MOVIES MADE ME

Remembering Jerry Harrell (Doctor Madblood)

2026-02-18T11:59:00.000-08:00

In the Fall of 2004, I was 25 years old and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I’d worked for about three years at a pair of TV production companies in the Hampton Roads area, and I’d just published my first book. Feeling secure, I bought a condo in Virginia Beach. Then I lost my job. Suddenly, I had a mortgage and no job prospects. If I wanted to keep working in television, I knew I had to move to New York or Los Angeles. But I wasn’t ready.

For a few months, I was flailing. I wasn’t so much looking for a job as I was looking for mentors. One of the people I sought out was Jerry Harrell, a.k.a. Dr. Madblood. Jerry first donned the wig and persona of the late-night TV horror host back in 1975, when he about 27 years old. By the time I met him, he had been doing his schtick for nearly 30 years. As a horror nerd, I found that incredibly inspiring, so I arranged a meeting at his office at ODU, where he worked as a media manager. We talked for over an hour.

I had recently met filmmaker George Romero, and I remember telling Jerry about that encounter. His eyes lit up, and he proceeded to tell me about meeting two of his heroes, Rod Serling and Forry Ackerman. We talked about the Madblood show, of course, which he described as a family affair. I remember him saying that the main reason he was still doing the show was because he couldn’t bear to disband such an amazing team. He also said the show fulfilled his mission in life: “to tell people that it’s okay to be weird.”

At the end of our conversation, Jerry invited me to the taping of the next episode. A few days later, I met the cast and crew in a small studio at ODU. And I was in awe. I’d already had enough experience with TV production to know that it’s not all fun and games… but the taping of Dr. Madblood Presents was all fun and games. There was a lot of improvisation, a lot of laughter, and a lot of love. To me, it seemed like the ideal working environment. At the end of the night, Jerry’s cohorts Craig T. Adams and Debra Burrell invited me to return the following week. I said I didn’t want to impose, but I didn’t say no.

Soon after, I attended the inaugural MonsterFest at Chesapeake Library, where Dr. Madblood was the guest of honor. Someone (maybe head librarian Jim Blanton?) reminded Jerry that I had recently published a book about horror movies, and he immediately suggested using my book in a segment he was recording that day at the convention. Fool that I am, I did not have a copy of my own book, so I didn’t get the free press. But I was tremendously grateful that he wanted to support me in that way.

I kept going to the taping sessions for Dr. Madblood Presents, and Craig and Debra eventually put me to work... rolling Brain’s fish-tank in and out of shots. I believe I was even credited as “Brain-wrangler” on a few episodes. Those sessions helped me to escape—for a few hours, at least—my overwhelming sense of inertia in life. I didn’t know where I was headed or what I wanted to do, but for the time being I knew I was among friends. That made a big difference.

In the Spring of 2005, things turned around for me. I got a new production job—on a TV series about paranormal experiences, which was right up my alley. I also met my future wife. We took a field trip to scout the real “Madblood Manor” in downtown Portsmouth as a potential filming location for our paranormal series. I wanted to pay homage to my friends—and that’s how Madblood Manor appeared in Season 1, Episode 6 of the Discovery Channel series A Haunting.

When my stint on A Haunting ended, I was feeling confident again, so I immediately wrote a spec script for an original horror film. In the pre-credit sequence of my story, a character watches Dr. Madblood on late-night TV. I ended that sequence with one of the doc’s famous pronouncements: “This one is going to be a real ker-schtinker!” Was I jinxing my own script? Nah. Coming from Dr. Madblood, that label would have been a badge of honor.

In the Fall of 2006, my wife and I moved to Los Angeles, where we spent the next fifteen years. Every Halloween, I would watch the Madblood Halloween special online, and post comments in the WHRO website’s chat room. I was always grateful for the opportunity to spend that time with my old friends, even though I was on the other side of the country. In 2009, I returned to Virginia for a MonsterFest screening of my documentary film Nightmares in Red, White and Blue. This time, I was ready for my close-up with Dr. Madblood. Jerry couldn’t have been kinder. He treated me like a pro. More importantly, he treated me like a friend.

In the Fall of 2025, Jerry Harrell took his final bow in the (original?) Madblood wig and lab coat for a 50th anniversary Halloween special. That’s 50 years of telling people it’s okay to be weird! The message resonates more strongly today than ever—which is why Jerry will be dearly remembered and missed. I don’t think he would have wanted anyone to exaggerate the importance of his life or work, so I won’t exaggerate. Jerry Harrell was a beacon of light, for me and so many others. He provided countless laughs and inspiration and refuge and family. Those things will survive for many years to come. For that, we will be eternally grateful.

Goodnight, Doc. Thanks for turning us on.

Book Review: Monsters in the Archives (Caroline Bicks)

2026-02-16T05:56:00.000-08:00

One of the most exciting things I did in 2025 was visit the new Stephen E. King Archive in Bangor, Maine. For three days, I holed up in an annex to the former King family home and read rare manuscripts by and about one of my favorite authors. The only bad part of the experience was leaving with the feeling that I had barely skimmed the surface.

That’s why I was excited to read Caroline Bicks’s book Monsters in the Archives. Bicks is a Shakespeare scholar who spent an entire year in the King Archive, studying manuscripts for five of King’s earliest (and most famous) books: Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, and Pet Sematary. Her book—which is mostly a literary analysis, with minor detours into memoir and journalistic interviewing—is a strong reminder of King’s love of language and his commitment to humanistic storytelling.

Bicks starts with Pet Sematary and works her way backward to the earlier manuscripts. Echoing the author’s memoir On Writing, the early section of Monsters in the Archives is a chatty “elements of style” guide, emphasizing King’s often-unacknowledged discipline as a wordsmith. Almost nobody (Bev Vincent excepted) thinks of Stephen King as a poet, but Bicks draws attention to word associations, rhythms and “aural effects” that give his work a “multi-sensory heft.”

Bicks also highlights revisions that made Pet Sematary more horrific by making the supernatural more ambiguous and the central characters more empathetic. King has said that the secret to telling an effective scary story is creating characters that readers care about. Monsters in the Archives goes on to illustrate this point with in-depth analyses of The Shining, ‘Salem’s Lot and Carrie.

I think of the ending of The Shining as the moment when Stephen King became “Stephen King” (America’s favorite boogeyman)—because he tempered the darkness of his story with just enough light and hope to win over a mainstream audience. While writing the novel, King once said, he assumed the entire Torrance family would die at the end—but, when he got there, he just couldn’t do it. Bicks shows that this anecdote is only partly true. In an early draft, King went there. When he revised the novel, however, he made a conscious decision to tell a different ending.

Going even further back, from The Shining to Carrie, Stephen King’s manuscript revisions are even more substantial, showing how the author honed not just his voice but a personal philosophy. King the short story writer (the voice behind the Night Shift stories) is more of a nihilist… and Carrie started as a short story. In interviews over the years, King has said that the original ending of Carrie was inspired by a 1950s B-movie called The Brain from Planet Arous. This always suggested to my mind a less accessible if not downright ludicrous third act. Bicks confirms the assumption—and shows how King’s extensive revisions over the course of multiple drafts put a greater emphasis on Carrie’s inner life, giving readers a telepathic connection to her, and also building a bridge of trust between the author and his Constant Readers. What’s on display here is the evolution of an artist.

Bicks says Monsters is also a book “about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.” Although the author kicks off her confessional B-story with an account of a genuinely creepy childhood paranormal experience, her digressions into memoir sometimes feel a bit forced to me. She is nervous to be on King’s hallowed ground and I’m not sure why. I too have made pilgrimages to real-world locations associated with King’s stories but I have never felt unnerved by those experiences, only awed. The trips provided validation that King’s imaginary world isn’t entirely made up—and, for me, that’s a good thing. It doesn’t conjure fear; it connects me to the work and the mind behind the work. Bicks’s shared journey into the archives does the same thing, and for that I’m grateful. In the age of AI, this sort of deep dive into the inner life of an artist is more inspiring than ever.

I can relate to Bicks when she writes about bearing “an unflattering resemblance” to Jack Torrance as he obsesses over the Overlook’s historical scrapbooks. Writing a book like Monsters in the Archives requires falling down the rabbit hole, becoming obsessed. When I was writing a biography of T.S. Eliot, I was constantly making connections between the poet’s words and my everyday world. When I was writing The Soul of Wes Craven, I saw connections to the filmmaker everywhere.

I used to go for a daily walk in the woods behind my house. When I entered the woods, the same hawk would swoop down, perch on a branch, and watch me. Wes Craven was a birder with a particular love of predatory hawks. I’m not saying I thought the hawk was Wes, or sent by Wes… but the human brain is hard-wired to make connections, and when we delve deeply into another human’s brain, there is a kind of communion that might be compared to telepathy. I don’t necessarily think this is a supernatural phenomenon…. but…. What if? Every good horror story starts with this question. Bicks writes, “What if manuscripts can absorb or store more than just inks and words? What if their pages can pass on dark energy along with their stories?” Or.... light energy?

I can’t escape the thought that stories transcend and transforms reality as we know it, because I believe our world runs on stories—and on our belief in certain stories. Everything we think we know is really a story that has been told to us, or that we’ve told ourselves. Religion is story. Politics is story. Our history—individual and collective—is story. If you believe that, then it becomes pretty damn amazing to sit in an archive and hold an original manuscript of a story that has affected hundreds of thousands of lives and (literally) changed the world we inhabit. We writers love this stuff: physical artifacts of half-imagined civilizations. Stone tapes in a digital world.

I share Caroline Bicks’s emotional attachment to the mass market paperbacks of King’s classic novels, the ones she read when she was growing up. Why? Because they’re part of my personal history, my story—and therefore very real to me. These are not just artifacts of a bygone civilization; these are sacred scrolls. Too much? Look at it like this: With the written word, readers become co-creators in a way that we don’t with visual media. We make imaginative leaps to fill in the details. Stephen King gets this; that’s why he leaves gaps. Caroline Bicks gets it too; her book points out those gaps, as well as the author’s intentions, and she makes us aware of our own private collaborations with King. We, Constant Readers, have our own monsters in the archive.

I read this book obsessively and finished it in two sittings. It left me wanting to revisit the early Stephen King novels, and King’s work in general. I think that’s the most rewarding effect that a book like this can have on a reader—making us more aware of the human beings behind our favorite stories: the author and ourselves. Bravo, Bicks.

Monsters in the Archives will be available from all the places on April 21, 2026.

Book Review: Partially Devoured (by Daniel Kraus)

2026-01-15T05:26:00.000-08:00

The title of my blog, “Movies Made Me,” reflects the idea that certain films—or, more to the point, my remembered experiences of seeing certain films—have influenced my sense of self in a deeply meaningful way. Or, as Daniel Kraus puts it: there are certain films “that float in the air you breathe, that fold into your DNA.” For him—as for me—one of those films is Night of the Living Dead.

Cue the music (which, in this case, is called “Eerie—Heavy Echo”).

Kraus’s new book, Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Changed My Life and Saved the World, is sort of a DVD audio commentary track for the film, sort of a film school master class with scene-by-scene (sometimes frame-by-frame) analysis, sort of a personal memoir by a well-known horror author, and sort of a cultural analysis and celebration of horror films in general. There have been other in-depth studies of Romero’s first and most famous film (Joe Kane’s Night of the Living Dead: Behind the Scenes of the Most Terrifying Zombie Movie Ever Made and Rob Kuhns’s documentary Birth of the Living Dead come to mind) but none of them have been this granular or this intimate. This is not a “love letter” to Romero’s film; this is a stalker’s private diary.

Kraus is the perfect tour guide through Romero’s apocalyptic world, not only because he’s a lifelong horror fan, but because he’s a talented storyteller with an academic’s love of research. In his first foray into nonfiction, Kraus’s authorial voice is as compelling as the voices in his novels (which include two collaborations with George Romero himself!). The book reminds me of Stephen King’s endlessly entertaining nonfiction Danse Macabre, and also (at times) of the anthology It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, which allowed me to experience some of my favorite horror films through completely new eyes.

Making me see Night through new eyes is a tall order, because I’ve watched it dozens of times over the years. I have also written extensively about it, as one of the movies that “made me.” I’ve made the pilgrimage to Pittsburgh, shambled through Evans City Cemetery, done the convention circuit and collected the autographs, even interviewed Romero a couple of times.

Apart from my own obsession with the film, Night has been so thoroughly chewed up and spit out by so many critics that it’s easy to assume there is nothing new to say about it, nothing more to be learned or experienced. Until a book like this comes along.

Partially Devoured is a deep dive, trivia-obsessed but not trivial. It’s a book about our identity-shaping engagement with important stories, written by someone who understands, intellectually and emotionally, how art becomes a part of us. It’s also a book about community, shared enthusiasms, shared experiences, shared identity—and how these things change over time. There’s a metaphor to be extended here: something about being partially devoured in a kind of hermeneutical loop. Or maybe a pun about zombies and “feedback” loops. I think George Romero would have appreciated that.

And I know he would have loved this book. He would been a little embarrassed, sure. He would have raised his voice, for dramatic effect, and said he couldn’t understand why anyone would care so much about Night of the Living Dead. (Then again—in our current political climate—he might understand it a little better today.) Regardless, he would have been humbled and moved by the thoughtfulness of Kraus’s analysis and the passion behind his prose, which is just as infectious as the filmmaker’s cinematic vision and personal charisma. What more could a horror fan ask for?

Partially Devoured will be published on March 10, 2026.

Book Review: I Killed Bette Davis (by Larry Cohen)

2025-12-12T05:35:00.000-08:00

In January 2008, I was hired to turn my first book into a feature-length documentary. The second half of the book (Nightmares in Red, White and Blue) was a survey of major horror film directors, so my goal for the doc was to interview some of the filmmakers I had profiled. One of the first calls I made was to Larry Cohen’s production company—and I was dumbstruck when Larry himself answered the phone. I had expected to make my pitch to an assistant or an answering machine. Suddenly I was talking to one of my filmmaking heroes.

I must not have fumbled too badly, because at the end of the call Larry said, “How about Monday?” Just a few days after the call, my cameraman Mike Bratkowski and I drove to Larry’s house off of Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hill—an old William Randolph Hearst mansion straight out of Old Hollywood, with 50-foot-high ceilings, a foyer filled with tapestry-sized posters from the silent film era, and a general aura of burnished gold. And then there was Larry, who greeted us with a warm, wry smile.

When I was growing up, Larry Cohen’s films were a cinematic blind spot for me. He wasn’t as widely celebrated as directors like George Romero, Wes Craven, or John Carpenter, so I barely knew his name. The first LarCo film I saw was A Return to Salem’s Lot, and that was because of the Stephen King connection. Then in high school, while I was working at a small-town video store, I discovered the It’s Alive trilogy. Those were fun, but what really drew me into Cohen’s world was a pair of books I found in my college library. Dennis Fischer’s Horror Film Directors and Tony Williams’s Larry Cohen: Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker informed me that I should be paying more attention to Larry Cohen. Thankfully, Anchor Bay followed close behind with new VHS releases of God Told Me To and Q: The Winged Serpent. I love those two films to no end.

After that, I started tracking down every film with Larry Cohen’s name on it. Not all of them were great, but all were high concept (and he made them well before Hollywood producers were recklessly throwing around that phrase). When I wrote my first book, I found it easy to make the case for Larry as an auteur because he was a writer/producer/director whose larger-than-life personality was clearly embodied in his films. The worldview behind his stories is that of a perpetual outsider, striving for purpose. Larry’s visions became increasingly tongue-in-cheek over the course of the 1980s, and diluted in the 1990s by alliances with other writers, producers, and directors—but there’s no denying the audacity of the core ideas. Larry was a brilliant and sometimes blasphemous storyteller who knew how to preach without pontificating. And he wrote great characters because he was a great character.

When I sat down to interview Larry in 2008, I felt a twinge of panic as he said that “monsters movies” were not really his “favorite thing.” I needed soundbites about horror movies for my documentary, but he seemed to be more interested in talking about classic Warner Bros. adventure movies, especially those directed by Michael Curtiz. Once I realized that his favorite films were those with strong characters and strong performances, I tried to shift gears and talk about horror movies that fit the bill. That drove our conversation forward from the 1930s to the 2000s.

In the early 2000s, Larry’s career was revitalized by a trio of original scripts that got produced with A-list casts and budgets for theatrical release. Phone Booth (2002) had originated as a collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock decades earlier but eventually became a box office hit and a star-making vehicle for Colin Farrell. The star-studded Cellular (2004) was a more modest success. Captivity (2007) was a bomb, and Larry was eager to distance himself from it in our interview. He also railed against the forthcoming remake of It’s Alive—which was as bad as he predicted. Sadly, his career never rebounded.

A few years after I met him, Larry posted 10 original screenplays on his website, trying to stir up discussion. One of the scripts (“Movie House”) became the basis for a live table read at a Los Angeles coffee house, with Larry in attendance. I loved seeing him there, basking in the glow of an energized performance with a receptive audience. A few years after that, I saw him again at a North Hollywood screening of Steve Mitchell’s excellent documentary King Cohen. I even had a chance to talk to him, and to thank him for being the first interviewee to say “yes” to my little documentary. At the time, I was quietly thinking about interviewing him again for a documentary on the history of western films. But, just a few months after that, Larry was gone.

The horror community didn’t mourn Larry Cohen’s death the way they mourned the loss of Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, or George Romero. I don’t remember a lot of tributes, which made his passing seem even sadder to me. Thankfully, Tony Williams’s book and Steve Mitchell’s documentary had already done a thorough and heartfelt job of summing up the man and his work. Those tributes remain available…. But, like the helpless addicts in The Stuff, I always want more. A few weeks ago, Sticking Place Books fed my Larry Cohen obsession with a truly excellent Christmas present.

I Killed Bette Davis is a memoir by Larry Cohen and an appropriately haphazard chronicle of his charmed life in cinema. Cohen focuses on infamous stolen movie moments (“I’ve got nothing against unions. I just couldn’t afford their fee.”) and heartfelt interactions with fellow celebrities (including friendships with Samuel Fuller, Bernard Herrmann, Red Buttons… and Bette Davis, sort of). I love the chapter on his unrealized projects, which included a western film starring John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and an aborted spy movie that was partly shot in the shadow of the Kremlin. Above all, I love Larry’s voice—wry and candid, with a childlike enthusiasm that is inspiring from an elder statesman with 36 feature films and countless TV shows to his name. There’s not a curmudgeonly note in the book. Even though he never quite made the A-list, Larry was always having fun, and that makes him the perfect tour guide through the crazy world of indie filmmaking in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

I would have loved a more serious analysis of his films—and more insight into Larry’s writing process—but the filmmaker excuses those omissions by confessing that he never wanted to become “self-conscious” and jinx his creative instincts. Anyway, as I said, the story is wonderfully augmented by Tony Williams’s Radical Allegories book and Steve Mitchell’s King Cohen doc. Now we have a triumvirate of constant Cohen companions.

In I Killed Bette Davis, Larry says he told filmmaker Elia Kazan that he had read Kazan’s biography twice. When Kazan wondered why, Larry explained, “I felt like I was hanging out with you, and I just didn’t want it to end.” I felt the same way reading Larry’s memoir. When I was done, I promptly queued up Q: The Winged Serpent and The Stuff, and watched them with my daughter—a new member of the Larry Cohen fan club. Thanks to Sticking Place Books for setting the stage. And thanks again, Larry, for being you!

Buy the book here: https://stickingplacebooks.com/books/i-killed-bette-davis

Lance Henriksen's Not Bad for a Human - Back in Print!

2025-10-06T05:21:00.000-07:00

Over the past few years, I’ve been watching as copies of Lance Henriksen’s 2011 biography Not Bad for a Human became more and more expensive online. Just last week, I did some sleuthing and couldn’t find a copy for less than $100. Most copies were listed for more than $200.

There’s something exciting about having written a book that becomes a collector’s item…. and something less exciting about the fact that casual readers simply can’t access the book. That was never my goal, or Lance’s.

