Mad science: You scream, I scream, we all scream for thousands of years.

The Archeology Magazine Web site has up a spiffy post exploring the phenomenon of "screaming mummies" – the gaping open mouth common to mummies that appears, on initial observation, to be a sign of agony and pain.

For well over a century, the contorted features of ancient mummies have led to speculation of untold pain and horrible deaths. The examples quoted above are from the examination of Egyptian mummies more than 120 years ago. Today, similar descriptions can still be found in television programs and academic writings. "Is this the face of a queen? What kind of terrible end did she meet?" and "a terrible head wound, an agonized scream," intones the narrator of "Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen," a 2007 documentary. A photo caption in the scholarly volume Mummies and Death in Egypt (2006) reads "mummy of a boy five years of age, fixed in agony." And the widely covered 2007 discovery of Chachapoya mummies in Peru prompted this newspaper headline "Moment 600 years ago that terror came to Mummies of the Amazon" and copy "Hands over her eyes and her face gripped with terror, the woman's fear of death is all too obvious."

Author Mark Rose suggests a different explanation: Ancient funerary practices that did not account for postmortem changes in the jaw.

Your jaw bone ascends toward the back (almost at a right angle to the horizontal line of the teeth), ending in a rounded protuberance (the condyloid process), which fits into a shallow groove in your temporal bone on the lower part of your skull.

The nature of this joint is a key to understanding why mummies scream. Physician Trisha Macnair explains in "Human decomposition after death" on the BBC Health website.

"This temporo-mandibular joint is fairly loose.... Unlike the tight ball-and-socket linking the leg and the hip, the jaw and cranium are held together only by ligaments and muscles. If unimpeded--by the position of the body, wrappings, or very fast desiccation--the jaw will drop down as the muscles relax and decompose after rigor mortis."

For the curious, we keep modern corpses from opening their mouths by tying the mouth shut. Morticians run a thread up through the bottom of the chin, loop it through the nostrils, cross over in the mouth, out the chin again, tighten, and tie.

Movies: Lowering the BAR.

There's a lot to recommend Sergio Martino's 1979 croc-attack flick, currently circulating about the states under the species-dubious title The Big Alligator River. Unfortunately, the star of the film, the titular "big alligator" isn't one of them. By turns interesting and awful, BAR is an almost textbooks example of what's so fascinating and frustrating about Euro-schlock genre cinema. An admitted rip off the legendary US blockbuster Jaws, Martino and his screenwriters managed to pack into their allusive work notable and meaty references not only to Spielberg's shark-attack masterpiece, but also to the ur-text of nature revenge films: King Kong. The whole thing is topped off with a nice anti-colonial theme that, if perhaps a bit tangled, is played straight and earnest enough to dispel any doubts about the filmmakers' sincerity. Martino's handles actors well, shows a considerable amount of style behind the camera and in the editing room, and has a knack for the sort of efficient pointillist characterization needed in large ensemble action-heavy flicks.

That said, he also seems perfectly happy to build his movie around some of the worst special effect seen this side of an Ed Wood film, smoothers his films with an awful sub-porn grade Italio-funk score, edits some of his movie with a butcher knife woefully in need of sharpening, and seems utterly tone deaf when it comes to shifting gears between different emotional registers.

The plot, while predictable, is handled nimbly enough that it never feels like a grind. Daniel, a NYC commercial photographer, and Bait, pro model and victim, are hired by Mr. Bad Idea. Mr. Idea is developing Paradise House, a tropic resort in the jungles of Africa (played gamely by Sri Lanka). Mr. Idea is hoping that Daniel and Bait can develop a photo ad campaign based on the resort's raw natural beauty and Bait's hot bod. Daniel and Bait are introduced to Thug, Mr. Idea's bully/overseer, and Ali, the resort's resident customer service manager and anthropologist.

At first, the whole think looks like paid vacation, but then Bait sneaks off with a local man and breaks a regional taboo by getting her freak on during the full moon. For this no-no, an ancient river god appears in the toothy form of a gianormous crocogator-thingy to make quick work of Bait and her summer fling. This scene is interesting in that it complicates the otherwise simple anti-colonial theme of the piece. Though very little is made of it, the incident that kicks of all this crocogator-driven bloodshed is not actually and example of white's exploiting Africans (or semi-blackfaced Sri Lankans, in this case). Rather, it's a local man and an imported African American woman trying to get a little nookie on a verboten night. The local tribe interprets the return of the big lizard as a sign that they shouldn't have befriended the white and now must chase them off. The whites interpret the whole thing as either a symbol of their own arrogance or the native's inherent tendency toward irrational violence. Either way, the mounting violence that follows is, on both sides, the result of ignorance and poor communication. Because the rest of the film leaves this complication unexamined, I'm not sure if this view of colonialism as a communal tragedy of errors is intentional or subtle. Either way, it's what ended up on film and it's neat to ponder.