Last year, Dustin McNeill of Harker Press—who took a chance on my 2024 biography of Wes Craven—asked what we’d think about republishing Not Bad for a Human. He was not the first publisher to ask, but he was the first publisher who cared enough about the book to do the work of bringing it back to life.

So here we are. Lance’s bio is once again available in hardback, paperback, and ebook formats. Some of the text has been revised for clarity and a few new bits of information have been added to the narrative. The new edition features artwork that was exclusive to the collector’s edition as well as dozens of new photos and a new Afterword by yours truly.

I can’t help remembering a day back in 2011 when Lance and I walked into a storage warehouse in the San Fernando Valley and saw 5,000 copies of our book sitting in front of us. We spent the next year traveling around the country with that book, meeting people and having a blast. Lance loved connecting with people through the book.

I’m proud to see it out in the world again, and grateful to Harker Press for making it happen. In case you haven’t noticed, this publisher is on fire lately, with new releases including Matthew DuPee’s book on the CRITTERS franchise, Lowell Greenblatt’s book on A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, and Rob Galluzzo’s collection of interviews ICONS OF FRIGHT. Not Bad for a Human is in very good company.

Thanks to everyone who has supported this book since 2011 and to new readers who have a chance to find us now!

A HAUNTING: 20th Anniversary

2025-09-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

Almost twenty years ago, I opened the new issue of TV Guide and saw a short article about the TV show I was working on. It doesn’t seem like much now, but I was very excited.

The show was called A Haunting and it premiered on the Discovery Channel on Friday, October 28, 2005. New Discovery shows didn’t usually get highlighted in TV Guide, but the Halloween premiere—and the relative novelty of paranormal shows in 2005—helped our cause. We couldn’t compete with bigger network premieres like CBS’s Ghost Whisperer and The WB’s Supernatural, which also debuted in the fall of 2005, but I thought our little show had a decent shot at making a mark on audiences.

A Haunting was produced at the Virginia-based production company New Dominion Pictures, and spun off of two TV movies that aired in the fall of 2002. I was working on a different NDP series when A Haunting in Connecticut and A Haunting in Georgia were shot, and I desperately wanted to work on them. But I was a 22-year-old newbie researcher, so that didn’t happen.

I had better credentials in the spring of 2005. I had recently published my first book, a cultural history of American horror films, which gave me some credibility as a “horror movie expert.” For that reason, I got a call to work on A Haunting and I jumped at the opportunity to prove myself.

When I conducted phone interviews for the pilot episode “Hell House,” I remember feeling nervous to ask people about their experiences with the paranormal. I worried that they would be guarded, fearful of being doubted and/or ridiculed. Also, I figured that if they’d gone through what they said they’d gone through, they might be legitimately traumatized and reluctant to re-visit those experiences.

As it turned out, the interviewees on “Hell House” were very down-to-earth, very relatable and very believable. For years when I was working on the series, people asked me if I believed that the things depicted in our show really happened. I always responded the same way: I believed that the people I talked to believed what they were saying. I wasn’t sure if I believed in “ghosts,” but I believed that they believed. And I was fascinated by my conversations with various paranormal “experts,” beginning with the late Lorraine Warren.

My fascination with the subject matter made my job easy and fun. I was also lucky to get to work closely with a good showrunner. Larry Silverman’s goal for the first season of A Haunting was to make six “mini-movies” that blurred the line between documentary and drama. Larry was not particularly a horror fan—nor was he a believer in the paranormal—but he understood how to tell a story. Instinctively, he guided the series toward the tried-and-true formula of Rod Serling and Stephen King: “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.” I remember having many conversations about character arcs and dramatic escalation in our stories, because we knew we had to establish the normal before we could make an audience suspend their disbelief in the paranormal. We also had to know how to build suspense in a visual medium.

For me, one particular scene in “Hell House” encapsulated the show. An interviewee had told me about an experience where she felt like she was being punched through the mattress of her bed. She stated clearly that she did not feel the mattress move beneath her; rather, she felt an immaterial—but still forceful—fist pass through the mattress and strike her body. Larry and I, along with the episode writer, had a long conversation about how to shoot that scene. Initially, there was some discussion about hiding a production assistant under the bed so they could punch the mattress from below. I knew that wouldn’t work.

I remembered something I’d read while researching my first book. In an interview with Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock famously explained the difference between shock and suspense, using a scene from his film Sabotage as an illustration. In the scene, a boy is traveling on a London metro bus and there is a time bomb under his seat. The boy is blissfully unaware, but Hitchcock made sure the audience knows—not just that the bomb is there, but exactly how much time is left before it goes off. The essence of cinematic suspense is that we know more than the character.

I thought: What if we showed the audience that there’s something underneath the bed before our character senses anything? The image that popped into my head was an overhead POV shot, looking down on the room as a ghostly shadow slides beneath the bed. I didn't want to see a ghost, just a shadow. Less is more.

I’m not suggesting that this was a particularly innovative shot—I’d seen it in plenty of horror films—but it was different from the traditional coverage (wide, medium, tight) used in most of NDP’s documentary shows. It was more cinematic, and it fit Larry’s goal of making “mini-movies.” After that, we were always thinking consciously about how we could build suspense using careful shot sequencing. We wrote the individual shots into our scripts. Again, this was hardly innovative—but, for me, it was a hands-on film school.

In my mind, our series was a direct descendant of docu-drama programming like Unsolved Mysteries, Haunted Lives (the 1991 Tobe Hooper pilot), and The Haunted (the 1995 TV movie based on the same case that was recently profiled in The Conjuring: Last Rites), but I also wanted the show to emulate effective horror movies. One of the jump scenes in “Hell House” owes a debt to The Sixth Sense, and another to Stir of Echoes. There’s also a transition between two scenes that was directly inspired by Cujo… although I didn’t realize I'd done that until years later.

By the time the episode was in post-production, Larry and I were the only producers left on the show and it fell on us to articulate the “philosophy” of the show and brand the series. Remembering the voice of the original Twilight Zone series, I cobbled together the opening narration from three sources. The first line—“In this world, there is real evil…”—came from A Haunting in Connecticut. The next two lines—“… in the darkest shadows and in the most ordinary places. These are the two stories of the innocent and the unimaginable”—summed up Larry’s vision for the series.

The last two lines were mine. “Between the world we see and the things we fear, there are doors. When they are opened, nightmares become reality.” As I said already, I wasn’t sure whether or not I believed in “ghosts.” Even today, my thoughts on the topic are scattered. In a more ponderous moment, I might start rambling about subject-object coalescence or the power of belief to transform consensus reality. But that would make for some lousy opening narration. At the time, I remembered the quote behind Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is…” I also might have been slyly nodding toward my book Nightmares in Red, White and Blue.

My friend Andrew Monument did a bang-up job editing the series open, as well as the entire “Hell House” episode. In particular, he made the climactic possession sequence work better than anyone imagined it could. It was at that point we realized we really had something. I was hoping the show would work for die-hard horror fans like myself, so at one point I made a suggestion that I thought might tip the scales. I approached Angus Scrimm, The Tall Man from the Phantasm series, about being our narrator. He seemed game, so I pitched my idea to the powers that be—but, in the end, the decision was made way above my pay grade, and my idea was rejected by someone who had never seen Phantasm.

That first episode still did pretty well. Over Halloween weekend, “Hell House” got a household rating of 0.94, which means that a little less than 1% of American households saw the episode in real time. That may not sound like much, but for a cable TV network at that time, it was pretty damn good. As a result, there was never any serious doubt that we’d get picked up for a second season, and so I wound up working on all six first-season episodes as well as five second-season episodes. I received my first onscreen writing credit for the episode “Cursed,” which set the stage for my TV writing career. Even more significantly, I ended up marrying one of my fellow producers on A Haunting. A few years after that, when the show was resurrected on a new network, A Haunting kept me busy during a year when my wife and I were at home with our infant daughter. In 2022, I got a chance to write one last episode for the final season. So, yeah, A Haunting has been a big part of my life.

As a result, it’s hard for me to objectively assess the show or its significance. I was blown away when an October 2015 article in Rolling Stone named it one of the “25 Best Horror TV Shows of All Time”—and again when the article was updated as a Top 30 in 2021. In 2015, A Haunting made the Top 10. In 2021, it landed at #17—just above Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Showtime’s Masters of Horror! The article’s writer declared it “a 21^st century portrait of How We Fear Now,” suggesting that A Haunting has a kind of sociological relevance that similar shows lack.

As the author of a cultural study of American horror films, I’d love to take some credit for that—but the fact is that the formula of the series was established way before we came along. In his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, Stephen King described The Amityville Horror (the 1979 film) as “The Horror of the Shrinking Bank Account,” noting that the film’s ghosts could be interpreted as symbols of the everyday burdens on the American middle-class. The same can be said for Poltergeist (1982), which provided a template for many of the haunted house movies of the past four decades.

In her 2023 book Ghost Channels: Paranormal Reality Television and the Haunting of Twenty-First Century America, Dartmouth professor Amy Lawrence writes that “what our current obsession with ghosts and haunting ultimately reveals is… the inability of existing social institutions to address the conditions that have made daily life unendurable.” She describes A Haunting as one of the progenitors of the current wave, but strangely focuses on Season Five episodes as metaphors for the 2008 housing crisis. I wish she had watched some of the earlier episodes because I think they help illustrate her observations about how paranormal reality TV has responded to social change in America.

Lawrence writes that the show’s characters routinely embrace “alternate systems of knowledge,” amounting to “a political act.” In hindsight, I recognize that A Haunting carries a vague anti-authority sentiment and places a very high value on subjective truth. For me, each episode was the story of one person’s—or one family’s—journey from skepticism to belief. In the early seasons, the endpoint of the journey was not necessarily reassuring. I think that’s what kept things interesting, and what ultimately kept the series alive (or undead?) for 17 years and 115 episodes.

The Soul of Wes Craven

2025-09-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

NOW AVAILABLE!

“Finally, the Bible is written for the cult of Wes Craven! … The reason Wes Craven is often overlooked and taken for granted is because this book didn’t exist. Now it does, and we have no more excuses.”

- Grady Hendrix, author of Paperbacks from Hell and The Final Girl Support Group

“Illuminating and touching, I learned even more about the man who changed my life by casting me as Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street. This intimate, well-researched look into his life expands my appreciation of the maestro.”

- Heather Langenkamp, star of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

“Startling, inspiring, and often moving, this titanic biography of Craven bursts open both how art can save us—and what we do to hamstring our finest artists.”

- Daniel Kraus, co-author of The Living Dead and The Shape of Water

“This book is the definitive account of Craven’s life and work, put together with passion, insight and intellect worthy of the master himself.”

- Andrew Kasch, co-director DC’s Legends of Tomorrow and Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy

“With patience, dexterity and assiduous research, Joseph Maddrey excavates the heart and soul of a horror movie legend. The Soul of Wes Craven reveals unseen facets of the beloved director, and in the process uncovers a poet, a philosopher, a psychologist and one of horror’s great thinkers. This book bubbles with stunning revelations, fascinating connections, and new stories, never before told, about the life and times of this icon of terror.”

- John Kenneth Muir, author of Wes Craven: The Art of Horror and creator of Enter the House Between

“As a screenwriter working with Wes Craven, I knew I had entered a magical world but I barely knew what a profound and remarkable man I was getting to know. Joseph Maddrey’s book allows us to discover the brilliance, the painful journey and the triumph of an extraordinary life. You will be as lucky to meet Wes in these pages as I was in real life.”

- Bruce Joel Rubin, screenwriter of Deadly Friend, Ghost, and Jacob’s Ladder

"The battle over the soul of Wes Craven goes to Joseph Maddrey, no contest. His comprehensive exploration of Craven's career leaves no nightmare unturned, offering up a humane portrait of a horror icon."

- Clay McLeod Chapman, author of What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters

“An inspiration for indie filmmakers of every genre. Maddrey chronicles Craven’s curious path from rebel college professor to horror film icon. The financial challenges, artistic compromises and unimaginable triumphs are wildly entertaining as Craven struggles to direct his way out of the grindhouse and into movie mainstream. “

- Peter Filardi, screenwriter of Flatliners and The Craft

"Those who think of Wes Craven mainly as the father of Freddy will undoubtedly be surprised by this compelling portrait of a complex, rarely satisfied artist, while hardcore Craven fans will be delighted by new revelations and keen insight. Joseph Maddrey's The Soul of Wes Craven is a vital, valuable addition to any library of definitive filmmaker biographies or horror movie studies."

- Lisa Morton, Bram Stoker Award-winning author and screenwriter

“Wes Craven was a filmmaker of golden talents. His trove is sinister, vivid of wit. Impeccably fraught. He was also charming, effortlessly astute; observant as a spy. The gifted Joseph Maddrey has brilliantly captured the magic of a filmic icon in his long overdue The Soul of Wes Craven.”

- Richard Christian Matheson, author of Created By and The Ritual of Illusion

“Overwhelmingly and understandably identified as a master of horror, Wes Craven was widely viewed as a filmmaker lurking behind a Halloween fright mask. With his incredibly detailed and engagingly written The Soul of Wes Craven, Joseph Maddrey brilliantly peers behind that mask to reveal the true face, heart and, yes, soul, of a deceptively complex and influential writer and director. Anyone seeking a comprehensive and genuine understanding of the life and work of Wesley Earl Craven from Cleveland, Ohio, will find this book as insightful and intriguing as it is invaluable.”

- Mark Dawidziak, author of A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe and Everything I Need to Know I Learned in The Twilight Zone

“An incredible, insightful, and revelatory look at the life of a genre icon. Filled with fantastic stories, captivating new details, and plenty of heart, this is the love letter tapestry of a literary, philosophical, and spiritual life that Wes Craven—and every film lover—deserves.”

- Thommy Hutson, screenwriter of Scream: The Inside Story and Truth or Dare

“Like its protagonist, the book is an intelligent and inspiring treat for genre fans and cinephiles alike. It’s got soul. And heart. And guts. But mostly, it’s entertaining as hell.”

- John Esposito, screenwriter of Creepshow and Stephen King’s Graveyard Shift

"The Soul of Wes Craven is beautifully written. It's funny, it's thoughtful, and it's even profound. I was deeply moved by this tour through Wes Craven's life. This is one of the best biographies I've ever read, and it's almost certainly the best book I've read about someone in the world of horror. All fans should read the book. Then we should all go back and re-assess the films with greater insight on their creator."

- Mark Sieber, author of He Who Types Between the Rows

"The Soul of Wes Craven is not the first biography on the master of horror, but it is the definitive one.... Maddrey’s book doubles as a heartfelt eulogy to the fearless filmmaker and generous person that was Wes Craven."

- Alex DiVincenzo, Bloody Disgusting

"Joe Maddrey's The Soul of Wes Craven may be the most comprehensive and thoughtful biography of any human being I've ever read. The physical book is in the 500-page neighborhood, and there's not a word of padding to be found."

- Stephen Mark Rainey, author of Fugue Devil: Resurgence

"Love Joseph Maddrey's The Soul of Wes Craven so much that I was sad to finish. A deeply researched dive into Craven's life & career that paints a clear picture of who he was & makes you look at ALL of his work in a new way. Plus insights into his unmade projects. It's ESSENTIAL."

- John Squires, Bloody Disgusting

"Cuts to the bone with in-depth interviews with the man, his family, and colleagues... A great gift for the holiday season--highly recommended for horror afficianados."

- Dave Simms, Cemetery Dance

"The Soul of Wes Craven provides an impressive view of Wes Craven from the perspective of a filmmaker, a screenwriter, a fan, a critic, and a biographer. Maddrey is especially adept at providing incisive details about Craven's childhood, adolescence, family, and religious schooling... [The book] can be used as a precise tool to finely comb over Craven's work, his personal life, and his contribution to the art of cinema."

- William Blick, Film International

Check out John Kenneth Muir's interview with the author.

Carpenter and Romero

2025-03-21T06:17:00.000-07:00

In 2017, I was working with Rob Galluzzo on the documentary film Analog Love. As that project was winding down, Rob began spit-balling about what we might do next. He had recently watched the feature-length documentary film DePalma, produced and directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, and suggested that we might make a similar film… about John Carpenter.

I love John Carpenter. I love the DePalma film, which has the simple brilliance of Francois Truffaut’s indispensable interview book Hitchcock. I loved the idea of interviewing Carpenter on Carpenter, going right to the source and avoiding any extraneous bullshit. I knew Carpenter could be a tricky interview, but I’d had a good rapport with him in 2008 (when I interviewed him for my documentary Nightmares in Red, White and Blue) and I was eager to take a deeper dive into his work.

So, it took Rob about three seconds to convince me that this was a good idea.

I spent the next week or so doing research, digging up old Carpenter interviews, re-watching the films, and writing interviews questions. Then I wrote a script for a short promo trailer—using footage from my own 2008 interview with the filmmaker—so we could pitch the project to The Man himself. I enlisted my friend Andrew Monument to edit the trailer, and I was thrilled with how well it turned out.

Unfortunately, the documentary did not move forward. At this point, it seems unlikely that it ever will. But I still love the trailer. Every time I watch it, my enthusiasm for John Carpenter—his classical storytelling, his irreverent humor, his indelible scores, his love of cinema—is renewed.

Between 2017 and 2021, I was also involved in developing two separate documentary projects about director George A. Romero. I had a brief correspondence with Romero in the early 2000s, and I came to really love him as a storyteller and a person, so the opportunity to pay tribute to him meant a lot to me. I did a ton of researching and planning and geeking out.

Again, neither project came to fruition… but I couldn't stop thinking about George Romero. In 2021, I took the initiative to create a trailer for my own ideal version of a Romero documentary, focusing on the filmmaker’s unique (and prophetic) worldview. Once again, Andrew Monument edited the trailer, using footage from an interview I conducted with Romero in 2008.

Of course, I knew I couldn't make my “ideal version of a Romero doc”—because, George was gone—so I conceived the trailer as a loving tribute to the father of the modern horror film, and an acknowledgment of his prescience leading up to the era of Trump, Covid, and the Black Lives Matter movement. The trailer expresses my undying affection for the filmmaker and his dark vision of America.

Personally, I can’t help wondering what George would make of our world in 2025. The filmmaker is gone but his films live on, and they’re part of us. We’re them and they’re us.

It's Only a Movie!

2024-06-26T07:34:00.000-07:00

In 2012, I was brainstorming a book about metaphysical horror films like Serpent and the Rainbow, Angel Heart, The Believers, Ghost, Flatliners, and Jacob’s Ladder. When I started doing my research, I learned that the writer of Ghost and Jacob's Ladder, Bruce Joel Rubin, hosted a weekly meditation class just ten minutes away from my home. Before that, I had been attending meditation sessions with a friend, so the overlap intrigued me. I found myself wondering if/how Bruce's meditation practice was related to his creative writing process.

For the next two years, I attended Bruce's meditation class and got to know him as a person. Eventually, in 2014, I asked if he might be interested in writing a book about the intersections of his spiritual life and his art. To me, the idea was more interesting than my plan to write a book about metaphysical horror films.

Ten years later, the Bruce Joel Rubin book exists—but it’s much more than I initially imagined it would be. I spent a full year poring over old interviews, listening to Bruce's recorded meditation talks, and interviewing Bruce at length. During that time, I also organized his personal archives (old scripts—produced and unproduced, research materials, promotional materials, reviews, etc.) for donation to the library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science. The archive project led me to write an in-depth article on the film Deadly Friend as well as a short book about the film Brainstorm. But, at a certain point, the Bruce Joel Rubin biography project faded into the background.

I had compiled a 53,000-word manuscript—a chronological selection of first-person stories—but Bruce thought the manuscript was incomplete, that it wasn’t personal enough, and it didn’t have a proper ending. For a while, he encouraged me to add my voice to the manuscript, to add historical context to his story. Although I added some supporting quotes from other sources, I avoided adding my own voice because I didn’t feel like this was my story to tell, or that my voice belonged in Bruce’s story. As a result, the manuscript sat on the shelf for several years.

In 2022, author Paul Cronin—a family friend of the Rubins—asked to read the manuscript. He encouraged Bruce to flesh out the existing manuscript, and posed a couple of precise questions that got Bruce writing. He also offered to publish the finished book.

What happened next is that the manuscript morphed into a true, intimate autobiography of an important cinematic storyteller, expressing Bruce's life, art, and worldview in a way that only he could. It’s Only a Movie! is an important document for anyone who cares about film or screenwriting, surviving Hollywood, evolving as a storyteller, evolving as a human being, or finding meaning in life (and death). It is exactly the type of book I love--one that subtly affects the reader's life by asking big questions.

Via his imprint Sticking Place Books, Paul Cronin has also published a worthy companion book. Three Visionary Screenplays gathers unproduced spec scripts that seem like forerunners to Bruce’s most celebrated film work. To my mind, the screenplay “Quasar” is the missing link between Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 2001: A Space Odyssey and Brainstorm. “Teratoma” is a metaphysical body horror movie that's every bit as dark and challenging as Jacob’s Ladder. “Secrets of the Astral Plane” is a mind-bending supernatural thriller as audacious and as heartfelt as Ghost. For anyone interested in any of Bruce's best-known work, Three Visionary Screenplays will be a revelation.

Both books are now available in hardback and paperback editions. It’s Only a Movie! is also available in e-book format, and as an audiobook (read by Bruce himself) on Audible. My friend Tony Mercer edited the latter project, and he did an amazing job. Obviously, I’m biased… but I am also extremely proud to have played a small role in bringing these two books to life.

If you want to hear more about the books, you can listen to an interview Bruce and I did for Mike White's The Projection Booth podcast. And if you want to read the books, you can find links for ordering them HERE.

Communing with Whitley Strieber

2024-03-20T15:44:00.000-07:00

Recently, The Projection Booth guru Mike White invited me to participate in an episode about the film adaptation of Whitley Strieber’s book Communion. I agreed and started preparing in my typically geeky way—by reading six of Strieber’s Communion books. I also sought out interviews the author has given over the years, and took a lot of notes. When the day came to talk about Communion, I thought I was ready.

Actually, I was overwhelmed. I had too many thoughts swimming around in my head, and in the end, I’m afraid I didn’t do justice to Whitley Strieber.

What I’d hoped to do, as briefly as possible, was offer a thumbnail sketch of Strieber’s pre-Communion life, as he has presented it in his nonfiction books. Ever since the author’s transformative experience on December 26, 1985—recounted in Communion—Strieber has been striving to understand exactly what happened to him (and continues happening to him) and why. His recorded theories involve ghosts, aliens, missing time, time travel, mystical experience, repressed memory, and so much more.

To me, Strieber’s work is endlessly fascinating but also frustrating. It’ll be hard for me to summarize my take on his life and art, but I feel compelled to try. As a biographer, I am very interested in Strieber’s memories of his youth—many of which, he says, were buried in his subconscious mind for decades. Since 1985, as he has continued to explore the mystery of “The Visitors,” he has recovered more and more forgotten details of his early life… and the overall story of his life (and its relationship to his art) has become more and more complicated.

I think it might be interesting to present some of those details in a straightforward biographical chronology—something Whitley has not done, to my knowledge—and see if that provides any clarity.

The basic facts: Whitley was born in San Antonio, Texas, on June 13, 1945, to parents Karl and Mary Strieber. He was the second of three children living in an upper-middle class Catholic household at 630 Elizabeth Road in San Antonio. Whitley says his father was “an attorney, a real estate operator, and an oil man” (Winter 1985). Karl Strieber also reportedly served in the U.S. military during World War II, although the details of his service are unknown to me. Based on what the son writes about him, he seems to have been a somewhat aloof figure. Whitley’s mother, who came from a prominent San Antonio family, was a more nurturing presence in her son’s life. Among other things, she introduced her son to the work of Franz Kafka, a major influence on Whitley’s writing.

Another significant influence was Karl’s brother, Whitley’s uncle Edward Miles Strieber. According to the author, Uncle Ed was a military man who was somehow involved with the government’s investigation of the Roswell incident on July 8, 1947. I found a note in an Army Navy Journal—dated October 4, 1947—for “Capt. E.M. Strieber, Oak Ridge to Sp Wpns Project, Albuquerque, N. Mex.” This suggests that Uncle Ed was in the right place at the right time. Because of the purported connection to Roswell, Whitley has suggested that, for him, “contact is a family affair” (A New World 2019). His uncle’s memories of the Roswell investigation also served as inspiration for the 1989 novel Majestic.

Whitley’s earliest memories also date from the summer of 1947, when he was two years old. In Transformation (1988), the author remembers a strange vision of “big gray monkeys” and “a huge disk in the afternoon sky that looked to me like the moon.” The latter might have inspired his first short story, written at age six, “about the moon coming up” (Swaim 1984).

In a series of journals on his website, and later in his book Solving the Communion Enigma (2011), Whitley describes recovered memories from the age of three, involving a summer day camp where the young campers were indoctrinated into Stalinism. He also recalls being taken to nearby Randolph Air Force Base, where he had even more uncomfortable experiences. In a 2005 journal entry on his website, the author alludes to “an abusive situation of some kind, apparently involving certain experiments on children." In Solving the Communion Enigma, he writes, “I recall getting into what I thought was an elevator in a place where there were men in uniform, a place I believe to have been Randolph, but it became dead dark and I began to feel people touching me.” Later, he explains, “I was involved in a special education project at Randolph AFB that utilized something called a Skinner Box in enhanced learning experiments” (A New World 2019). Evidence of child abuse? Or something much more complicated?

The details (and the accuracy of the author’s memory) are unclear, but Whitley is certain about the long-term effect that these strange experiences had on his psyche, insisting that they “shattered the mirror of expectation for me, leaving me, like my wife and so many other people whose understanding of reality has been upended in childhood, open from then on to noticing what most people assume to be impossible and therefore do not see. Once the mirror of expectation is shattered, the door of perception is open, and there is something there, something alive, looking back at us from where the mirror once stood” (Solving the Communion Enigma 2011).

As an adult, Whitley Strieber has written many times about the relationship between trauma and transcendence. Whitley’s most haunting childhood memories—the ones he writes about in his books—are not just of traumatic events, but of seemingly supernatural experiences. The author, however, is uncomfortable with the term “supernatural.” In 2016, he co-authored an entire book (The Super Natural: A New Vision ofthe Unexplained) to help clarify his point of view, using Aldous Huxley’s concept of “doors of perception” as a philosophical foundation. Like Huxley, he believes that the human mind has reality-filters that can be removed, allowing us to perceive aspects of our natural world that are usually hidden and usually dismissed as “otherworldly.”

As a result of his early childhood experiences, Whitley writes, he has seen more of the world. In the summer of 1951 (or possibly 1952—dates vary from one account to another), the author says he entered a “secret school” run by beings that he now refers to as “The Visitors.” He describes his earliest memories of the school in Transformation, and at length in The Secret School (1996). His experience there culminated, he writes, with a prolonged, mysterious illness—an “immune system deficiency”—that nearly killed him. Once he recovered, his parents were reticent to talk about exactly what had happened. In Solving the Communion Enigma, he concludes, “I think that my parents eventually understood that whatever I was being made to endure was causing me harm, and got me out of the program.”

It is perhaps worth noting (as Whitley does in his book Breakthrough) that his mysterious illness took place around the same time as a major UFO flap over Washington D.C. Of course, it was also a time when science fiction movies about aliens and UFOs were big business in Hollywood. Whitley admits that he was a childhood fan of “flying saucer stories,” and that his “eyes were searching the heavens” every night (The Secret School). When he was 9, he says he and a friend witnessed “a huge object cross the sky” above them (Communion). That same year, he became “obsessed” with histories of ancient Egypt and ancient Rome. Standard stuff for an intelligent American “monster kid” of the day… and not surprising for a future sci-fi / horror writer.

The following years got weirder. In a 1985 interview, Whitley outlined a series of events that influenced his life between the ages of ten and fifteen. First, one of his uncles was murdered. After that, the uncle’s wife was somehow “burned in a fire from head to toe.” Then Whitley’s grandfather died suddenly from lung cancer and his father lost his vocal cords to throat cancer. Finally, his grandmother “nearly went crazy” (Winter 1985). He seems to believe that some kind of curse had befallen his family. Then, in the summer of 1956, Whitley says he went on a boat trip with his father and older sister, and “disappeared” from the boat for several hours. He doesn’t remember what happened to him, only that he was gone “but did not drown” (Transformation).

The following summer, Whitley went with his father and sister on another trip—this time, via train, to Madison, Wisconsin. On the way back, he suddenly fell ill again. In Communion, he writes about a feverish hallucination that has haunted him ever since—an experience “of hearing a wolf howling and seeing one on the roadside.” His vivid vision of the wolf—and equally vivid memory of the sound it made—generated “an immense lifelong interest in wolves” that inspired three novels: The Wolfen (1978), Wolf of Shadows (1985), and The Wild (1991).

Whitley’s series of strange childhood experiences culminated in the summer of 1958 with a fire in the Strieber family home. In Communion, he suggests that he himself caused the fire, the result of a failed attempt to build “an antigravity machine” in his bedroom, using “counter-rotating magnets.” According to the author, a childhood friend says Whitley told him, at the time, that “spacemen” provided the design—but Whitley says he doesn’t remember ever saying that.

Over the following years, Whitley’s horrors were relegated to page and screen. He discovered E.C. Comics and Franz Kafka, and wrote his first horror story at age 15. A high school teacher remembers that teenage Whitley was especially interested in the occult and haunted by the threat of nuclear war (Conroy 1988). Whitley himself says that during his high school years, he went through “all kinds of sexual upheaval,” but never had a date until he went to college, which “drove me more and more into myself” (Winter 1985). Apart from one “fragmentary memory” of “helping a group of children in a gray vaulted room” (mentioned in Transformation), the author’s teenage years are mostly a blank.

His story picks up again on August 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman started firing bullets from the top of the University of Texas tower in Austin, Texas. In more than one early interview, Whitley claimed he was on campus and witnessed the shooting. He recanted that claim in Communion, then later recanted his recanting in Transformation. Much has been made of Whitley’s unreliable memories surrounding this incident, so I won’t go into detail here, but I want to quote something Whitley said in a 1987 interview, when he was questioning his own memory, because I think his words highlight a central issue regarding his work. Whitley said,

“I’m very confused by that Charles Whitman memory. On the one hand, I have very vivid, graphic and specific memories of the incident, and on the other hand a good friend of mine tells me I wasn’t there. What’s important to note, though, is that I brought it up in my book. The revelation is an attempt to honestly explain what’s been happening to me. If I was trying to cover something up, would I bring up an inconsistency like that?” (Heaton 1987)

By the time he said this, Whitley was already wrestling with vivid, graphic and specific memories of a much harder-to-understand experience that had taken place on December 26, 1985. In writing Communion, he shared everything, because he was earnestly trying to understand what had happened—what was “real” and what wasn’t. His search for answers eventually pointed him back toward childhood, and also uncovered a series of perplexing memories from his young adult life.

In September 1967, Whitley started having experiences of intense-and-inexplicable dread, and periods of “missing time” (not unlike his experience on the boat in the summer of 1956). The following summer, while on break from film school in London, he disappeared for four to six weeks, somewhere in Europe. The only thing he remembers is a nurse forcing him to eat something “so bitter that it almost split my head apart,” although he doesn’t remember being sick or in a hospital (Communion).

In 1969, he moved to New York, married his wife Anne, and decided to write novels. Whitley says he wrote eight comedic novels between 1970 and 1977, none of which has ever been published. To pay the bills, he took a day job at an advertising agency. Around the same time, he and Anne also joined a meditation group associated with Russian mystic writer George Gurdjieff. Today, Whitley partly attributes his ability to communicate with “The Visitors” to a meditation practice learned through the Gurdjieff Foundation. In a 2009 journal entry posted on his website, he writes, “Prior to the December 1985 close encounter, I was deeply asleep. I had spent fifteen years intensely involved in the Gurdjieff Foundation, so I knew that what we consider a normal state is not really normal. It’s a state of sleep. We react, we do not act. The attention pours out into the world, and the inner being is left to starve. But I’d been working toward a more awakened state for a long time.”

In 1977, the doors of perception opened a little wider. Whitley says he had an experience in New York’s Central Park that prompted him to write his first horror novel, The Wolfen. A few years later, he claimed that he had started writing horror fiction because he wanted to do something “important.” He explained, “I believe that one of the most important functions of literature is to allow the reader to become an explorer in his own emotional world. To me, the best fiction allows me to learn about my own inner life as I read the story” (Winter 1983). He was essentially exploring his own inner life, and revisiting his earliest personal experiences, as he wrote.

In many of his nonfiction books, from Communion to The Super Natural, Whitley Strieber contextualizes his earliest horror novels—The Wolfen (1978), The Hunger (1981), Cat Magic (written in 1981 but not published until 1986), Black Magic (1982), and The Night Church (1983), plus a few short stories—as manifestations of repressed memories. In The Secret School, he writes, “I believe my whole body of work—my whole life—has been an unconscious effort to somehow overcome my fears and reach back to the secret school.”

In The Wolfen, one of his characters describes “a virtual alien intelligence right here at home.” Another character explains, “People used to call them werewolves. Now they don’t call them anything because they’ve gotten so damn good at covering their tracks that there are no legends left. But they’re here. They damn well are here.” Another one remembers a childhood encounter that took place one summer night when he was six or seven years old. Strieber writes, “He was asleep in his ground-floor bedroom. Something awakened him. Moonlight was streaming in the open window. And a monstrous animal was leaning in, poking its muzzle toward him, the face clear in the moonlight…” Was Whitley summoning his own early visions of “big gray monkeys” and “a huge disk in the afternoon sky that looked to me like the moon”?

In The Hunger, the author defines vampires as “another species, living right here all along.” When “majestic” vampire Miriam Blalock appears in all her glory, he writes, “The eyes were not pale gray at all, but shining, golden, piercingly bright. The skin was white and smooth as marble. There were no eyebrows, but the face was so noble, so much at peace that just seeing it made Sarah want to sob out the petty passions of her own humanity and have done with them forever.” When the vampire speaks, she promises, “You shall learn secrets.” Was Whitley remembering his otherworldly teacher from the secret school?

Secrets and mysteries abound in Cat Magic (which deals with the occult and the transformative power of death—the subject of Whitley’s most recent nonfiction books, especially The Afterlife Revolution), Black Magic (about psychic warfare), and The Night Church (which Whitley described in a 1983 Fangoria interview as “a new treatment of the idea of demons”). Then, at some point in the early 80s, Strieber had another epiphany. He explained to interviewer Douglas E. Winter that he no longer wanted to write horror novels as entertainment, because “time and history have caused what I used to think of as horrors to become—more and more—realities.” Now, he explained, a horror novel “ought to have significance politically, emotionally, culturally—and literary significance. It should have an impact far beyond entertainment, but be important on that level, too” (Winter 1985).

Whitley’s first experiment with the new approach to horror was the novel Warday, co-authored with his childhood friend Jim Kunetka. Written in a journalistic style, the novel follows the two authors through a dystopian future America that has been devastated by nuclear attacks. Strieber told Winter, “When you read Warday, you are reading me, as I understand myself, and perhaps even beyond that.” By vividly imagining himself in an alternate reality, the author says he experienced “a great breakthrough in consciousness. I found myself able to think and to feel in ways that I have never been able to think and feel before” (Winter 1985).

Warday was a bestseller, Strieber’s most successful book to date. So, naturally, he and Kunetka got to work on a followup. Nature’s End would take place in an equally bleak future, in a world devastated by the sudden effects of global warming. While working on the book in March of 1983, Whitley says he had another transformative experience, which he recounts briefly in Communion, and at greater length in The Secret School. In one moment, he explains, he was standing on the corner of La Guardia Place and Houston Street, surrounded by traffic, assaulted by noise. The next, he heard only the “clip-clop of horses,” and looked around to find himself in “old New York” with horse-drawn carriages on unpaved streets.

Whitley does not say he imagined this. He says he experienced it. The question is whether he was somehow able to use his mind and his imagination to transport himself to another time, or whether he simply losing his (admittedly tenuous) grip on reality and hallucinating.

A few months later, in December 1983, Whitley says he took another step into the unknown. One night, he woke up and saw an “apparitional” figure, “standing and looking down at me at about two-thirty in the morning.” The figure, wearing a cowl, locked eyes with his observer, then disappeared. When Whitley shared the details of this experience with journalist Ed Conroy, he said he didn’t think much of the experience until he noticed “a dramatic change in my work.” It was, he said, as if he’d been “inspired by a muse” (Conroy 1988).

After completing Nature’s End, Whitley began work on a book that he described in a mid-1980s interview as “something completely new,” his “big ‘breakthrough’ novel,” and “the best thing I’ve ever done.” By the time this quote was published, however, he had apparently scrapped the novel and begun working on something else (Wiater 1986). That “something else” was Communion—which prompts me to think of the old “something completely new” as a missing link between the docu-horror of Warday / Nature’s End and the nonfiction horror of Communion. That missing link was eventually published, in 1991, as The Wild.

The Wild is about Bob Duke, a despondent, middle-aged tech salesman—a native Texan, raised Catholic, happily married, father of one—who slowly transforms into a wolf. Essentially, it is Whitley Strieber’s version of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and that connection is highlighted by the fact that Duke’s twelve-year-old son Kevin is obsessed with Kafka. The main character’s transformation is confusing and traumatizing for himself and for his wife Cindy, but it is also a door into a more awe-inspiring world. It is a gift. In a passage that seems to summarize his work as a whole, and which also explains my attraction to his work, Strieber writes:

Despite all the terror he had felt last night, the sense that the universe had ripped and he had been the one who fell through, there was also a sense of wonder. Once Kevin had commented that seeing even the most dreadful of supernatural manifestations, a disfigured ghost or a vampire, would make him happy because of everything else it implied about the persistence of the soul. Bob had not used the word “supernatural” in reference to his experience before, but it now occurred to him to do so.

He wished that he could impress Cindy with the seriousness of the situation. To do that, maybe he should express the wonder. For, despite everything, there was wonder. Even if it was all a complex, subtle dream, woven of lies and illusions, it was remarkable, ranking as a psychological phenomenon. And if there was any truth to it at all, any truth—

Good God.

Sources

Conroy, Ed. Report on Communion. 1988.

Everitt, David. “Whitley Strieber and The Hunger.” Fangoria #25. 1983.

Heaton, Michael. Interview with Whitley Strieber. San Francisco Examiner. March 5, 1987.

Strieber, Whitley. Breakthrough. 1995.

Strieber, Whitley. Communion. 1987.

Strieber, Whitley. The Hunger. 1981.

Strieber, Whitley. A New World. 2019.

Strieber, Whitley. The Secret School. 1996.

Strieber, Whitley. Solving the Communion Enigma. 2011.

Strieber, Whitley and Jeffrey Kripal. The Super Natural. 2017.

Strieber, Whitley. Transformation. 1988.

Strieber, Whitley. The Wild. 1991.

Strieber, Whitley. The Wolfen. 1978.

Swaim, Don. Interview with Whitley Strieber. April 6, 1984.

Wiater, Stanley. Interview with Whitley Strieber. Twilight Zone. August 1986.

Winter. Douglas E. “New Wave Gothicism and Spiritual Panic.” Shadowings. June/July 1983.

Winter, Douglas E. Faces of Fear. 1985.

https://www.unknowncountry.com/whitleys-journal/the-boy-in-the-box/

Book Review: Theology and Wes Craven

2023-09-07T07:08:00.003-07:00

Horror fans rejoice! This is the third academic book about Wes Craven published in 2023. Edited by Religious Studies professor David K. Goodin, Theology and Wes Craven departs from the previous two by focusing less on the case for Wes as an auteur, and instead drawing attention to “underappreciated theological subtexts” in his work that resonates with current social issues. The book’s ten essays offer new insights on some of Wes’s most famous creations (Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The People Under the Stairs) while heaping attention on some of his more neglected works (The Fireworks Woman, My Soul to Take, and even Coming of Rage, Wes’s 2014 comic book series with Steve Niles).