Timed as it is with the sudden mass desertion of the resort by the native workers and the discovery of a mauled canoe, Daniel suspects there's something sinister. He's given to insights like that. It's a natural outgrowth of being a photographer – professional observer, don't you know. He explains his concerns to Mr. Bad Idea, who dismisses because Amity, as you know, means friendship. Um . . . I mean, because guests are arriving for the resort's initial season and the last thing Paradise House needs is Daniel's patently absurd paranoid fantasies of some sort of crazed native uprising/crocogator bloodbath harshing the mellow.

Daniel and Ali decide to investigate by themselves. Not only do they discover that the natives blame the palefaces for the return of their vicious river god, they discover a Ben Gunn-ish missionary who can confirm the monster beastie's existence.

All this build's up to a climax that owes more to Poe's Masque of the Red Death - with a lavish nighttime hotel party that turns into a slaughter on both river and shore – than Jaws.

As far as big toothy water reptile stories go, BAR has everything you need and a little more. Like the Corman-produced, Sayles-scripted Alligator, it even uses its somewhat silly genre premise to lightly evoke some welcome social themes.

What it utterly lacks is a nice crocogator. Crocogator flicks, which I fancy I've seen more than a few of, live or die by the pleasure their scaly protagonists can provide. Viewers don't necessarily need the most realistic monsters, but the do need the monster to thrill them. The ballyhooed "alligator" of the title is a travesty. In the model shots, the crocogator is played by what appears to be a small rubber gator, the kind you can find being sold for a buck or so in museum and zoo gift shops. While its tail leisurely sways back and forth as it swims, the rest of its body is completely immobile. Its legs are perpetually looked in a bent standing position (NB: though the beast is in standing position, the film avoids ever showing it on land – the technical problems involved be well beyond the budget/ingenuity of the filmmakers) and it's mouth hangs open like a scoop. In the non-model shots, the crocogator appears as a static mouth and back unit. The tail, which turns out to be prehensile, flails about on its own; we get no shots ever showing it connected to the rest of the animal. Even by the admittedly low standards of the crocogator horror/action genre, this fails it hard.

Generous souls will, perhaps, want to give Martino the benefit of doubt. The film's last scene involves a stagey wink meant to punctuate an in-film joke. Maybe, the kindly viewer might propose, the wink telegraphs to the viewer that this whole thing has been a spoof. Perhaps, instead of rip-offing Jaws, the film was actually a send-up of the American big fish rampage flick. There's not much evidence of this in the flick. The crocogator attack scenes are staged grimly – if poorly – as opposed to the occasional tongue-in-cheek set pieces in Alligator. Furthermore, there's little in the "making of" featurette available on the No Shame Cinema (and there's you're problem, you should have some) disk that Martino is anything other than impressed with his lame monster. Still, a layer of ironic detachment would have gone a long way here and if the viewer wants to add it in the post-post-production phase, it can't hurt.

Another way to view it would be to suggest that it's a sort of experimental giant crocogator flick created with the goal of making a giant crocogator film that foregrounds everything except the monster that's central to the subgenre. Evidence is scarce for this interpretation too. But, personally, that's how I choose to redeem the film.

Now let's never mention The Big Alligator River again.

LOTT D: Toxic assets?

NY Times theater reviewer Charles Isherwood takes a look at the new Trroma-inspired off Broadway musical The Toxic Avenger. To this blogger, the review suggests that this is one of those things you either decide you're into or you throw it a pass, but it is pretty much exactly what you think it's going to be. More interesting is Isherwood's rapid oscillations between elitist disdain and displays of "hey, I'm just a regular guy" wackiness. Check the end of this excerpt:

Actually, the dopey, intermittently funny show that opened on Monday night at New World Stages is not the first all-singing, all-dancing adaptation of this horror spoof dreamed up in the 1980s by Lloyd Kaufman, the no-brow auteur behind the nigh-legendary cheesy-flick manufacturer Troma Entertainment.

Um, it’s not even the second.

This new version, with book by Joe DiPietro (“I Love you, You’re Perfect, Now Change”) and music by the Bon Jovi member David Bryan, is at least the third attempt to transform Melvin, the geek turned righteous monster of the movie, into a Sweeney Todd for our times. Clearly some fictional characters are born to sing, but who could have imagined that Mr. Kaufman would become the new Metastasio?

If you can’t quite place Metastasio, he wrote opera libretti in the 18th century that were used and reused by various composers. Possibly this review is the first time these two artists’ names have ever appeared in a single paragraph. (And by the way, wouldn’t Metastasio be a great name for a superhero?)

To be fair, Isherwood's not above this campy self-referential trash cult stuff. He later opines:

Musicals based on preposterously unlikely material have become fairly commonplace — we have already been exposed to “Evil Dead: The Musical,” for heaven’s sake — so you don’t get a free pass for simply choosing a cheesy movie and making it sing. The joke is getting stale. “Little Shop of Horrors,” perhaps the progenitor of the genre, had wit, charm and a melodic, lovable retro score. Only a few songs in “Toxic Avenger” rise above the generic in either music or lyrics. (Mr. DiPietro wins a point for rhyming “macho” with “gazpacho,” but would a girl who thinks Toxic is a French name really know about that Spanish soup?)

We'll leave the aside the incongruity of wondering if a blind librarian would know gazpacho is, but not wondering why exposure to toxic waste gave Toxie superpowers instead of cancer. Rather, I think he's pulling his punches here. What he's really lamenting is the idea that, if you work in certain subgenres, you don't really have to try to produce quality. It's that free pass mentality that says, "I'm making a [fill in vaguely disreputable entertainment varietal]; quality is beside the point." This free pass mentality carries with it an often unspoken corollary that demanding quality is, somehow, elitist. As if to demanding that a third-time rehash of a production at least include some good music is the equivalent of declaring that theater has been dead since the Puritans pulled down the original Globe.

Recently, Roger Ebert hit a Isherwoodian note in his review of the new Last House on the Left. Like the Toxie musical, the new Last House is the latest addition to a long line of remakes, being the second remake of a remake. At the Hall of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers, it was decided that we should compose a response to Ebert's pan, specifically focused on this line:

Other scenes, while violent, fell within the range of contemporary horror films, which strive to invent new ways to kill people, so the horror fans in the audience will get a laugh.

That's certainly a zinger, composed intentionally to tick off a bunch of people Ebert thinks should be harassed. His characterization of horror film fans is broad and derogatory and his dismissal was sure to kick of wave after wave of pro-horrorist rodomontades. Though Ebert was an important defender of the original Halloween and (as his review mentions) the original Last House, fans have suggested that he doesn't understand the horror genre. Even more hysterically, some suggest that Ebert's a snobbish elitist, which ignores the fact that he wrote the Citizen Kane of trash flicks: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Still, despite it's fan-baiting sharpness, that line is not, I think, the heart of Ebert's jeremiad. That appears in the paragraph previous, emphasis mine:

Not many unseasoned audience members will find the 2009 rape scene "toned down," and indeed I found it painful to watch. In the 2005 film, it was so reprehensibly and lingeringly sadistic, I found it unforgivable. So now my job as a film critic involved grading rape scenes.

For Ebert, Isherwood, and I suspect a large number of critics and fans, the issue is the gratuity of so much genre art. By "gratuitous" I don't refer to extremely violence (though that is certainly the case in many horror flicks). Rather, I mean the pointlessness of its extremes. In Ebert's review, he contrasts the inspiration for the trio of remakes, Bergman's The Virgin Spring, with the later models. His issue is not, necessarily, with the violence of the latter flicks. After all, the story is pretty much the same between all three films. What he misses is the tangle of revenge and guilt, the questions about justice and the limits of the Christian ethic of forgiveness. In the remakes, all that's left is the killing. He admits that there is a primal tension in the naked struggle to survive – "We are only human, we identify with the parents, we fear for them, and we applaud their ingenuity." – but this is that really enough?

This film, for example, which as I write has inspired only one review (by "Fright"), has generated a spirited online discussion about whether you can kill someone by sticking their head in a microwave. Many argue that a microwave won't operate with the door open. Others cite an early scene establishing that the microwave is "broken." The question of whether one should microwave a man's head never arises.