Goodin personally contributes three of the ten essays, including the two most groundbreaking ones. Following a regrettably brief (and occasionally inaccurate) overview of Craven’s career, he shines light on a nearly-lost 1964 novel by the future filmmaker. Wes talked about the unpublished novel, written while he was pursuing a Master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University in ’63-‘64, during a 2010 interview with author John Wooley, who repeated those comments in Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares (Wiley & Sons, 2011). A few years later, in 2015, Amanda Auble and Sarah Schreib reported in the Johns Hopkins News-Letter that “the Sheridan Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives still maintains Craven’s graduate thesis,” and they quoted a few excerpts from the manuscript. Goodin, however, is the first person (that I know of) who has attempted an analysis of Wes’s "lost" novel, which Goodin describes as “a roadmap” for Wes’s future filmmaking career.

Noah’s Ark: The Journals of a Madman is a complex allegorical novel that functions largely as a repository for ideas and deeply personal musings. As such, it is difficult to study as a piece of literature divorced from the filmmaker’s biography. Goodin wisely notes that any attempt to summarize or explicate the text “will be reductionist” and potentially “discourage others from arriving at their own personal readings.” He makes the attempt anyway, because (he says) the novel will probably never be published and most people will never read it. I have mixed feelings about the result. Although Goodin enthuses about having this “opportunity to explore the theological worldview of Craven when he was just 25 years old,” he doesn’t seem to have gathered enough biographical context to do so. What his essay offers instead is a very worthwhile scholarly introduction to the Biblical allusions in Wes’s novel, which serves as an excellent introduction to themes repeated in the filmmaker’s work.

Goodin has also written an excellent essay on Wes’s most ignored-or-maligned work, the hardcore adult film The Fireworks Woman. He convincingly makes the case that Fireworks is a deeply personal protest film, much like Last House on the Left. In much the way that the earlier horror film rages against American hypocrisy during the Vietnam War, The Fireworks Woman takes aim at “evangelical purity culture.” Goodin suggests the filmmaker “wanted to reveal the emotional and spiritual damage done to young persons who are caught between an untenable Evangelical faith and their own natural desires,” and claims Wes was specifically riffing on the Old Testament Song of Solomon. Although the writer/director never talked about this particular film, I completely agree with Goodin that it’s an important film worthy of study—and there’s plenty of room for an ongoing dialogue. For example, I’d like to quibble with the essayist’s reading of the film’s ending, which seems much more ambiguous to me.

The other essays in this collection cover familiar territory with flashes of brilliance that make old, familiar films seem new again. C.J. McCrary provides a pair of thought-provoking essays on Marian symbolism in Last House on the Left and Wes’s distinct humor in A Vampire in Brooklyn and Cursed. The former essay insightfully reflects on Wes’s ambivalence toward his first film and helps to explain—in a theological context—how a notorious horror film can be “a model of healing devotion.” McCrary’s subsequent essay on Wes’s “puckish” humor is equally insightful and helps this reader to recognize Wes’s voice in those two films. (And in this respect, the essay serves as a complement to Richard Sheppard’s Vampire essay in ReFocus: The Films of Wes Craven, and a counterpoint to Berns and Veteri’s Vampire essay in A Critical Companion on Wes Craven.) McCrary also briefly examines Coming of Rage and might be the first critic to carefully consider this obscure project as part of Wes’s oeuvre.

Next, Amy Beddows takes on the daunting task of saying something new about the Nightmare on Elm Street series and Carol J. Glover’s endlessly-popular “Final Girl” Theory. She succeeds by invoking the Biblical “myth of feminine evil” to explain why male characters never listen to Final Girls, and by paying particular attention to actress Heather Langenkamp’s contribution to the Nightmare series. The essay is a strong complement to Crofts and Rijswijk’s Nightmare essay in ReFocus: The Films of Wes Craven, as well as Langenkamp’s 2011 documentary film I Am Nancy.

ReFocus contributor Kevin J. Wetmore returns with a second essay on The People Under the Stairs. While his previous study reflected on depictions of systemic racism in horror cinema, this one examines People as a critical commentary on warped Christianity (specifically, Prosperity Gospel and Dominion Theology) in Reagan-era America. Wetmore makes some astute observations about Wes’s religious worldview as well as past and present-day collusions between Church and State. Taken together, his essays also convincingly suggest that The People Under the Stairs might be Wes’s most salient and underappreciated film.

And speaking of underappreciated films… David L. Dickey has written a wildly enthusiastic and ambitious essay about My Soul to Take, proclaiming Wes’s final film as writer / director “a work of transgressive art” and possibly “the best example of his artistic skill in storytelling.” It’s a bold claim, backed up by a convincing argument that the film in many ways parallels Wes’s 1964 novel Noah’s Ark, echoing the Biblical themes as well as the allegorical approach of that novel. For anyone that values Wes as a storyteller, this is an important consideration.

For me, the two remaining essays don’t quite reach the high bar set by the rest. Christopher Garland’s notes on Serpent and the Rainbow hint at some tantalizing ideas—there’s a great passage about the film’s “particularly porous” line of demarcation between past and present, life and death—but they left me wanting more. Federico Andreoni’s essay on Music of the Heart uses Wes’s film as a thin excuse to teach a history of classical music theory. This essay seemed oddly placed at the end of Theology and Wes Craven… although, in fairness, I think Wes would have loved it. He was, after all, a former Humanities professor.

In final analysis, I do wish that more of Wes’s work had been studied in this volume. The absence of The Hills Have Eyes (from any book about Wes) and Deadly Blessing (from a book about Wes and theology) are especially glaring. An essay on the Nightmare Café TV series also would have been a nice addition. Luckily for readers, Theology and Wes Craven doesn’t have to stand alone. In the introductory chapter of Theology, David Goodin teases an unwritten essay on “colonial subtext” underlying a theological subtext in Hills. Stephanie Chang’s ReFocus essay on Last House on the Left lays the groundwork, and Mikel J. Koven’s essay on Hills takes up the mantle. As Goodin implores, the “seeds have been planted for further cultivation…. Get to it!” Three books in a single year is a lot but Wes Craven is an endlessly fascinating subject and I sincerely hope there’s more to come.

Theology and Wes Craven is available from Lexington Books.

2023: The Year of Wes Craven

2023-08-08T06:53:00.011-07:00

Wes Craven (photographed by Chris Buck)

Wes Craven passed away almost exactly eight years ago, and his loss reverberated strongly within the horror community. When, two years later, we also lost George A. Romero and Tobe Hooper, fans and film critics paid tribute to the three fallen Masters of Horror—and, apparently, made plans to celebrate them in a slew of academic publications.

2021 saw the publication of “the first comprehensive scholarly study” of Tobe Hooper, University of Texas Press’s American Twilight. (John Kenneth Muir wrote the first comprehensive overview of Hooper’s career, Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre, in 2002, but the depth of analysis in American Twilight reflects the passing of nearly twenty years as well as newer work by the filmmaker.) That same year, Scout Tafoya published his intensely personal and intensely geeky monograph Cinemaphagy: On thePsychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper. Brilliant tributes, both.

In 2022, following the establishment of the George A. Romero Foundation and the George A. Romero Archive at the University of Pittsburgh, Edinburgh University Press released George A. Romero’s Independent Cinema, an in-depth look the business of Romero’s film company Laurel Entertainment, by Tom Fallows. Earlier this year, McFarland published Not of the Living Dead, a very welcome anthology of essays about Romero’s lesser-known, non-zombie films. Later this year, Oxford University Press will release Adam Charles Hart’s Raising the Dead, a study of Romero’s unpublished and unproduced work. In academic circles, Romero lives on.

In 2023, Wes Craven is getting an equally reverent treatment. In addition to the publication of a revised and updated version of Brian J. Robb’s study Screams & Nightmares, three books of essays about Craven’s work will be released. Vying for the title of the first comprehensive scholarly study of Wes’s world are Edinburgh UP’s ReFocus: The Films of Wes Craven, edited by Calum Waddell, and Lexington Books’ A Critical Companion to Wes Craven, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and John Darowski. They will be followed, later this year, by Lexington’s Theology and Wes Craven, edited by David K. Goodin.

ReFocus: The Films ofWes Craven has an excellent editor in Waddell, an authority on horror and grindhouse cinema, whose stated goal is to prompt readers and viewers to look beyond the A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream series, and recognize Wes as a “nearly unrivaled influence within the genre” (“nearly” is qualified in a footnote about John Carpenter) as well as an “essential American filmmaker.” Through close readings of Wes’s minor works—as well as two new essays about the original Nightmare on Elm Street—ReFocus makes a strong case for Wes as an auteur.

Finding intersections between life and art, the book is divided into four loosely-chronological sections. “The Early Wes Craven” looks at the director’s most primal horror films (Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Hills Have Eyes Part II) as well as one lost and relatively unknown student film he shot (Pandora Experimentia). “Freddy Krueger and Beyond” features two new essays on Elm Street, plus analyses of two Wes-directed episodes of the 1980s Twilight Zone TV series amd the film Deadly Friend. The heavy-lifting “Hollywood Nightmares” section examines The Serpent and the Rainbow, Shocker, The People Under the Stairs (the only non-Nightmare film to warrant two separate essays), Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and A Vampire in Brooklyn. Finally, “Lineage and Legacies” examines Music of the Heart, Scream 4, and Wes’s supposed influence on The Purge film series.

The first section of the book is uniformly excellent. Holger Briel’s essay on Last House within the context of that film’s censorship in Germany is well-researched and carefully considered; it illustrates how censorship can rob a film of its meaning and unfairly distort popular perception of the filmmaker(s). Mikel J. Koven’s essay on Hills 1 as an example of Folk Horror views the 1977 film through a 21^st century lens, interrogating the film’s narrative point-of-view for sociopolitical implications—and making some intereseting points about the 2006 remake without ever explicitly mentioning it. Will Dodson takes on the ambitious task of resurrecting Hills 2, revealing the bones of a more insightful (unmade) film about trauma and cultural assimilation. Unfortunately, Dodson’s essay is limited by the author’s access to only one draft of Craven’s script—but all three drafts now reside in the Horror Studies Collection at theUniversity of Pittsburgh, so there’s opportunity for a followup.

Especially noteworthy is Brian R. Hauser’s essay on Pandora Experimentia, the source of many urban legends at Clarkson University, where Wes taught in the late 60s. Hauser also taught at the school (many years later) and organized a panel discussion about the now-presumed-lost student film, featuring members of the original cast and crew. Apart from Pandora co-directors Ken Lyon and John Heneage, Hauser is undoubtedly the foremost authority on the topic, and he brings a wealth of primary research that fans won’t find elsewhere.

The second section of the book delves into Wes’s subtextual criticisms of the Reagan era. A Nightmare on Elm Street has been extensively mined, but Sinead Edmonds finds something new to say about this iconic film as a narrative of personal and cultural trauma. In a second essay on Elm Street, Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk helpfully point out that the parents in the story—as well as their children—are damaged. Both essays could be expanded meaningfully through close readings of earlier drafts of Wes’s scripts for A Nightmare on Elm Street (in which Nancy seeks institutional help from a psychiatrist and the church) and A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors (in which Nancy’s father starts out as a weary vigilante, hellbent on finishing Freddy).

It is refreshing to see Matthew Sorrento pay some critical attention to Wes’s Twilight Zone episodes, an important part of the director’s body of work. Writing about the episode “Shatterday,” Sorrento parses differences between writer Harlan Ellison’s authorial intentions and Wes Craven’s auteurist interpretation. He also suggests a way of reading “Her Pilgrim Soul”—my favorite Wes episode—that I’d never considered.

As something of an apologist for Deadly Friend, I was happy to read Norberto Gomez Jr.’s essay, presenting the film within the context of early 80s optimism about new/future technology. Gomez’s interpretation of the film reminded me of George Romero’s Martin, another neglected horror film about a lonely hero searching for human connection using inhuman (or, possibly, superhuman?) methods. The author also makes a good case for Deadly Friend as a forerunner of Scream and Pulse. He could have easily included Wes’s novel Fountain Society as well.

The third section of the book maps a surprising turn toward optimism in Wes’s work. James Kloda indicts The Serpent and the Rainbow as a “white savior” narrative but suggests a way of viewing the film that makes it nonetheless progressive. Melody Blackmore acknowledges Shocker as a film about “cultural terror of technology” but also redefines it as a hidden ghost story about transcending the mind-body connection. In two complementary essays on The People Under the Stairs, Catherine Lester and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. view that minor classic as a genuinely cathartic children’s horror film, a prescient Black horror film juxtaposing economic and racial disparity, and a “strikingly optimistic” story from a reputed master of horror. Max Bledstein outlines the positive effects of horror cinema in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and Richard Sheppard makes A Vampire in Brooklyn sound (dare I say it?) smart, by characterizing the critically-dismissed horror-comedy film as a “post-O.J. Simpson” commentary on American society. I’ll never watch it the same way again.

The fourth and final section of the book is disappointingly brief but nonetheless valuable. It is also the most heartfelt section of the book. Waddell’s essay on Music of the Heart argues a case for Wes Craven as a “revolutionary” filmmaker, and positions the director’s neglected non-horror film as a thematic capstone to his career. Next, Erika Tiburcio Moreno contends that Wes’s revolutionary voice resonates posthumously in The Purge films—but her contention that Wes’s heroes “all turn to violence as a (perhaps short-term) solution” gives short shrift to the heroes and heroines of Elm Street, Shocker, Red Eye. Waddell returns and rounds out the collection by suggesting that Wes’s last three feature films (Red Eye, My Soul to Take, and Scream 4) reflect his “postmodern sense of Self.” I’m not completely sold on the theory, and I wish Waddell had spent a bit more time on Red Eye and especially My Soul to Take, but I love some of his insights. Bottom line: I am very grateful that this book exists, and any serious fan of horror cinema should be too.

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, an authority on international horror films, and co-editor John Darowski cover some of the same ground in A Critical Companion to Wes Craven, but their book stands on its own as an even more comprehensive look at the filmmaker’s career. Touting Craven as “a true auteur” whose “personal voice” is “present even in his less celebrated work,” the collection gives due attention to projects that are mostly ignored in ReFocus—including The Fireworks Woman, Deadly Blessing, Swamp Thing, Wes’s TV movies (Summer of Fear, Invitation to Hell, Chiller, Night Visions, even Casebusters), the TV series Nightmare Café, and My Soul to Take. The editors don’t seem to have quite the same level of in-depth knowledge of their subject—the introduction contains several factual errors—but the enthusiasm behind this book is undeniable.

Instead of taking a chronological approach, Critical Companion divides essays into four sections according to “different aspects of the director’s oeuvre.” Part 1—“Space, Time, Urbanities”—offers an overview of Wes’s major themes and methods for visualizing those themes. Part 2—“Traumatic Aspects”—interrogates some of the filmmaker’s most thematically complex and troubling/troubled narratives (Last House on the Left, The People Under the Stairs, and My Soul to Take). Part 3—“The Authorial Voice”—highlights some of Wes’s more idiosyncratic works, and Part 4—“Sociological/Philosophical Inquiries”—returns to the major themes with impersonal/theoretical readings of key films.

For me, the highlight of Part 1 is Michael J.T. Stock’s essay on EcoGothic, a subgenre that Wes wanted to explore during the final years of his life. The last line of Stock’s essay reminds me of an anecdote Wes shared in 2010, about an intended shot for the original Hills Have Eyes movie, in which the camera pulls up and away from a character—all the way into outer space—giving a cosmic sense of humanity’s isolation and vulnerability to a cruel or indifferent universe. I also enjoyed Daniel P. Compora’s essay on Nightmare, Shocker, and Scream as “an evolving narrative of the dangers of suburban life,” which puts a finer point on some comments made by Calum Waddell in his essay on Music of the Heart.

Part 2 is a deep dive and, inevitably, a mixed bag. Taking the plunge with My Soul to Take, Reece Goodall declares that film “worthy of scholarly re-evaluation in that many of its perceived flaws are in fact significant to how it should be understood.” Goodall presents an intriguing thesis, but I don't agree with her implication that Wes intended those “perceived flaws.” Even in a critical analysis, I think it’s important to recognize that some films are assembled from uncongealed ideas, random suggestions, business-related compromises, and a lot of second-guessing. I love the idea that Wes intended to make a film about “the instability of identity for young people,” as well as an interrogation of “issues of faith and storytelling,” but I don't think he consciously crafted a piece of Junk Art to illustrate those themes. On the other hand, I agree that My Soul to Take deserves more attention, and this is the most thought-provoking take I've read on the film.

Equally challenging is the group-authored essay “Wes Craven and BIPOC Horror: Contrasting The People Under the Stairs with The Possession of Joel Delaney.” The group consensus is that Possession is the more laudable film, and that Wes undercut his own message by trivializing the racist villains in People. It is a fair criticism—but I think the authors go too far in questioning whether a white, middle-class director “can or should examine social issues outside of their lived experiences.” (Worth noting: Wes Craven grew up poor in the racially-diverse Hough Avenue neighborhood of downtown Cleveland during the post-WWII years, and he was a firsthand witness to plenty of racial tension, economic disparity, and violent injustice.) This is still the most insightful essay I’ve read on The People Under the Stairs.

Part 3 of the book may be a bit too esoteric for most readers, but I love Will Dodson’s devotion to the Television Films of Wes Craven. The guy actually sat through Casebusters and managed to find “embryonic sequences that would be fully realized in The People Under the Stairs.” He also connects Chiller to The Fountain Society, and Night Visions to My Soul to Take. Hats off to you, sir! I also enjoyed Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Eduardo Veteri’s essay on authorship and studio interference. Reflecting on The Fireworks Woman, they ask ask, “Is it possible to find an authorial voice even in a porn film?” The answer is yes; they argue convincingly that The Fireworks Woman is more of a Wes Craven movie than Vampire in Brooklyn or Cursed, “because it did not suffer from studio intrusion.” John Darowski rounds out the section with a look at Wes’s adaptation of Swamp Thing and the art of “filtering another’s text through his own sensibilities.” Any serious consideration of Swamp Thing—which the director regarded as a representative work—is a worthy addition.

The fourth and final section of A Critical Companion makes a case for Wes’s continued relevance as a cultural critic. Ezra Brain and Olivia Wood declare that the director was instrumental in turning slasher movies into “a more queer-friendly subgenre”—with his outsider characters, critiques of repressive societies, and fantasies of resistance. (For more evidence of this, see Tucker Lieberman’s essay “The Trail of His Flame” in the 2022 anthology It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror.) They draw together all of the filmmaker’s work with a simple insight that Wes’s stories always emphasized “empathy and compassion,” “kindness and humanity where darkness is explored and conquered.”

Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh go on to highlight what is arguably the most provocative undercurrent in Wes’s work—questions about religious faith and the nature of evil. I especially love their attention to Deadly Blessing, aptly described as “a transition from the depiction of explicit violence to an exploration into areas of fantasy and evil that disrupt the realm of belief.” Observations about that film’s trans character dovetail nicely with details from the preceding essay. The authors’ interpretation of Deadly Friend—as a different type of “Final Girl” film—is also intriguing. (This seems like a good jumping-off point for the forthcoming book Theology and Wes Craven...)

In the final essay, Andrew Smith presents Scream 4 as a film that true crime TV writers should reckon with. Because it speaks to our pop cultural moment (the True Crime Entertainment / Social Media Influencer era) while also vaguely hinting at important metaphysical questions, Smith contends that Scream 4 is “perhaps the most interesting of the Scream franchise"--and, therefore, a fitting capstone to Wes’s career.

So where does horror cinema go after Wes Craven? It’s a question that both of these new books pose (the former more explicitly than the later), leaving little doubt that Wes endures as a ghost in the machine, a persistent spirit in the semi-fictional world that has arisen since he died in 2015... before President Trump, before Covid, before the first photograph of a black hole... These books stand as evidence that Wes was—and is—American cinema’s great Philosopher of Horror. He didn't just see the future. Like his fellow Masters, he saw us.

ReFocus: The Films of Wes Craven is available from Edinburgh University Press.

A Critical Companion to Wes Craven is available from Lexington Books.

VIRGINIA CREEPERS: A History of Local Horror Fiction

2023-07-06T08:38:00.005-07:00

One of my latest projects is co-editing an anthology of original, previously unpublished horror stories set in my home state. Dark Corners of the Old Dominion will be released by Death Knell Press in September 2023. In the meantime, I’ve been taking a deep dive into the history of Virginia-based horror novels.

The commonwealth of Virginia has a long history, and therefore plenty of legends and “true” ghost stories… but, as far as I can tell, it’s a relatively new setting for horror fiction. Virginia native Edgar Allan Poe published “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” an otherworldly short story set in the hills southwest of Charlottesville, in 1844—but this strange tale draws most of its power from a waking dream of an exotic Hindu civilization rather than the Virginia setting. Ellen Glasgow set her 1923 short story “The Whispering Leaves” on the banks of the Rappahannock River, but this Jamesian effort to modernize Southern American Gothic is wrapped in a cringe-worthy depiction of Old Virginia plantation culture. Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel The Beguiled—which became the basis for a 1971 Clint Eastwood movie as well as a more recent adaptation by filmmaker Sofia Coppola—was set on Cedar Hill Road near Spotsylvania in the Civil War-era, but in some ways it almost feels even more modern, like a savage modern slasher movie.

Other than those three stories, I don’t know of many Virginia creepers that predate the golden age of the American horror novel, which began with the publication of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and Thomas Tryon’s The Other (1971). My survey of Virginia horror starts in earnest with John Farris’s 1977 occult novel All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By. Stephen King hyped the novel in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, and so did Grady Hendrix in Paperbacks from Hell. Mostly, they were praising Farris’s bravura opening chapter, which visualizes a gruesome wedding massacre at a fictional military institute in Gaston, Virginia. The massacre is related to a supernatural curse on one of the commonwealth’s oldest families. The mystery continues: “The day Clipper went crazy in the chapel, something else strange happened near there—on Railroad Ridge, which overlooks the town of Gaston and the military school. A little boy named—Jimmy, I think—was on the ridge picking flowers for his sick mother. A terrible thing happened to him in the woods…”

Stephen King made a trip to Virginia a few years later, in his 1980 novel Firestarter. The novel, about a father and daughter pursued by a shadowy government agency known as The Shop, is set in a fictional suburb of D.C. called Longmont. I’m betting the town name was inspired by Longmont, Colorado, which King probably visited while he was living in Boulder and writing The Shining, but the setting is pure Virginia: a pair of antebellum plantation homes formerly owned by Civil War veterans. King explains that when the old-timers gave up their ghosts in the mid-1950s, the government moved in and started conducting illegal experiments on naïve college students. A generation later, the sins of the fathers come back to burn them.

The sins of the fathers—and mothers and grandparents—also haunt the youngest generation in V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic. The 1979 novel is set almost entirely inside an estate house in the rolling hills near Charlottesville, but young protagonist Cathy Dollenganger gets a brief, nighttime view of her bucolic piedmont VA surroundings: “There were hills aplenty, looking like lumpy patchwork quilts, with trees parading up and down to separate them into distinct sections. Sentinels of light, I called them, but Momma told us the many trees in straight rows acted as wind-breaks, and held back the heavy drifts of snow. Just the right words to make Christopher very excited. He loved all kinds of winter sports, and he hadn’t thought a southern state like Virginia would have heavy snow.” Turns out, life at Foxworth Hall is cold as ice.

V.C. Andrews, a native of Portsmouth, lived out her later years on Lynnhaven Bay in Virginia Beach, where she wrote three and a half sequels to Flowers in the Attic before succumbing to breast cancer at the age of 63. In true gothic fashion, her name and her spirit have lived on, with ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman publishing dozens of books under her name. For better or worse, that long-lasting legacy isn’t very closely associated with Virginia.

For a time, crime writer Patricia Cornwell was the commonwealth’s most famous local writer. A native Floridian, Cornwell moved to the Richmond area in 1981, and started writing fiction there in 1984. Drawing heavily on her personal experience of working for the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Richmond, she published her first crime novel Postmortem in 1990, introducing Kay Scarpetta, a character that has appeared in 26 novels to date. Cornwell said she loosely based Postmortem on a series of strangling murders that occurred in Richmond in the summer of 1987, and conceived Scarpetta as “a force of reason and rationality in an evil, satanic world.”

Part of Cornwell’s early success may have been timing. Postmortem was published just two years after Thomas Harris’s bestseller Silence of the Lambs—which begins at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Cornwell, in turn, might have inspired fellow Virginian author Wendy Haley, who published her first murder mystery in 1992. Haley’s Shadow Whispers was primarily set in Norfolk’s Ghent neighborhood. The author also wrote historical romances, a couple of southern vampire novels (no, not The Vampire Diaries—but those are also set in Virginia), and a trio of ghostwritten R.L. Stine novels before her untimely death (cancer) in 1998. Haley wrote three more murder mysteries. The last one, White Light (1995), was a horror-tinged tale set against the backdrop of “New Age” culture associated with the Edgar Cayce research center in Virginia Beach.

One of the biggest success stories in the Virginia horror community is undoubtedly Waynesboro native Elizabeth Massie, recently celebrated by the International Horror Writers Association with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Massie published her first novel, Sineater, in 1992, and it was voted “best first novel” at the HWA’s Stoker Awards that year. Set in the fictional rural mountain community of Beacon Cove, Sineater is about a local conflict between tradition and modernity, a heaping helping of Southern Gothic, backwoods prejudice, and horrors of religious zealotry. It is also a surprisingly tender coming-of-age story, demonstrating the real strength of Massie’s character-driven storytelling.

Massie plays to that strength in her second novel Welcome Back to the Night, a savage and supernatural tale of culty white supremacists and “aliens,” drenched in pre-millennial dread. The setting is the fictional town of Henford, nestled in the hills of the Shenandoah Valley, somewhere between Staunton and Harrisonburg. Massie’s third novel, Wire Mesh Mothers (2001), also starts in Virginia, near Emporia. There’s no hint of the supernatural in that one, but it’s a powerful horror novel about dysfunctional families and psychological trauma. Since then, the author has put her own unique spin on stories about witchcraft (Homeplace, 2007), zombies (Desper Hollow, 2013), and cave-dwelling monsters (Virginia: Valley of Secrets, part of the author’s Ameri-Scares series, 2013). She recently completed a sequel to her first novel, titled Wages of Sin.

Another native Virginian who has consistently explored darker corners of the state is Stephen Mark Rainey, whose fictional journeys began with a vivid nightmare set in the woods behind his childhood home in Martinsville. In an introduction to his 2000 short story collection The Last Trumpet, Rainey remembers, “It was a true night-horror, one that woke me in a cold sweat three separate times. Each time I managed to go back to sleep, the dream took up right where it left off.” The haunting experience has inspired a long-running cycle of short stories and an elaborate Lovecraftian myth rooted in Virginia’s blood-red clay. Over time, Rainey has transformed his hometown into Aiken Mill, Virginia’s version of Castle Rock. Mysteries continue to unravel in Fugue Devil and Other Weird Horrors (1992), The Last Trumpet, The Lebo Coven (2004), and Fugue Devil: Resurgence (2023). Rainey will make another stop in Aiken Mill in the forthcoming Dark Corners of the Old Dominion.

The year 2000 seems like a reasonable line of demarcation between the golden age of the American horror novel and the current era of indie horror. By and large, horror novels haven’t had the kind of mainstream popularity in the 21^st century that they had in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. But that’s not to say that there haven’t been some damned good horror novels in recent years. And quite a few of them are set in Virginia.

One of the more celebrated horror novels of the early 21^st century is New Yorker Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), which is set at a haunted house in the countryside, not too far from Richmond, on the fictional corner of Succoth and Ash Tree Lane. The author aggressively distorts and breaks the frame of the traditional ghost story, haphazardly presenting fragments of documentary evidence to create verisimilitude and also disorient the reader. In some ways, House of Leaves the literary equivalent of a found footage horror movie. Some call it meta-fiction, some satire. What’s clear is that this book will either terrify you or frustrate the hell out of you. Or both.

Few horror novelists have followed Danielewski’s rather audacious lead, but one title worth mentioning in the same breath is Edgar Cantero’s The Supernatural Enhancements (2014). Cantero is a Spanish author who apparently has an affinity for the Virginia countryside. His novel is set in the fictional town of Point Bless, in a house built by one of the first Dutch immigrant families in Virginia—a family with a dark past (in slavery times, the author writes, “the Axtons were particularly brutal”) that won’t die. In a 2014 Reddit appearance, Cantero said he was okay with one reader’s characterization of the novel as “a lighter House of Leaves.”

British novelist Graham Masterton, a well-known name in the horror fiction world (his 1976 novel The Manitou inspired the 1978 film), also dredged up some old Virginia ghosts in his 2004 novel The Devil in Gray. The novel depicts a series of gruesome murders in the city of Richmond, which turn out to be perpetrated by an undead Confederate soldier seeking revenge. On his website, Masterton says the idea came from a simple but tantalizing question about one of the most brutal battles of the Civil War: “What if the Confederates won the Battle of the Wilderness because they used Santeria magic to help them?”

West Virginia native Justin Evans says the classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw was his main inspiration for writing 2007’s A Good and Happy Child, a first-person novel about schizophrenia and/or demonic possession set in a fictional southwestern Virginia town called Preston. “I grew up in a town very much like the one I describe in the novel,” Evans said, “in an environment where everyone believed in ghosts and everyone had their own ghost story. I’d sit in the living room while my dad told tales of demonic possession that would make grown men’s hair turn white. Some of the scary details in the book… are things that I grew up with.” As an adult, the author transplanted those scary details to the neighboring state of Virginia, somewhere near Lynchburg and Lexington, along the James River. Like Elizabeth Massie’s Sineater, his novel explores conflicts between “Old Virginia” and the modern age—a world of “Faulkner characters” set against the invading liberal culture at the local college. Religion, mysticism, Jungian psychology, and the Problem of Evil have prominent roles in the novel.

Further north, in the fictional town of Walden, zombie-master Brian Keene’s 2010 novel Darkness on the Edge of Town offers Lovecraftian apocalyptic horror with a blue-collar, beer-swilling Bruce Springsteen vibe. This one reminds me a lot of Stephen King’s novella The Mist, with its down-to-earth, morally-dubious characters, and its complete refusal to hazard guesses in response to unanswerable questions. Taking some of its inspiration from the back roads and communities near Staunton, Keene’s book is an earnest exploration of the scarcely hidden, deeply human darkness of small-town southern life.

Steve Rasnic Tem’s Blood Kin digs even deeper into the hills and the history of Virginia’s cultural bedrock. Tem is a native of Jonesville, a heavyweight among modern horror author, and this book earned him a well-deserved Stoker Award for best novel in 2014. Set during the Great Depression, in the real southwestern Virginia town of Marion, Tem’s novel offers a little bit of everything a horror fan could ask for. There’s a family curse, a terrifying preacher, snake-worshippers, psychics, small town prejudice, supernatural kudzu… but Blood Kin is much more than the sum of its tropes. It’s a poetic tribute to the power and mysteries of storytelling going back to Faulkner, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

D. Alexander Ward’s 2016 novel Beneath Ash and Bone is another deep dive into Virginia’s dark history, a gritty supernatural murder mystery set in the pre-Civil War Virginia mountains. It plays out like a splatterpunk version of a hardboiled detective story by Ambrose Bierce. Nuff said. The setting is the fictional town of Selburn, a place as bleak and stony as the tale itself.

One of my favorite horror novels of the current decade is California writer Jo Kaplan’s It Will Just Be Us, set in the wilds of the Great Dismal Swamp. Kaplan sets the scene like this: “Gray and hazy sunlight filters through tall thin trees that rise from their own rippled reflections in stagnant waters to stand on top of themselves, and the way is veined with creepers and shrouded in the mists of time.” Although the setting—an old haunted house wrapped in wisteria—may seem stereotypical at first, I think Kaplan’s novel is closer in spirit to Michael McDowell’s unconventional The Elementals than to Shirley Jackson’s oft-imitated The Haunting of Hill House. I’d hate to give too much away, so I’ll just say it’s a ghost story in reverse.

Although I’ve worked my way up to 2020, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface. Before I beg off, I’d be remiss if I didn’t celebrate two new Virginia authors who are getting better with every book. Tidewater native S.A. Cosby has walloped readers with a trio of visceral Virginia-based crime thrillers that definitely skew dark enough to be called horror. My Darkest Prayer (2019, set in fictional Queen County), Blacktop Wasteland (2020, set in fictional Shepherd’s Corner), and Razorblade Tears (2021, set in Richmond) will soon be followed by All the Sinners Bleed (2023, set in fictional Charon County). Cosby is carrying the mantle of great Southern Gothic writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy—by way of Chester Himes and Walter Moseley. He says, “For me, the best Southern fiction takes the hypocrisy of the South, a region that seeks to steep itself in religion and moral rigidity, and melds that with the reality of a multitude of social, sexual and class backgrounds and situations.”

Very different but equally compelling is the work of Richmond native Clay McLeod Chapman. His recent trio of awesomely geeky horror novels—2019’s The Remaking (witchcraft and warped memory in Roanoke), 2021’s Whisper Down the Lane (Satanic panic and karmic justice in Greenfield), and 2022’s Ghost Eaters (addiction and existential odysseys in Richmond) will soon be followed by What Kind of Mother (2023, set near Lynchburg). In a 2022 interview for Virginia Living magazine, the author said, “My narrative default is always to return to Virginia. If I close my eyes and I kind of imagine where I want to set a new story, 99.9% of the time it’s going to be here because this is where I grew up and it just feels like home.” Chapman also has a new story in Dark Corners of the Old Dominion.

At the end of all this exploring, I’m left wondering what defines Virginia horror as Virginia horror. Some time ago, I read a survey of contemporary Southern literature called The Christ-Haunted Landscape, which convinced me that a certain type of religious sensibility lurks in the background of most Southern fiction. It’s just as obvious that the ghosts of the Civil War are haunting American culture and literature today, stoking the fires of political and generational conflicts. Many of our most pervasive boogeymen live here: Big (Bad) Government, Small Town Malaise, Urban Blight, Redneck Culture, Radical Intolerance, Racial Injustice, and the Long Monstrous Arm of History Repeating Itself. Are we afraid of what’s coming for us or horrified by what’s already here?

Virginia’s horror writers dare to answer.

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2023-03-09T07:59:00.000-08:00

AVAILABLE HERE!

"Maddrey's book restores the crafts of writing and screenwriting to the story of the cinematic adaptations of the early novels of Stephen King. By focusing on the nitty gritty of pitches, treatments, reworked and revised screenplays, and the last-minute changes that occur when such projects enter principal production, Maddrey demonstrates the process that made such famed film adaptations as Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). Crucially, Maddrey restores King's voice to the narratives of these films by not only reviewing his role in the development of making these works, but also by exploring other versions, sequels, remakes, and the critical and cultural legacies of these books. With original interviews and extensive analyses of primary documents and material in archives, Adapting Stephen King is a dream for fans of King and the movies and TV shows that he made possible." - Kevin M. Flanagan, George Mason University

"Maddrey's approach is as resourceful as his information is thorough and insightful. Adapting Stephen King Volume 1 is mainly a novel-to-script-to-screen study, but it also includes oral history interludes and interviews with the screenwriters responsible for the most significant adaptations... Clearly, a lot of work went into this book." - Mike Segretto, Psychobabble

"This book arrived at the perfect time because I am working on a project that relates to adaptations and I was looking for deep dives into early projects and, lo and behold, there it was!" - Bev Vincent, author of The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, The Dark Tower Companion, and The Road to the Dark Tower

"I've read it cover to cover. It's extraordinary! [...] If only I had this back in the day." - John Esposito, screenwriter of Stephen King's Graveyard Shift

"Although much has been written about [adaptations of Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining], this book does a nice job of summing it up, and shedding new, fresh light where few previous writers have bothered to go. It remains to be seen how the series will deal with minor and middling adaptations, but the approach exemplified in Volume 1 is most laudable and makes one anxious to see more." - Dejan Ognjanovic, Rue Morgue issue #203

AVAILABLE HERE!

"Analog Love is a fun and emotional trip down memory lane with more to say than you might realize." - Tim Salmons, The Digital Bits

"Analog Love invites a panel of artists, art critics, pop-culture aficianados, and hardcore normies [the full spectrum] to weigh in on the artform of mixtapes and what was both singular abotu the era and what was lost when we moved on. Of course, you'll get advice like how imperative the first track can be in setting the mood, and how important it is to add in a track that challenges the listener in such a way that it truly tests their dedication to the mixtape maker. At the end of the day, Analog Love insists on how a mixtape should make for both the best day of a listener's life, and a cyclical experience that can be loved forever." - Brock Wilbur, The Pitch

"A humble but authentic piece of work with some heart [...] Analog Love is geeky in the best possible way. [It] presents what's superficially a... well, superficial subject and makes it feel very relevant, and even poignant." - George Pacheco, Outburn

"I didn't expect to love this documentary this much. Listening to people talk about something they love at a deeply personal level is always a treat, but listening to Henry Rollins talk about music and mixtapes is just intoxicating. So frigging good. And he s not alone. The music lovers interviewed here are all so cool to listen to, in their own unique ways. What a great cast. This movie is full of heart, full of love. It put a smile on my face the whole time. And I can't stress enough how well it was put together. The directing is never boring. The visual ideas are great. It's really well paced. I just loved it. And now I can't wait to spend my weekend, making new Spotify playlists." - Cedric Renol, Letterboxd.com

"I one zillion percent believe everyone should watch Analog Love. Those of you who enjoyed mixtapes will be caught up in nostalgia and those of you who aren’t aware of such an art form will be inspired. I guarantee it. I can feel the love that went into makes this film and it will continue to be a must watch for many years. - Christie Gee, ChristieGee.com

Book Review: Not of the Living Dead

2023-03-09T07:57:00.002-08:00

The introduction to Not of the Living Dead, the latest book on cinema’s King of the Zombies quotes George A. Romero from a 1992 interview, saying that he hopes he’ll be remembered for something other than just Night of the Living Dead. At the time of the interview, Romero had already made his three most famous zombie films (Night plus Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead), as well as eight other feature films. Although he would spend the next two decades developing tons of projects, he would direct only four more films, including three zombie films. Perhaps for that reason, even in death he has not managed to escape his own zombie-verse.

But while most people know George Romero as the creator of cinema’s ubiquitous non-voodoo zombie, fans and serious critics know him as a lifelong revolutionary. Robin Wood was one of the first academics to highlight and celebrate the progressive socio-political subtext of Romero’s narratives and Tony Williams took a deeper dive with his career-spanning 2003 book The Cinema of George A. Romero. Since then, hordes of critics have feasted on Romero’s texts and subtexts, but most have continued to focus on the zombie movies. Not just because they’re more popular but because they’re less ambiguous, easier to “read.” That’s why the new book Not of the Living Dead is so refreshing.

In this collection of essays, four authors (Noah Simon Jampol, Cain Miller, Leah Richard, and John R. Ziegler) examine Romero’s “non-zombie films” as standalone narratives and/or components of the revolutionary storyteller’s work as a whole, prompting viewers to see them from new and different angles. The book offers extremely close readings of There’s Always Vanilla (1971), Jack’s Wife (1972), The Crazies (1973), Martin (1977), Knightriders (1981), Creepshow (1982), Creepshow 2 (1987), Monkey Shines (1988), “The Cat from Hell” (a segment of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, 1990), “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (a segment of Two Evil Eyes, 1990), The Dark Half (1993), and Bruiser (2000). There’s also a chapter on The Amusement Park (completed in 1973, released in 2021) and George’s unproduced script for a Resident Evil movie (1998). These essays will make even the most ardent Romero fan look at the films with new eyes.