(As an aside, some have suggested that this line points to Ebert's lack of a clue, claiming that it shows Ebert is unable to distinguish the fictional depiction of murder from the real thing. "Of course you don't really stick peoples' heads in microwaves, dummy," say these critics. What Ebert is really referring to is the moral conflict the parent's feel in the original film. When does justice become bloodlust? That's what Ebert claims is missing from both the film and the fandom that supports such flicks.)

Ultimately, Ebert's correct. He has over-generalized, but he gets the basic dynamic down. Too many horror producers are willing to take the free pass. The rebirth of the slasher subgenre, perhaps the purist expression of the "ugly, nihilistic and cruel" filmmaking Ebert decries (though here Ebert's wrong; these filmmakers very strongly believe in something: they believe they'll make some money), is it most recent example. Uninspired and phoned-in pastiches that are the color-by-numbers paintings of the horror film world, these flicks are the very definition of "free pass." And it’s the fans that are handing the passes out. When fans explain to critics that bad dialogue, lack of characterization, predictable plotting, barely competent camera work, and atrocious acting are part of the point of the subgenre, they're giving these talentless hacks carte blanche to turn in crap work.

I think it's high time for a little elitist disdain up in here and I'm glad Ebert brought some.

Imagine how different the genre would be if fans told filmmakers that every time they were going to kill a bunch of people, they should have a dramatically and intellectually convincing reason to do so.

To paraphrase Kurt Weill, I don't know if that would bring you joy or grief, but it would be fantastic, beyond belief.

Stuff: All net finger roll Edgar Allan Poe off the pick.

So you're a fan of goofy word play, basketball, and Edgar Allan Poe – and you've been wondering when, oh dear God when, somebody would make a t-shirt that allowed you to simultaneously express all these facets of your character.

Your wait, my complicated friend, is over! Now wrap yourself if the pun-tastic Goth hoop madness of Brooklyn Industries new "Poe Dunk" tee.

Free Stuff: Zombies! Zombies! Yawn! Zombies!

Personally, I'm ready to bench the corpses for another decade or two. Horror lit needs to rotate the crops.

But, as I seem to be in the minority on this, I point you to a spiffy little contest being held by the fine folks at the Largehearted Boy blog. For just naming a book that scared you, you could win three free zombie books, including World War Z, Breathers, and, um, something else that complete escapes me at the moment.

So, right on, free stuff. Don't say I never did nothin' for yah.

Art: It's a gasser!

Not so long ago, the fine gentleman behind When Is Evil Cool? posted an image of a small crowd of English bobbies in gas masks. I commented that they looked like a legion of Golden Age Sandmen, Wesley Dodds being my favorite comic character from the cape and cowl crowd. Then, coincidentally, the blogger behind the wonderful Horror's Not Dead posted a similar, but completely unrelated, picture of a town of post-WWI Era partisans (Spanish Civil War perhaps?) entirely in gas masks.

Curious, I wondered just how many of these group gas masks shots there were out there and, oddly enough, there were tons of them. After the First World War, it became something of a fad to trick out folks in surplus masks. Perhaps the grimmest symbol of the war, the masks quickly became novelty items for bright young things in the UK and US, where few of those who hadn't served had any first hand experience of the horrors of chemical warfare.

The pictures mix an almost strained wackiness with an edge of grim surrealism. I think, at the time, they were meant to be more funny than creepy, but that's not, I think, the modern effect.

Here's some of my favorite shots, plus the two that inspired the search.

Link Proliferation: Intelligence can be eaten!

You Know What Will Do You Know What to Us

Here's a 1979 live telly performance of "Transmission" by Joy Division.



And here's their big one – you know the one – live in '79.



"Suicide is just what people do here because there is nothing else to do."

A strange and depressing tale from Wales.

Vanity Fair tackles "The Mystery Suicides in Bridgend County." For several years, the small Welsh town of Bridgend has suffered from an outbreak of suicides. All from a similar demographic and almost ever one of them using the exact same method. From the article:

Since January of 2007, 25 people between the ages of 15 and 28 have killed themselves within 10 miles of here, all by hanging, except for one 15-year-old, who lay down on the tracks before an oncoming train after he was teased for being gay.