Leah Richards, an authority on Victorian Gothic literature, analyzes There’s Always Vanilla and Jack’s Wife as products of a particular zeitgeist. Drawing on contemporary interviews with Romero, she points out that the director envisioned Vanilla as a statement piece about the fate of the “American hippie,” and Jack’s Wife as a response to second-wave feminism. She also notes that neither film lived up to the director’s hopes; in later years, Romero dismissed Vanilla as “a little romantic comedy that didn’t pretend to be anything else,” and said he’d like to remake Jack’s Wife in order to make it “more pertinent” and “more sensitive.” The implication is that, although both films are admittedly dated, they were also ahead of their time—because Romero was ahead of his time.

Noah Simon Jampol, author of a thesis on “Science Fiction as Ethical Response to the Holocaust,” finds Holocaust imagery in Romero’s third film The Crazies while highlighting the complexity of that film’s theme. Unlike the Dead films, he writes, The Crazies blurs the line between Good and Evil, Us and Them, presenting a more nuanced view of humanity. Perhaps that’s why the film initially failed to find a larger audience? But it’s also why the film remains worthy of careful analysis. Jampol’s insights on the ending of the film are especially thought provoking.

Cain Miller, whose main area of study is masculinity and the male body in horror cinema, examines Martin, Monkey Shines, and Bruiser as an unofficial trilogy about toxic masculinity. He offers a surprisingly sympathetic reading of the Cuda character in Martin while pointing out the significance of the film’s setting for conveying its theme. I think Romero, who once said the film was about how “evil” is “a permanent part of us” and needs to be understood, would have loved this reading. Although the director claimed there was no such social message in Monkey Shines, Miller’s Freudian reading of that film is equally satisfying. Again, comments on the film’s ending—which was eventually changed by studio execs—are illuminating. Analyses like these, which contemplate artistic intentions vs. commercial considerations, show us exactly what and how a revolutionary storyteller like Romero contributes to normally-staid genre storytelling.

Bruiser is a more problematic subject for study. As Miller points out, Romero said this film was “exactly what I wanted it to be”—and yet the film is the most “socially regressive” film in the director’s catalogue, exhibiting “derogatory stereotypes, outdated gender politics, and uncomfortable racial subtext.” The essayist notes that Romero loyalists sometimes pin the mean-spiritedness of the film on the director’s lost decade in the wilderness (he spent the 1990s in development hell) but the film remains something of a blemish on his record. Thankfully, Bruiser was not his last film—which makes me yearn for a chapter on the sorely-neglected Survival of the Dead as a kind of riposte.

Rounding out the collection are several essays by supernatural studies expert John R. Ziegler—on Creepshow, Creepshow 2, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, and Two Evil Eyes. These essays are arguably the most suppositious in the book. Ziegler reads many of these films as narratives about the dangers of patriarchy and capitalism, but I think sometimes he stretches things a bit too far. For example, he reads the rape scene in Creepshow 2 as “a critique of middle-class white masculinity.” The author’s reading of The Dark Half as a narrative about “queer reproduction” is more intriguing. Romero consciously transformed Stephen King’s novel about two minds fighting over control of one body into a film about two bodies fighting over what type of man should rule the roost. Reflecting on the studio-imposed ending to that film, Ziegler makes an inspired comparison to Hitchcock’s The Birds. One is left to wonder what Norman Bates—who famously liked to stuff “birds”—would make of George Stark being carried away vs. picked apart by “birds.”

In the 1992 interview that the authors quote in their introduction, Romero said he had not yet made a film that fully expressed his style and vision. In later years, he cited Martin as a personal favorite, but Knightriders comes closest to the man behind the movies. In her essay on that film, Leah Richards explores the complexities of King Billy, the film’s central character and a kind of surrogate for Romero himself—a heroically-progressive but sometimes-crazy individualist attempting to control a socially-liberal monarchy. Knightriders offers ample criticism as well as sympathy for Billy, the flawed but loveable idealist who draws viewers into his troupe the same way George Romero drew (and continues to draw) viewers into his vision for a better world. Unfortunately, after Knightriders, Romero never again had so much creative freedom.

But he certainly had more to say. As the George A. Romero Archival Collection at the University of Pittsburgh illustrates, the filmmaker spent decades developing non-zombie projects that have not yet seen the light of day. Those projects, like the Not of the Living Dead book, are valuable to cinephiles who believe that George Romero revolutionized horror cinema by putting so much of himself into the stories he told. I am personally grateful to the keepers of the flame at UPitt, grateful to the authors of Not of the Living Dead, and looking forward to the next book on Romero’s “lost” work (Adam Charles Hart’s Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, due this year from Oxford University Press).

Long live the King!

Not of the Living Dead is available from the publisher at McFarlandBooks.com

Book Review: Horror Films of 2000-2009

2022-12-03T07:23:00.002-08:00

Back in the mid-90s, John Kenneth Muir staked out ground as a film critic willing to take horror cinema more seriously than most. Buoyed by the success of his early books about iconic directors like Wes Craven, John Carpenter, and Tobe Hooper, he launched a series of mammoth studies of American horror films organized by decade. The nearly 700-page Horror Films of the 1970s came out in 2002, followed by the 800+ page Horror Films of the 1980s in 2007, and the comparatively slim Horror Films of the 1990s in 2011. Now he ventures into a new century with Horror Films of 2000-2009, a 900-page exploration of what Muir characterizes as the triumphant return of the great American horror film. “Bad times make for good horror films,” he declares, and the cultural turmoil of post-9/11 America helped filmmakers—and critics and scholars—rediscover the genre’s “voice and purpose.”

Some will quibble, of course. Serious horror cinema scholarship, which began in the 70s, has enshrined that decade as the Golden Age of Cinematic Horror. (It’s no accident that Muir started his series there.) Most would agree that horror films of the 80s are worthy of the Silver or at least the Bronze. Horror Films of the 90s represent an Iron Age, at best. Which leaves… what? Rust? Some Old Guard horror fans—especially those who grew up in the 70s and 80s—have made that claim.

In fairness to the nay-sayers, many of the most popular horror films of the early 2000s were throwbacks to the 70s and 80s. Remakes of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, DAWN OF THE DEAD, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, and HALLOWEEN suggested a dearth of imagination in Hollywood, and high expectations killed the initial critical response to the new films. At the same time, the remake phenomenon (which Muir defines broadly—including sequels, prequels, reboots, and bold “re-imaginations”) suggested something significant about the culture: History repeats itself. The idea that we could be trapped in some kind of creative time loop is scary... but maybe not an inspiring recipe for a new Golden Age. As a result, it was incumbent upon a new generation of filmmakers to make the old stories new again, which they did with debatable results. Muir seems to be more enthusiastic than most, giving 4-star reviews to roughly 20% of the current crop of titles, including many of the high-profile "remakes."

Although he has written multiple books about the Golden Age of Horror, the author tries very hard to distinguish himself from the Old Guard, avoiding knee-jerk reactions to popular trends within the fan community while remaining laser-focused on how each individual film reflects (or fails to reflect) larger cultural / historical trends. “All horror films are political,” he insists. That might be taking his zeitgeist theory a bit too far (unless perhaps his definition of "politics" is as broad as his definition of "remake"), but the approach provides a consistently interesting lens through which to view the genre and the individual films. Muir offers undeniably compelling takes on zombie films as libertarian metaphors, found footage vs. Final Girls, and torture porn as morality play. With the advantage of hindsight, his latest book also offers critical reevaluations of films that he says have been unfairly maligned or overlooked.

True to form, the author offers considerable insights on the films of John Carpenter (a 6-page write-up on GHOSTS OF MARS!), Tobe Hooper (who else has spent so much time contemplating CROCODILE and THE TOOLBOX MURDERS?), and George Romero (4 stars for SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD? Damn straight!). He is also an enthusiastic but judicious viewer of the work of next-gen Masters like M. Night Shyamalan, Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, and Alexandre Aja. I’m not sold on Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN as a 4-star movie, but it’s impossible to dismiss the perspective of an intelligent critic who has taken the time to watch and carefully consider more than 300 contemporary horror films en masse. On the whole, his reassessment of this contentious decade of horror cinema is fun, informative, and challenging.

In the later part of this book, Muir puts the past behind him and highlights some truly brilliant films that have been overlooked by mainstream viewers—including LAKE MUNGO and PONTYPOOL, which he includes in his Top Ten list for the entire decade. Two subsequent reviews in the 2009 chapter suggest, to my mind, an important arena of focus for Horror Films of the 2010s. Muir all but dismisses the sleeper hit PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, arguing that it “leaves precisely nothing to the imagination” and fails to “engage and deal with the questions we face in real life.” In contrast, he hails the forgotten indie film DAWNING, an existential drama that accomplishes “a lot with very little.”

Going forward, I imagine he’ll highlight more hidden indie gems produced during a decade when horror cinema slipped back into the shadows (because Obama was president?) and I will look for Muir’s next book to remind me of those neglected titles, the way Horror Films of 2000-2009 has reminded me of how much I love GINGER SNAPS, SESSION 9, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, DEAD END, DARK WATER, TEETH, THE FOURTH KIND, THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL… But now it’s time to stop writing and start re-watching. For me, the book has done its job.

Horror Films of 2000-2009 is available from www.McFarlandBooks.com.

Book Review: Philip K. Dick - Essays of the Here and Now

2022-02-28T05:44:00.005-08:00

Philip K. Dick: Essays of the Here and Now, ed. David Sandner. www.McFarlandBooks.com

When I learned about this new book of essays on the work of legendary sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick, I was intrigued. The title, especially, caught my attention. Essays of the Here and Now. It’s always tempting to cast any good sci-fi writer as a futurist or fortune teller, but it seems to me that many of these authors have simply written timeless stories about human potential and humanity in extremis. Their work can be set in the future, in some imaginary world or alternate reality, but their ideas illuminate the here and now.

Case in point: I read Philip K. Dick’s novel VALIS for the first time in January 2017. I was well aware of PKD before then, but for some reason I had never taken a deep dive into his work. So there I was, reading the author’s fictionalized account of a visionary experience that had re-wired his mind in February 1974. I’m not going to try to sum up the plot VALIS because trying to sum up any PKD novel is a fool’s errand, but let me draw attention to one intriguing detail that appears in the novel. There’s a story within the story that says “God” used an “information-firing satellite” to remove President Richard Nixon from office, thereby preventing a cataclysmic World War III. Because the story within a story exists, it seems that someone “remembers” that alternate future. Philip K. Dick himself claimed to have experienced that alternate future America in real life.

Now back to 2020: I’m reading all of this in the days leading up to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. For me, the fact that Trump was elected president seemed (and still seems) like the stuff of dystopian science fiction. In that here and now, PKD’s story made sense to me in a profoundly affecting way. The barrier between fiction and reality seemed to have broken down—and, in our new “facts don’t matter” political milieu, the breakdown continues.

In his introduction to Essays of the Here and Now, editor David Sandner writes, “The surprise is that [PKD’s] paranoia, decades after his death, should remain something that feels frighteningly relevant, here and now. American society has become only more anxious and uncanny since he wrote.” Although the essays in the book all come from an academic conference that took place in southern California in the spring of 2016, this statement—about epidemic paranoia, anxiety, and an inescapable sense of uncanniness—is increasingly timely. 2016 was a simpler time. Before President Trump. Before Covid. Before January 6^th. Before the threat of a new Cold War.

The work of Philip K. Dick was of course relevant in 2016, but perhaps in a less urgent way. Unfortunately, the early essays in Here and Now seem to me the least urgent and the most tiresomely academic. Things pick up a bit with Richard Feist’s essay “Voices, Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind,” which examines PKD’s 1974 visionary experience within the context of his philosophical influences and studies in brain science. Feist recognizes that Dick “was not, strictly speaking, a scholar.” He was an obsessive autodidact who explored ideas for deeply personal reasons, in a rather haphazard fashion. When he wrote VALIS, he trying to explain his own experience and thereby address some of the biggest questions in Western religion and philosophy. His mission took him down a deep rabbit hole, into a brilliant and perplexing mental Wonderland, which he documented in an 8,000-page literary experiment he called the Exegesis.

Here’s the thing: If the work of Philip K. Dick speaks to you, you have to take the leap. It’s obvious that the essayists who contributed to Essays Here and Now have taken the leap. I only wish they had written more about why.

While I was obsessing about PKD in 2017, I zipped through several of the major novels (Time Out of Joint; The Man in the High Castle; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Ubik; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; The Transmigration of Timothy Archer), along with major essays in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick and David Sutin’s biography Divine Realities: A Life of Philip K. Dick, on my way to Jonathan Lethem’s 800-page edit of the Exegesis. I got lost in that Wonderland for almost a full year. I don’t know how to sum up PKD’s effect on me during that year except to say I found myself continually thinking “This is crazy…. but also brilliant… In fact, it’s so brilliant that I might be crazy too, because I’m starting to understand it.”

Back to those key words: paranoia, anxiety, uncanny.

Although Philip K. Dick has some shortcomings as a novelist, I fell under his spell like a kid in a cult. I can’t remember the last time an author had exerted such a powerful influence on me. Then a strange thing happened. I finished reading the published version of the Exegesis and hit a wall. In 2019, I circled back to PKD and read his early novel Eye in the Sky, but it wasn’t the same. The drug had worn off. I picked up Essays of the Here and Now because I was looking for help explaining PKD’s allure for a reader like me. What I found was a mixed bag.

The first half of the book spoke to my intellect but not to my gut-level obsession with the author’s spiritual journey. There’s no question that the essayists gathered here are passionate about PKD’s work—and their work has prompted me to seek out a few PKD titles that I didn’t previously know much about. One essayist defines Galactic Pot Healer as “a novel written by a PKD who fervently longs to stop being PKD.” That made me curious, so I ordered the book. I was also intrigued by Gabriel Cutrufello’s explication of Dick’s early mainstream novels, especially The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike: “Instead of using cognitive estrangement to present problems in a way that creates fresh perspectives for the reader, Dick takes the familiar and illustrates how it is already science fictional.” That’s exactly what I loved about PKD’s novel Time Out of Joint, which is firmly grounded in 1950s America—so much so that it seems like a John Cheever story—until it morphs into mind-bending sci-fi, making the new “unreality” feel maddeningly real.

From an academic perspective, perhaps the most valuable essay in the first half of the book is Gregg Rickman’s breakdown of an outline for a PKD novel that was never written. Sadly, it reveals that not only can’t we read the novel but we also can’t read the outline, because the Philip K. Dick Estate has suppressed it. For die-hard fans, then, Rickman’s breakdown is a privileged glimpse into the unpublished work.

For me, the real gold is the second half of the book, which consists of transcriptions of four panels that took place at the 2016 conference, featuring several of PKD’s friends and fellow writers, as well as dedicated archaeologists of his work. Super-fan and Exegesis editor Jonathan Lethem gives a lengthy history of his discovery and editing of the Exegesis, as well as an entertaining insider history of PKD fan culture. This guy is a national treasure. Back in 2017, I stumbled upon a recording of a speech he gave at the Los Angeles Public Library, which fueled my new obsession. (Listen here: https://www.lapl.org/books-emedia/podcasts/aloud/exegesis-philip-k-dick)

Authors Tim Powers and James Blaylock remember Philip K. Dick as a friend, highlighting his eccentricities in hilarious and humanizing ways. A trio of other authors (including the author of the definitive book about Blade Runner) offer insider observations about Hollywood’s forays into the Phildickian universe. Finally, in a conversation with Samuel Sousa, Lethem muses on the semi-fictional, real-world setting of PKD’s later life and novels—and casually reveals that PKD worked with author Ray Nelson on the short story that went on to inspire John Carpenter’s film They Live.

Mind blown.

Essays of the Here and Now isn’t quite the book I was looking for but it’s a worthwhile jumping-off point for deeper dives into PKD’s haunting and awe-inspiring view of the semi-fictional here and now, where reality is always being written and rewritten.

2020

2020-11-19T07:55:00.005-08:00

In spite of the chaos of 2020, I managed to get three different projects published this year.

First, my in-depth study of the 1983 film Brainstorm was published in e-book format by Liverpool University Press as part of Auteur's Constellations series. Each book in the series profiles one important science fiction film and puts it into historical context. I researched the ten-year development process behind Brainstorm, analyzing over a dozen unpublished drafts of the screenplay and conducting interviews with all three credited screenwriters (Bruce Joel Rubin, Phil Messina, Robert Stitzel) as well as the film's director Doug Trumbull. I believe the book will change the way people view the film.

My friends at Resurrection Films have included five of my original horror short stories in their new anthology The Dark Side of Acting Up, Vol. II. I worked with the Resurrection team on the 2019 documentary Millennium After the Millennium, and when I heard about this new project I couldn't resist throwing my hat in the ring. My stories are featured alongside plays by Jason Morris, Carly Street, and Mark Francisco, as well as artwork by Ian Stopforth. I recently pitched the book to some fellow horror geeks as follows: "Psychos, demons, aliens, and killer ducks... trading fours in the seventh circle of Hell."

Finally, Powys Media has re-published my 2018 novella Out the House. The first edition was a limited printing of only twenty-five copies, which were delivered to the cast and crew of the Internet web series The House Between. Author John Kenneth Muir wrote and directed three seasons of that series in 2006 - 2008. Ten years later, I couldn't get the show's characters and ideas out of my head so I wrote this meta-fictional spinoff. It's a very personal and very esoteric book. I have no idea what casual readers will think of it... but I'm curious to find out. The book is available through Lulu.

Now, on to 2021. I have a new book coming from McFarland & Company in the spring... and it's an big one: The first volume in a projected series about screen adaptations of Stephen King's work. Volume 1 covers all seven adaptations of the author's first three novels, focusing on produced and unproduced (and all unpublished) screenplays. It includes new, in-depth interviews with screenwriters Lawrence D. Cohen (the 1976 film CARRIE), Bryan Fuller (the 2002 TV movie CARRIE), Peter Filardi (the 2004 TV miniseries SALEM'S LOT), and Diane Johnson (the 1980 film THE SHINING). I think this will be be an important text in the academic field of Adaptation Studies, and I'm confident it will surprise even the most hardcore Stephen King fans. I'm already working on Volume 2...

New Projects

2019-12-18T07:10:00.000-08:00

There is nothing simple about T.S. Eliot. At least, that's the simple conclusion to be drawn from the existence of thousands of books, essays and dissertations about the Nobel Prize-winning poet. Collectively, this body of critical work has created a popular conception of Eliot as an impossibly complex writer and a man of many contradictory masks. Critics have presented him as an avant-garde poet and a conservative critic, a modernist and a traditionalist, a Romantic and a Classicist, a philosopher and a moralist, an American and a European, a proto-fascist and a pseudo-mystic, a bigot and a sage. Each of these masks can be peeled away, but then what are we left with? Who was T.S. Eliot and what did he really stand for?

“The next time I teach Eliot to undergrads I will assign this swift, witty, enjoyable invitation to T. S. Eliot’s work and thought. Maddrey knows everything about Eliot, but he grinds no axe which frees professors and students to grind their own. Scrupulously footnoted for professional use, not short but concise, it is stuffed with unfamiliar and apt quotations. Maddrey quotes a 1949 interview about The Cocktail Party, in which Eliot said, 'If there is nothing more in the play than what I was aware of meaning, then it must be a pretty thin piece of work.' There’s the New Criticism in 25 words, 21 of them monosyllables. Eliot asks us to quit asking what he thought and to do some thinking ourselves. This book will help.”

—George J. Leonard, Author of Into the Light of Things and The End of Innocence. Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities, San Francisco State University

“Joseph Maddrey provides an illuminating spiritual biography of T.S. Eliot that treats his writings as markers of Eliot’s lifelong spiritual drama and development while avoiding reducing his poetry to biography because he treats the texts as products of creation that all can contemplate. Maddrey admiringly captures the creativity of both Eliot’s character and his poetry. The two are elusive not only because Eliot’s poetry employs a vast and encyclopedic storehouse of poetic images ('3,000 years of word made flesh'), but also because his poetry strives to move 'beyond poetry,' at the apophatic 'ever-present frontier of consciousness—where words fail, though meanings persist.' Maddrey introduces Eliot to a new generation of readers, and guides wanderers anew at the 'point of intersection with the timeless / With time.'”

—John von Heyking, Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada

“T. S. Eliot considered that 'a worthwhile biography should show the development of an artist and give readers a proper sense of how each work of art fits within the whole.' In Simply Eliot Joseph Maddrey has fulfilled the directive, brilliantly compressing a gargantuan amount of previous Eliot studies and providing a fresh dynamic manual for understanding this storied literary icon.”

—Quinton Hallett, Poet, and Author of Mrs. Schrödinger’s Breast

“Simply Eliot is an accessible, artfully-written book that positions a well-known literary figure in a seemingly new landscape. One of the book’s greatest strengths is its extensive engagement with archival sources. Maddrey draws on those sources to give weight and depth to his narrative, which weaves interpretations—close-readings, even—of Eliot’s poetry into the broad strokes of his biography and intellectual genealogy. The approach is neither reductive nor esoteric, and Maddrey’s way with language draws the reader—one suddenly realizes one is reading and enjoying literary criticism. For this reason, the book will appeal not just to an audience of academics or students, but to intelligent, cultured people of all kinds.”

—Dr. Siân White, Associate Professor of English, James Madison University

“Joseph Maddrey's Simply Eliot is an elegant addition to the Great Lives series, providing an authoritative introduction to T.S. Eliot's work and influences. Accessible and yet well researched, Maddrey's biography gives readers a deeper understanding and appreciation for Eliot's life and his development as an artist by tracing the personal and critical influences of the individual poems and plays written throughout the writer's long career. Maddrey focusses on the individual works themselves to demonstrate how each fits into the whole and represents Eliot's journey as a spiritual seeker and artist. Maddrey's book will make a great introduction to all who are interested in Eliot as well as to everyone and anyone who wants to learn more. Simply Eliot is simply what all biographies should be.”

—Carol Scarvalone Kushner, Professor of English & Humanities at Dutchess Community College

“Joseph Maddrey’s brief vita of Eliot is a tale of a search for identities both human and divine. Maddrey is right to say that 'Eliot’s total commitment to the church transformed his poetry.' Was that church, though, the Church of England, with its distinctive patrimony of the King James Bible, and Lancelot Andrewes, and George Herbert, and their like, or the Anglican faith as a world religion which Eliot experienced first in the USA during his flight from Unitarianism? Maddrey’s analysis of Eliot as an American High-Church Anglican living in Britain insightfully explores the relationship between religious and cultural identities, and helpfully places Eliot, nationally and religiously respectively, as 'stranger and pilgrim.'”

—The Reverend Graeme Napier MA MPhil (Oxon), Rector, St. John’s in the Village, Greenwich Village, New York

“This relatively brief account of the life of T.S. Eliot admirably enlarges one’s appreciation of his poetry and other writings by situating them within their historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Not of least value is the final section entitled ‘Suggested Reading’, which is actually a summary of the responses of critical scholarship to Eliot’s work rather a mere list of books.”

—The Reverend Dr. Paul Bradshaw, Professor Emeritus of Liturgical Studies, University of Notre Dame

“I had to stop my daily life, almost, to read Simply Eliot; for me, it is compelling, refreshing, and genuinely exciting to read a biography that speaks to Virginia Woolf’s “common reader.” Cats saved Eliot for millions of people, but it did not make people want to read Eliot’s challenging poetry. I think Maddrey’s book will.”

—Charles W. Spurgeon, Professor Emeritus at Marymount University and Author of The Poetry of Westminster Abbey and J. Henry Shorthouse, The Author of John Inglesant (with Reference to T.S. Eliot and C.G. Jung)

COMING SOON:

The makers of Brainstorm (1983) spent more than a decade transferring the revolutionary concept of an “empathy machine” from page to screen, only for the famously troubled production to be met with critical and commercial indifference on release. But since 1984 the film has continued to inspire viewers to imagine possibilities for the future. As a result, Brainstorm now seems less like a fixed piece of film history than an idea in evolution. The screen story embodies the ambitions of sci-fi cinema going back to the 1950s, as well as the turbulent culture of the western world in the 1960s and 1970s. It also foreshadows technological breakthroughs around the turn of the twenty-first century, making the film startlingly relevant to our digitally-enhanced information age. To fully appreciate the film’s “ultimate experience,” it helps to understand exactly how the film evolved. This book aims to provide context for such an understanding, beginning with a brief history of science fiction cinema and setting up a careful consideration of multiple drafts of the Brainstorm screenplay by three different screenwriters: Bruce Joel Rubin, Philip F. Messina, and Robert Stitzel. It will also briefly examine the production history of the film (including the tragic death of star Natalie Wood), the career of the director and special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, the particulars of the completed film, and the film’s influence on future storytellers like James Cameron.

PACIFIC NORTHWEST #4: A Trip to Twin Peaks

2019-04-20T10:27:00.000-07:00

I have never been shy about expressing my love for David Lynch’s TV series TWIN PEAKS. I did it here. Here. And here.

Somehow, this series manages to balance the uncanny darkness of a feverish nightmare with the transcendent lightness of a mystical experience. The series isn’t everyone’s cup of coffee, but I recently re-watched Season Three and I remain spellbound by Lynch’s unique method of storytelling. There is an undeniable mystique about his fictional universe—and much of it is rooted in the Pacific Northwest, where the filmmaker grew up among shadows and tall trees.

I visited the Pacific Northwest for the first time this past week, and was overwhelmed by the lushness of spring. Maybe it’s because I have been living in a desert for 12 years, but I just couldn’t get over all the moss. It seemed to me that if I stood in any one place for very long, I would end up looking like Jordy Verrill. (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist one more Stephen King reference. Somehow, his stories seem to belong here too.)

We started our TWIN PEAKS tour near the town of Edgewick, in the shadow of two small mountain peaks, at the Twin Falls Trail. I don’t think these specific places inspired the series, but it’s hard to know for sure. So many places along the Snoqualmie River (especially businesses) share names from the series that it’s hard to know which came first; hard to tell where reality ends and fiction begins. This area was used as the backdrop for a gateway between worlds in Season Three.

The "twin peaks" above Edgewick. Note the name of the gas station on the right.

Twin Falls trailhead in Olallie State Park

"Nursery tree" or Day of the Triffids?

Does this image make you nervous?

Or this one?

Really?

Welcome to David Lynch's world of shadows and tall trees

Twin Falls overlook on the Snoqualmie River

We followed the Snoqualmie River east to the town of North Bend and one of the most iconic locations in TWIN PEAKS: the Double R Diner. The real diner, called Twede’s Café, is actually pretty unassuming. At least, it was on the lazy Tuesday afternoon when we stopped by for some damn fine coffee and cherry pie. The interior is thoroughly decorated with behind-the-scenes photos and news clippings related to the series. And, yes, the cherry pie is amazing.

We drove north and continued east on Reinig Road, beside the river and beneath the looming monolith called Mount Si. This is where the “Welcome to Twin Peaks” sign stood in the opening credits of the original series. More recently, a replica of the sign was placed in the same spot—but quickly stolen by vandals. So you’ll have to use your imagination.

Just a few hundred steps to the east is a fork in the road where we found three more sites associated with the show. In the original series, this intersection was known as Sparkwood and 21. To the north on 396^th Drive is the old Twin Peaks Sheriff Department, now the DirtFish rally school. The building and the lobby still look pretty much the same, but I was stunned to see what was out the front door. It had never occurred to me that, throughout three seasons of TWIN PEAKS, we never see a turnaround shot. Apparently, at one time, the Packard Sawmill sat right next to the Sheriff Department. Today, there’s not much left of the old mill.

The former Twin Peaks Sheriff Department

The turnaround view

The remains of the Packard Sawmill

Back on Reinig Road, just past the turnoff for 396^th, we encountered a small railroad bridge that has been converted into a footpath. It leads down into the town of Snoqualmie, which is the closest thing you’ll find to an actual town of Twin Peaks. This is where the kids went to high school in the first two seasons, at Mt. Si High School (currently under construction and unrecognizable from the show).

Fans will recognize Reinig Bridge as the spot where the traumatized Ronette Pulaski is seen wandering back toward town. Despite the fictional air of torture and tragedy, it’s a beautiful location and a great place to observe the swirling, hypnotic eddies of the Snoqualmie River as seen in the opening of the original series.

Sparkwood and 21

Just a bit further east on Reinig Road is another significant intersection. To the left is a one-way bridge leading down into Snoqualmie. To the right, the road meanders along the banks of the river toward Snoqualmie Falls—and the location of the iconic “Great Northern Hotel,” a.k.a. Salish Lodge and Spa. The view from the upper observation deck beside the hotel looks even more impressive in real life than it does in the series, especially at this time of year when there’s so much water rushing over the falls.

The view from the lower observation area was also featured in TWIN PEAKS. I had to make the hike down there because I read that there’s a hidden cave at the base of the falls, and also that “strange things” have appeared in photos taken down there. I took more than my fair share of photos, but didn’t see anything strange. Still, it’s a beautiful spot—and the juxtaposition of this majestic natural beauty with the imposing machinery of a nearby hydroelectric plant is certainly worthy of David Lynch.

Snoqualmie Falls is a pretty tough act to follow, but we rounded out our trip with a meal at The Roadhouse in nearby Falls City. This was a good reminder that things are not what they seem in TWIN PEAKS. The filmmakers only used the exterior of The Roadhouse in the show. Interiors of the biker bar, also known as the Bang-Bang Bar, were shot in the Raisbeck Performance Hall at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. (Apparently, this was one of several interior scenes there were shot close to the city. The inside of The Great Northern Hotel is actually the Kiana Lodge in Poulsbo, and Laura Palmer’s body was found on the beach near that hotel. The Palmer house is in nearby Everett, Washington.)

One last twist: According to the menu at The Roadhouse, the exterior of The Bookhouse (meeting place of the TWIN PEAKS secret society) was shot right out back, in a currently-abandoned—and, naturally, moss-covered—shack. The interiors, however, were shot at The Old Place in Cornell, California.

During our time in Snoqualmie, we happened upon a place that might have been an inspiration for The Bookhouse—a historic meeting hall known as “The Woodman Lodge,” which sits right behind the Northern Pacific Depot in downtown Snoqualmie. I shudder to think that David Lynch’s Woodsman is hiding in there.

PS - For a more expansive virtual tour of Twin Peaks, check out this website. Or, let this Snoqualmie local be your guide. The Salish Lodge and Spa gift shop also provides a free map of the main locations. And if you reeeeeally want to make an event out of it, there's an annual Twin Peaks Festival in North Bend and Snoqualmie. This year, it takes place over the weekend of July 12 - 14.

PACIFIC NORTHWEST #3: A Trip to the Goon Docks

2019-04-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

Having children means having an excuse to revisit one’s childhood, and I’m thrilled that my daughter is finally old enough to watch the movies I grew up loving as a kid. Just a few months ago, she saw THE GOONIES for the first time—and immediately proclaimed it “her favorite movie.” Within a few days, she had moved on to a new “favorite” (THE KARATE KID, maybe?) but I was still elated… especially knowing that we were about to make a family trip to the real-world “Goon Docks” in Astoria, Oregon.

Just as the town of Brownsville has embraced STAND BY ME, the town of Astoria has embraced THE GOONIES… to an extent. Astoria hosts the Oregon Film Museum, which turns out to be more of a standing tribute to the Steven Spielberg-produced film than a general celebration of movie-making in Oregon. And just as there is an annual STAND BY ME day in Brownsville (July 23^rd this year), there is an annual "GOONIES day" in Astoria (on June 7^th).

The museum is housed in the old Clatsop County jail, where Mama Fratelli helps her eldest son Jake escape at the beginning of the film. The getaway vehicle is a black ORV… which, today, is parked out in front of the museum. (If it’s not the same vehicle used in the film, I’m impressed with the attention to detail… There are bullet holes in the back door, just like Chunk said.)

"ORV..."

"... bullet holes..."

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our tour of Goonies land actually started at Ecola State Park. That’s where the Fratellis' hideout was located, on a bluff overlooking Crescent Beach and Cannon Beach. On the latter, Mama Fratelli drove the ORV through a cluster of similar vehicles to make her escape. The distinctive Cannon beachscape is defined by a group of massive “bird rocks." The largest one is known as Haystack Rock.

Elk grazing next to the parking lot at Ecola State Park

The Ecola State Park day-use area, where the Fratelli hideout was located

The view from the Fratelli's hideout, looking south toward Cannon Beach

Cannon Beach, looking south

Cannon Beach, looking north toward Haystack Rock

THE GOONIES would have you believe that Ecola Point and Cannon Beach are a short bike ride from Astoria. In fact, Haystack Rock is only barely visible (on a clear day) from the top of Astoria Column, which looks down on the historic town…. reputedly, the oldest settlement west of the Rockies.

On a clear day, you can see Haystack Rock in the distance. If you look very closely at the center of this photo...

Astoria

In a place with such a long history, it’s not surprising that there is some disconnect between the culture of the “locals” and the movie-centered culture of the tourists. Just across the street from the Oregon Film Museum is the Flavel House Museum, home of the Clatsop County Historical Society. In THE GOONIES, Mikey's father works here and the pirate map that leads the misfit kids to buried treasure is a "reject" from his carefully-curated historical treasures. Only the irreverent kids recognize the true value of the map.

I sympathize with the outsiders (because I am one), and admit that during our brief 24-hour stay in Astoria, I did not tour the Flavel House Museum.

I did, on the other hand, do a drive-by of Ally Sheedy’s house from the 1986 movie SHORT CIRCUIT. It’s not a great movie, but the house has a breathtaking view of the Astoria-Megler Bridge.

The SHORT CIRCUIT house

On the far east side of town is another memorable filming location: the elementary school from the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle KINDERGARTEN COP (this movie actually holds up better today than SHORT CIRCUIT), right down the street from Mikey (Sean Astin)’s house in THE GOONIES. I took a stroll through the neighborhood, but didn’t bother to visit Mikey's house—because, apparently, the current owners are none too fond of Goonies. Thankfully, a few neighbors are much happier to fly the Goonies flag.


This is where Arnold Schwarzenegger learned that boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.

Mikey's house from THE GOONIES, viewed from a boringly respectful distance


Flying the flag

Down on the docks below this neighborhood is a charming fisherman’s wharf, which is currently home to a loud bunch of barking sea lions (native goonies?). This is where the ships still come in, slipping under the Astoria-Megler Bridge. And on the other side of the bridge… miles and miles of virgin forest, at the southern edge of Washington state.

Next stop: Twin Peaks

PS - For an even more elaborate virtual tour of the Goon Docks, check out this website.

PACIFIC NORTHWEST #2: A Trip to The Overlook Hotel

2019-04-19T13:15:00.002-07:00

The second stop on our Pacific Northwest trip was The Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel THE SHINING. Sort of.

Kubrick used the historic Timberline Lodge, built in the 1930s as a WPA project, as his inspiration—but did not do any filming at the lodge itself (aside from the aerials seen at the beginning of the movie). Instead, he ordered the construction of a replica façade at a studio in England. The interiors were shot on a sound stage, the better to facilitate Kubrick’s famously elaborate Steadicam shots.

The main inspiration for Kubrick’s interior sets was the Ahwahnee Hotel in California’s Yosemite National Park, but (to my eyes, at least) there are some similarities between the Ahwahnee and the Timberline—most notably, Native American designs incorporated into the art and architecture of both hotels. According to co-screenwriter Diane Johnson, Kubrick was intrigued by the notion that the Overlook Hotel was built on an Indian burial ground. In her 2014 memoir Flyover Lives, she noted that “the idea of tainted ground and Indian ghosts malevolently hovering over the hotel does not really achieve visual or other expression, or only subliminally—one critic points out the Calumet baking powder tin in Wendy’s kitchen—but it served to generate some of the creativity of the filmmaker, and some of the décor.”

Sidenote: King's inspiration for THE SHINING novel was actually The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. (And this is where THE SHINING TV miniseries directed by Mick Garris was shot.) I haven't been there yet, so don't ask me about that one.

To account for snowdrifts, the architects of the Timberline built two main entrance

The lower entrance was once accessible only by passing through an ice cave


This ominous-looking fellow still greets everyone who passes through the lower entrance.

The lower lobby

One of the original guest rooms

The interior of the Timberline doesn’t have much in common with Kubrick’s sets. But a Stephen King nut like me can always find something…

One of the main design motifs in the hotel is an incorporation of wild animals into the art and architecture. Naturally, this made me think of Stephen King’s hedge animals—featured prominently in THE SHINING miniseries directed by Mick Garris, but not in Kubrick’s film.

And get this: According to a pamphlet produced by the Friends of the Timberline, the official mascot of the Timberline Lodge is… a Saint Bernard. Coincidence? Not on my blog.

Next stop: The Goon Docks

PACIFIC NORTHWEST #1: A Trip to Castle Rock (Oregon)

2019-04-18T16:55:00.004-07:00

This past week I took my family on a quick road trip through the Pacific Northwest. Because I’m me, we hit up several places associated with my favorite movies and TV shows. Also because I’m me, I am posting my photos (with a few notes) for future like-minded travelers.

Our first stop was in Brownsville, Oregon, which stood in for Stephen King’s Castle Rock in the 1986 film STAND BY ME (which I have already written about here). Like most King fans, I’m a bit obsessed with the town of Castle Rock. Last year, I was hired to help promote Hulu's new series about the fictional town, and I tried creating my own map of Castle Rock, using geographical clues from the relevant King stories. I quickly realized that it was a fool’s errand. Over the years the layout of King’s fictional town has changed… just as the location of the town within King’s fictional Maine has changed. (I have also written about this previously.)

Appropriately enough, Hollywood’s Castle Rock is all over the map too—in Brownsville, Oregon (STAND BY ME); Mendocino, California (CUJO); Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario (THE DEAD ZONE); Gibsons Landing, British Columbia (NEEDFUL THINGS); and Orange, Massachusetts (Hulu’s CASTLE ROCK). But as far as I know, Brownsville is the only town to fully embrace its alter ego. Just check out their Chamber of Commerce webpage, which provides a detailed map to the filming locations that were used in STAND BY ME. The town also holds an annual “STAND BY ME day.” This year, it's on July 23.

My family visited Brownsville on a rainy and glum Wednesday afternoon, but I was still thrilled to be making this cinephilic pilgrimage down memory lane. The town didn't just remind me of one of my favorite films, but of a town I grew up in, where the 4th of July parade and carnival were major events. During our visit, I noticed more than one sign advertising the upcoming Independence Day celebration in Brownsville.

I can understand why the filmmakers picked this town. Not all of STAND BY ME’s iconic scenes were shot here—some locals pointed me toward a bridge and a hiking trail near Cottage Grove (about an hour south of Brownsville), and the most memorable bridge in the film (where the boys outrun a train) is suspended over Lake Britton, California—but the beating heart of the story is here. Then and now.

Next stop: The Overlook Hotel

This is the first view of Castle Rock in the film, seen as Gordy walks out of the drug store onto Main Street.

He turns left and crosses the street onto Spaulding Avenue, seen here.


A moment later, he's climbing into a treehouse on School Avenue. The tree still exists, on private property.