The article discusses the phenomenon:

Outbreaks like this are rare but not new. Plutarch writes about an epidemic of suicide by young women in the Greek city of Miletus that was stopped by the threat that their naked corpses would be dragged through the streets. Sigmund Freud, who himself committed assisted suicide, held a conference in the 1920s on teen-suicide clusters. They have happened in Germany, Australia, Japan, the U.S., Canada, and Micronesia. Psychologists familiar with the phenomenon are saying that what’s going on in Wales is a classic case of the Werther effect, named for Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young man who puts a gun to his head to end the agony of unrequited love and because he can't find his place in the provincial bourgeois society of the day. The novel's publication, in 1774, prompted young men all over Europe to dress like Werther and take their lives. It’s also called the contagion effect and copycat suicide: one person does it, and that lowers the threshold, making it easier and more permissible for the next. Like 10 people waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change, and one of them jaywalks. This gives the rest of them the go-ahead.

For a while, investigators suspected that wonderfully multipurpose villain, the Internet. Theories that the suicides were part of online community pact were bandied about.

The first known Internet suicide pact surfaced in Japan in 2000, and a new epidemic has been raging there since last April. About 1,000 Japanese have killed themselves by inhaling fumes created by mixing common household cleaning products. Police have asked Internet service providers to shut down suicide Web sites but have found it harder to keep people from posting the recipe for the mix or raving about how this method enables you to “die easily and beautifully.” Why these young people are so eager to die—what it is that their life in Japan isn’t giving them—is as much of a mystery as what is happening in Bridgend.

In Wales, however, the victims’ friends all say that the Internet has nothing to do with what is happening. “It’s nothing like that,” a girlfriend of Natasha Randall’s told a reporter. The victims acted on their own, she believes. “People get down, and they do it.” The Internet is just how young people communicate and, to a large extent, socialize these days. This certainly isn’t a suicide pact like the one made in 1997 by Heaven’s Gate, the cult in Rancho Santa Fe, California, 39 of whose members, dressed in matching black shirts and sweat pants and brand-new Nike sneakers, swallowed phenobarbital-laced applesauce with a vodka chaser, then put plastic bags over their heads to asphyxiate themselves.

Ryan's Song

Having a death sentence hanging above you (firing squad, if prosecutors get their way) might diminish the productivity of a less passionately creative person; but, from his prison cell, Indonesian serial killer Verry Idham Henyansyah, a.k.a. "Ryan" (pic above), is just hitting his stride. From the Australian edition of the Herald Sun:

The smooth-faced 31-year-old has already achieved national infamy with his confessions to a series of grisly murders - including a mother and her toddler - and details of his life as a gay man in Muslim-majority Indonesia.

Now Henyansyah, popularly known as Ryan, is chasing fame of a more orthodox kind - with a prison-penned autobiography published in February and a collection of pop songs due out next month.

Holding court in his jail cell recently, dressed in flowing white robes and a matching Muslim skullcap, Henyansyah trilled a sweet-voiced rendition of one of his songs for an appreciative crowd of court officers, local residents and reporters.

"Release me, forget me, release me from these shackles," Henyansyah sang.

"Enough for now. You can get my album soon," he said, as the applause and cheers for an encore turned to visible disappointment.

The serial killer has confessed to at least 10 murders. He claims that jealousy over the attention men gave his boyfriend and unwanted sexual advances directed towards himself were the cause of his many homicidal episodes.

Remorse for his crimes was the motivating force behind the album, which he recorded in prison, Hensyansyah said.

"I write the songs for people I love. Forgive Me Mother is for my mother. Another song, Sun, is about lovers missing each other because they are separated until they die,'' Henyansyah said.

Henyansyah has never denied the crimes that could earn him the death penalty.

Indeed, his autobiography, The Untold Story of Ryan, includes maps to the graves in his parents' backyard, as well as photographs that chart his progress from village boy to Koran recital teacher, to simpering, shirtless male model.