A few minutes after that, Gordy returns to town and meets Chris here, at the corner of Main and Park Avenue

They run into a parallel alley, where Chris flashes his father's gun and Gordy shoots a trash can

The boys round the corner at the north end of Main St, and bump into Ace and Eyeball coming out of Brownsville Saloon

At the end of the film, the boys return to "Castle Rock" via this bridge at the southern end of town

They part ways at the corner of Park and Main, current site of a treehouse replica... directly in front of Teddy's house

Chris and Gordy then head north on Main Street, past an old Coke mural, bringing the story back to where it started

Visiting Aldous Huxley in Llano, California

2019-03-14T13:44:00.001-07:00

Aldous Huxley

There are a handful of writers that I find myself coming back to again and again. Aldous Huxley is one of them—but not so much Huxley the British satirist as Huxley the American proto-hippie.

Like most people, I discovered Aldous Huxley in high school via the 1932 novel BRAVE NEW WORLD. But that was not the book that hooked me. Around the same time, one of my teachers pointed me toward THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION. A bold move, introducing an impressionable teenager to a book about mind-expanding drugs. For the record, I have never taken any psychedelic drugs but I still have an abiding faith in the idea of “doors of perception.” And for my 18-year-old self, Huxley’s book provided a mission statement: “To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.”

A few years out of college, I read Huxley’s 1921 novel CROME YELLOW back to back with THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, his 1945 treatise on mysticism. A few years after that, when I first moved to Los Angeles, I read AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN and attended a Huxley symposium at The Huntington Library. I could not reconcile Huxley the satirical novelist with Huxley the pseudo-mystic, so I kept avoiding a deeper dive into the author's work—although I continued to be drawn to anthologies like MOKSHA: WRITINGS ON PSYCHEDELICS AND THE VISIONARY EXPERIENCE and THE DIVINE WITHIN: SELECTED WRITINGS ON ENLIGHTENMENT, as well as Allene Symons’ 2015 book ALDOUS HUXLEY’S HANDS: HIS QUEST FOR PERCEPTION AND THE ORIGIN AND RETURN OF PSYCHEDELIC SCIENCE. This most recent book made me more aware of Huxley’s time in southern California.

For years, I had known that Huxley wrote THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY in house in the “Mojave desert.” What I didn’t know was that “Mojave desert,” in this case, meant Antelope Valley, roughly an hour away from my current home. A quick google search turned up an address for the Pearblossom Picture Ranch in Llano, California. When I reached out to owners Anne Barry and Jim Karow, they kindly invited me to pay them a visit at Huxley’s old home. (Actually, if I’m being honest, I invited myself… but they kindly agreed…)

In preparation for my visit—and because I am a research geek—I read David King Dunaway’s biography HUXLEY IN HOLLYWOOD. This book solidified my sense of two Huxleys, defined by Dunaway as the “descriptive cynic” and the “prescriptive mystic.” Dunaway's book is entirely focused on the latter, the American Huxley. This "other" Huxley was born around 1934, when the author was 40 years old and living in England during the lacuna between world wars, and suffering from debilitating depression.

In 1936, Huxley corresponded with his friend and esteemed peer T.S. Eliot about his attempts to revitalize his life through meditation and the study of mysticism. An agnostic descended from a strong line of agnostics (his grandfather invented the term), Huxley approached the “art of mental prayer” as a matter of discipline. Meditation did not come easy to him, but Huxley worked to develop a steady practice—much as Eliot had done a few years earlier, when he converted to Anglo-Catholicism. Eliot advised him that one needs a specific “metaphysic” (i.e. religion) in order to achieve what some mystics call enlightenment. Huxley agreed with this idea in principle, but unlike Eliot he had not yet embraced a specific metaphysic.

At the time, both writers were deeply concerned about contemporary nationalistic ideologies—namely Fascism and Communism—creating chaos in Western civilization by masquerading as religions, but their solutions to the problem were different. Huxley made some preliminary conclusions in his 1937 book ENDS AND MEANS, while Eliot proposed his solution in the 1948 book THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. Eliot thought that rebuilding a cohesive Christian culture was the answer, but Huxley did not share Eliot’s faith in organized religion; he believed that the world had to change at a more basic level, one person at a time—and he started by trying to change himself.

In 1938, Aldous and his wife Maria and their 17-year-old son Matthew went to the U.S. for a vacation and wound up settling permanently in Los Angeles. Many of Huxley’s British peers (including Eliot, an American expat who had consciously decided not to return to America in the mid-30s) accused Huxley of a wartime defection. Huxley wouldn’t have been much help in a fight—he was a middle-aged pacifist, and practically blind—but he was a symbolic figure, and British nationalists attacked him as a symbol of abandoning the fight for the future of Western civilization.

From his own perspective, Huxley didn’t abandon the fight; he chose to fight in a different way: by envisioning the world without war—or, perhaps more to the point, the world without warmongers. In THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, he wrote, “The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.” In his 1944 novel TIME MUST HAVE A STOP, he clarified, “One can either go on listening to the news—and of course the news is always bad, even when it sounds good. Or alternatively one can make up one’s mind to listen to something else.” Huxley opted to listen to the desert.

In November 1941, one month before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he and Maria and Matthew moved to the high desert community of Llano. Nearly three decades earlier, Llano had been the site of a secular socialist colony with several hundred members, but disputes over groundwater rights had long since driven the settlers away. All that remained in 1941 was the stone foundations of a rather large ghost town. The Huxleys settled in a ranch house near the ruins.

A few weeks ago, I drove out to the house via the Route 14 freeway, and tried to imagine what the drive must have been like for the Huxleys in the early 1940s. Route 14 didn’t exist at that time, and there weren’t any reliable roads through the Angeles National Forest. Biographer David Dunaway suggests that the Huxleys somehow traveled over the San Gabriel Mountains by way of Mill Creek Summit, but that doesn’t seem right to me. I assume they must have gone north through the Newhall Pass and then followed the Sierra Highway east to Antelope Valley. It probably took them several hours.

What did they see when they got there? Dunaway describes a simple one-story ranch house, to which the couple eventually added an extra floor and a hexagonal “apartment.” They also built a separate house—designed by Aldous himself—next door.

Front of the renovated house

Back of the renovated house (Aldous Huxley's office was the upstairs loft)

The house the Huxleys built (or designed, anyway...)

View from the backyard, looking south toward the San Gabriel Mountains

The now-abandoned Huxley swimming pool

Dunaway writes that tall trees and an irrigation ditch “marked the oasis for miles.” The couple reportedly had an orchard and a garden, where they grew apples, almonds, grapes, pears, radishes and potatoes. They also had a goat named Spike, who had to be kept out of the garden. Their daily routine consisted of hard work and reflection: “breakfast at ten, work through the morning, lunch and siesta, with the afternoon for hiking and painting, followed by reading aloud in the evening.” Maria read her nearly-blind husband the biographies of several saints and mystics, which prepared him to write THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY.

Many of those famous saints and mystics experienced ecstatic visions in the desert, and the Huxleys might have had some comparable experiences. In a 1956 essay entitled “The Desert,” Aldous writes about divine grace, declaring that “the desert and silence and the desert emptiness are the most expressive symbols” of it. Although the author never claimed he had a mystical experience at Llano, he said that his wife Maria did. According to Laura Archera Huxley’s book THIS TIMELESS MOMENT, Aldous reported that Maria lived at Llano “with an abiding sense of divine immanence, of Reality totally present, moment by moment in every object, person and event.” He seems to have learned from her example, and spent the rest of his life trying to realize the same state of mind.

Maria Huxley

While at Llano, Aldous also wrote his pivotal novel TIME MUST HAVE A STOP and a little-known essay called the THE ART OF SEEING, as well as the screenplay JACOB’S HANDS and the children’s fable THE CROWS OF PEARBLOSSOM. THE ART OF SEEING is, on the surface, an account of his experience with a controversial treatment for failing vision—but, really, it’s a book about meditation, discipline, balance, and Self-realization. I'm going to quote the book at length because it's relatively unknown and currently out of print. Huxley writes:

“Whatever the art you may wish to learn… there is one thing that every good teacher will always say: Learn to combine relaxation with activity; learn to do what you have to do without strain; work hard, but never under tension. To speak of combining activity with relaxation may seem paradoxical; but in fact it is not. For relaxation is of two kinds, passive and dynamic. Passive relaxation is achieved in a state of complete repose, by a process of consciously ‘letting go’… Dynamic relaxation is that state of the body and mind which is associated with normal and natural functioning.”

“Mal-functioning and strain tend to appear whenever the conscious ‘I’ interferes with instinctively acquired habits of proper use, either by trying too hard to do well, or by feeling unduly anxious about possible mistakes. In the building up of any psycho-physical skill the conscious ‘I’ must give orders, but not too many orders—must supervise the forming of habits of proper functioning, but without fuss and in a modest, self-denying way. The great truth discovered on the spiritual level by the masters of prayer, that ‘the more there is of the I, the less there is of God,’ has been discovered again and again on the physiological level by the masters of the various arts and skills. The more there is of the ‘I,’ the less there is of Nature—of the right and normal functioning of the organism.”

“We all tend to be greedy ‘end-gainers,’ paying no attention to our ‘means-whereby.’ And yet it must be obvious to anyone who will give the subject a moment’s thought, that the nature of the means employed will always determine the nature of the end attained. In the case of the eyes and the mind controlling them, means that involve unrelieved strain result in lowered vision and general physical and mental fatigue. By allowing ourselves intervals of the right sort of relaxation, we can improve the means-whereby and so arrive more easily at our end, which is, proximately, good vision and, ultimately, the accomplishment of tasks for which good vision is necessary. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all the rest shall be added.’ This saying is as profoundly true on the planes of spirituality, ethics and politics. By seeking first relaxed visual functioning of the kind that Nature intended us to have, we shall find that all the rest will be added to us...”

TIME MUST HAVE A STOP, written around the same time, articulates Huxley’s philosophy of action and non-action, and advocates for religion-by-research, the individual maintenance of an ever-evolving metaphysic that is both deeply personal and trans-personal. Do the work, the author suggests, and you can help the whole world escape mental and emotional enslavement to past and future. This is the essential message of Huxley's later work: Be Here Now.

Visiting Llano in 2019, I was awed by the space and silence surrounding the author’s one-time home…. although there is much less today than there would have been in the early 1940s. Anne and Jim graciously took me on a short walk to the nearby silo that highlights the ruins of Llano del Rio, a place Huxley himself called “Ozymandius.”

It’s hard to visit a place like this and not think about the ravages of time. People come and go. What was here before us and what will be here when we’re gone?

More than half a century ago, Aldous Huxley looked through the walls of the silo and saw “a heap of tin cans, some waste paper and half a dozen empty bottles of Pepsi-Cola.” Nevertheless, he was awed by an “almost supernatural silence” in the place. He wrote that it reminded him of “the natural silence” of his “own real self—a thousand thunders which have their source in silence and in some inexpressible way are identical with silence.”

He wasn’t running away from the world; he was running to it.

Inside the silo at Llano del Rio

Beside the abandoned concrete pool behind the old Huxley house

Health problems eventually drove Aldous and Maria away from Llano, but for the rest of his life Aldous kept returning (or trying to return) to that desert in his mind. When Maria died in 1955, he held her in his arms and regaled her with vivid descriptions of the place where they had been so happy together.

After Maria's death, Aldous followed the writings of philosophers William James and Henri Bergson to the idea that mystical experiences can be chemically induced—and to his own variation on T.S. Eliot’s desire to move “beyond words.” There is much to be said about Huxley’s later years and experiments, but for now I’m going to end with something he wrote in 1961, two years before his own death. To me, it seems like a good way to sum up the influence of this important man of letters...

“Self-knowledge is always an awareness of first-order experiences—of events below the level of words; of the mysteries of existence before we have conceptualized them into a specious intelligibility. But if this is the case, why bother with literature, why go to the endless trouble of hunting out the right, the uniquely perfect form of verbal expression? The paradoxical answer to this question is that it is through words that we are made aware of the subtler forms of nonverbal experience. We do not need a novelist or a lyric poet to tell us what it feels like to have a tooth-ache or to be afraid of an oncoming tiger. But wherever more complex, less obvious experiences are concerned, good poets and novelists can be enormously helpful. […] Good literature presents the reader with the results of an honest investigation into what is, and so encourages him to break out of the role he happens to be playing and to discover for himself the realities of perception, thought, and feeling that lie behind his assumed mask and have been eclipsed by it.”

For me, this is the value of Huxley’s work. He has helped me to re-discover, at various times in my life, that I am where I am meant to be.

John Carpenter Revisited: THEY LIVE (1988)

2019-01-19T08:59:00.000-08:00

The legacy of John Carpenter’s 1988 film THEY LIVE seems to loom larger with every passing year. Maybe that’s why I’ve put off writing about it for so long. So much has been written about the film’s heightened relevance in the Trump era that, at this point, drawing specific connections seems as unnecessary as pointing out the film’s “hidden message.” You don’t need any special glasses to see this shit.

That said, it doesn’t feel right to simply write about THEY LIVE as a genre film. It’s something more… and something less. A few months ago, I took part in an online poll of professional horror geeks to name the best horror films of the 1980s. I was stunned when THEY LIVE beat out A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET for third place. (Carpenter’s THE THING took home the top prize, followed by David Cronenberg’s THE FLY.) I love THEY LIVE, but I wouldn’t even call it a horror movie, let alone a contender the best horror movie of the 80s. Nevermind that I prominently featured THEY LIVE in my 2009 documentary about the best American horror movies… I still think THEY LIVE is science fiction. That’s how Carpenter himself described it to Starlog journalist Steve Swires in 1987—as a “science-fiction thriller.” Elsewhere, he has compared it directly to Don Siegel's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956). To be fair, the filmmaker has also described it as an “existential western” (to Cinefantastique’s Dennis Fischer in 1989). More recently, he has declared that the film is his version of THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1939). I understand the comparison, but there’s a hell of a tonal difference between THE GRAPES OF WRATH and THEY LIVE.

Until recently, I have always thought of THEY LIVE as a bit of a farce. This is, after all, the movie in which “Rowdy” Roddy Piper declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum”—right before blowing away a bunch of aliens. It’s a movie with a WWF-style street brawl that stops the story cold for a whopping six minutes. It’s a movie that ends abruptly with an alien sex scene. All I’m saying is that THEY LIVE doesn’t ask to be taken too seriously. And yet it deserves to be taken seriously.

Watching the film at The Egyptian theater in Hollywood a few nights ago, I was riveted by the first twenty minutes of the film—which are stark and gritty and seething with righteous anger. The long, slow rollout of the story is filled with haunting images of downtown Los Angeles at a time when Reaganomics was taking a visible toll on the city and its residents. (For anyone curious about the specific filming locations, Jared Cowan of Los Angeles Magazine recently compiled a then-and-now photo essay.) Skid Row appears here as a dystopian nightmare, America's purgatory full of hungry ghosts. Roddy Piper’s character John Nada manages to hold his head high among the wreckage, but his expressions of abiding faith in America sound naïve when police invade and raze the community to the ground.

The police raid is reminiscent of attacks on the Okies in THE GRAPES OF WRATH, and also illustrates President Ronald Reagan’s destruction of the New Deal that had lifted working-class Americans out of the Great Depression. What I didn't realize until recently is that the sequence is essentially a reenactment. In THEY LIVE, the homeless camp is called Justiceville, and its most vocal leader is a street preacher. In fact, there was a real Justiceville in downtown Los Angeles, organized by a street preacher named Ted Hayes. It was destroyed by police in 1985, and the story was told in a 1986 Discovery Channel documentary.

Justiceville from garyglaser on Vimeo.

John Carpenter obviously had strong personal feelings about this injustice. And that’s what keeps THEY LIVE from becoming a farce. When John Nada puts on his shades and goes to war with yuppie aliens, he’s fighting a real war. His enemies may look like rejects from a 1950s monster movie, but the people he’s sticking up for are real. Carpenter cast real Skid Row residents as the citizens of Justiceville, and he seems to have made a genuine connection with them. In 1988 the director told Steve Swires, “I’ve realized that true success has nothing to do with how much money you make. It has to do with the principles by which you live. So, in that respect, I actually feel much safer among the street people in downtown Los Angeles than among the millionaires in Beverly Hills.”

In the end, the street-dwellers in THEY LIVE inaugurate a revolution in human consciousness; they “wake up” John Nada to a hidden reality. Carpenter says he always knew THEY LIVE would be a “hidden-reality” movie, but he only worked out the details after stumbling upon a comic book adaptation of Ray Nelson’s short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning.” The filmmaker told Nerdist’s Luke Thompson that in the source story, “humanity was hypnotized, almost as if you go up on stage and see a stage hypnotist, and I thought, ehh, that’s kinda corny, so I changed it to a radio frequency to disguise real reality.”

In an essay in the newly-released tome They Live: A Visual and Cultural Awakening, Roger Luckhurst suggests that Carpenter might have also drawn some additional inspiration from Philip K. Dick’s 1959 novel Time Out of Joint, another "hidden reality" story. (Certainly, Carpenter was familiar with Dick's work, as he had previously contemplated directing a film adaptation of the author's short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale").

I read Time Out of Joint for the first time last year, and it resonated for me in a startling way. The novel is about a middle-aged man named Ragle Gumm who one day reaches for a cord to turn on a light in his house… only to find that the cord isn’t there. It never has been there. So why does he remember it? This surreal experience causes Gumm to suspect that his reality has been altered.

The story gets weirder from there—and so did Dick’s novels. A few years after Time Out of Joint, he wrote The Man in the High Castle, about characters living in a reality where Germany and Japan won World War II. The story is set into motion when the characters discover evidence of an alternate reality—in which the Allies won the war. Which reality is the “real” one? Even the author wasn’t sure. Sometime after writing The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick theorized that he himself was living in an alternate reality. He claimed to have vivid memories of a timeline in which Nixon survived Watergate and turned America into a totalitarian state. “I’m not saying merely, ‘It can happen here,’” the author wrote, “but rather, ‘It did happen here. I remember…’”

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Philip K. Dick’s work resonated for me because, to a certain degree, I feel like we all slipped into an alternate reality when Donald Trump became the 45^th President of the United States. Even today, it seems like an unbelievable turn of events. If President Trump had appeared in a work of fiction before 2016, you would have said the work was too farfetched. Emotionally, our reality in 2019 feels like Phildickian science fiction. Which brings me back to THEY LIVE.

In 2016, an interviewer asked John Carpenter if Americans should watch THEY LIVE before voting in the presidential election. Carpenter responded, “Nah. It’s just a movie.” Carpenter’s dismissive response reinforces his desire to “hide” his “message” for commercial reasons. In 1989 he acknowledged that “people who go to the movies in vast numbers these days don’t want to be enlightened,” only entertained. Should I point out the irony of the director diluting his “message movie” for commercial reasons? Nah. It’s just a movie.

In spite of his reluctance to talk about THEY LIVE's "message," Carpenter has been very vocal about his contempt for Ronald Reagan and the neoconservative movement in 1980s America, at one point calling the decade “a real bad time in America, a real Nazi time.” What must the director be thinking now? Maybe it’s time to dust off his idea for HYPNOWAR, the long-rumored sequel to THEY LIVE?

The trick, of course, would be once again making a film that is both culturally relevant and also fun. In 1988, Carpenter explained how he managed to pull this off the first time around. “I wasn’t quite sure how to tell the story,” he admitted. “One way was to make it scary, but this element of humor always kept creeping into it. I was at a loss as to how to bring it all together… until I met Roddy Piper at WRESTLEMANIA III.”

I think it's fair to say that the reason THEY LIVE continues to win over audiences is not because of its increasingly relevant “message,” but because of its playful and often ridiculous sense of humor. This is a fun, celebratory film—because, in spite of everything, John Carpenter loves America. John Nada loves America. This was the basis of a strong, deeply personal collaboration between the director and the star—and that's what gives this very dark film its very big heart.

Perhaps the only worthy sequel to THEY LIVE is a conversation the two men had on the Piper’s Pit podcast in 2015. Carpenter and Piper didn’t talk much about the film and they certainly didn’t talk about politics; they talked about life—hard times and crushing insecurities, and the way that friendship and love helped them through these things. That’s a reality that everyone needs to wake up to.

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