The Future's So Bright

PopMatters has posted not one, not two, but – count 'em! - three sample chapters from David Janssen and Edward Whitelock's new book Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music. Here's the two authors on the unlikely and short-lived musical career of Chuck Manson:

It is not necessary here to retread Manson's "philosophy" in detail, since that groundwork has already been well established by Vincent Bugliosi, John Gilmore, and Ed Sanders, among others. Suffice it to summarize that Manson's two central Family texts were the Revelation of St. John and the White Album. There are moments in the Manson narrative, though, that make one wonder if Sharon Tate might still be alive had Charlie been offered that record deal he had scammed and schemed so tenaciously to procure. Some of the anecdotes of Manson's musical development are almost romantic and fit the rock 'n' roll myth quite nicely. The world’s forgotten boy learned to play guitar in prison from Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, the last "Public Enemy #1" on Hoover’s list to be captured alive. Karpis was apparently quite the hot axeman as well, and he was impressed with his protégé’s natural abilities. In his exposé of the Manson Family, John Gilmore and Ron Kenner quote one “Wallie” Sallers, a contemporary hanger-on at Dennis Wilson’s place:

"Charlie cut an album," she remembers, "using the girls in the background, and it was really sort of an interesting album. Everybody thought he was a good musician, more or less, and he used to write a lot of songs ... Charlie had a very nice voice. He sounds something like the voice in, what was that record about Martin Luther, JFK and Bobby Kennedy all getting killed—Martin, John and Bobby—sounds just like the voice of Dion."

As grotesque as the Dion analogy might seem, it is not unreasonable to conclude that a man who could convince a young group of mostly young women that he was Christ, Satan, and the fifth Beatle would have a "nice voice." Certainly, Manson understood the power of rock as a persuasive medium, and on this point he is in close agreement with rock critics like Garlock and Larson. Manson’s following claims could have been argued just as plausibly by the latter two:

"The Beatles confuse you with what they say. They trick you with distraction, with the beat. You get programmed from the front or programmed from the back. Music doesn’t know time. Music is soul. And you can bring it in from the back. I can sing a song right now and when it’s over you forget the words, the music, but it stays in your infinite unconscious. And then a few months later you hear another song ... talking about a beer, Coors is great, Coors is great. Pretty soon you think of beer and you know that Coors is great. And this is what the Beatles do, they confuse you with cadence, and program you in the back, behind the beat, and this is what stays with you."

Manson understood and implemented the "programmable" potential of rock music, and he combined that force with the style, tone, and content of apocalypse.

The third section deals with everybody's favorite Spud Boys: Devo!

Books: Gorgantis is ready for his close up, Mr. Whale.

Shambling Towards Hiroshima, Jim Morrow's new novella, opens on Sym Thorley, once great horror film star turned has-been horror con signature factory, contemplating suicide. After slogging through his umpteenth presentation about his golden age in the post-Univeral monster era and his last significant as the giant monster Gorgantis, Thorley is seriously considering tossing himself out his hotel window. Before he goes, however, he begins to write down a memoir of his role in Operation Knickerbocker, a super secret World War II Era project to defeat Japan with a small heard of mountain-sized fire breathing mutant iguanas and his complicity in the dawn of the Atomic Age.

As the war in the Pacific drew to a close, American military leadership began to ponder the blood and treasure cost of invading the home islands of the Japanese empire. The Army had one solution: the A-bomb. The Navy had another: unleash giant, pissed-off, fire-breathing iguanas to stomp Japan into submission. However, the deployment of either of these devices would mean ushering humanity into a new and terrible era. Either we kick off a race to obtain ever larger stockpiles of ever more powerful nuclear weapons or we relinquish our status the dominant species on the planet. Far better, the American high command decides, to simply frighten Japan with a harmless demonstration of the destructive capacity of these weapons, secure their surrender, and never actually let either of the genies out of their bottles.

Problem is that we only had two bombs and the lizards, while ready to go, had only two settings: sedated into a near coma state or uncontrollably savage and destructive. Military researchers hit one the idea of breeding a few man-sized versions of the great beasties and letting them cut loose on a giant scale model of a Japanese city. Unfortunately, shrinking these monsters down had the unintentional consequence of making them gentle as kittens.

So now the Navy had a tiny model city, an approaching curtain time, and no scary monster. What to do?

Call Hollywood, of course.

Pulling in director James Whale (yep, that James Whale), also ran monster actor Thorley, and a handful of real life monster movie magic makers that fans of early horror flicks will recognize, the Navy decides that it will simulate the simulated attack, having a man in a convincing rubber suit trash their model city. The prep for this unique performance, all clashing Dream Factory egos and occasionally Kafka-esque military security details, makes up the bulk of the this slim novel. As an added treat, fans get to follow Marrow's name checking. (Sure, James Whale is a bit obvious, but Morrow also manages to work in nearly forgotten era figures, like William "One Shot" Beaudine.)

Part Hollywood satire, part love letter to 1950s horror flicks, part meditation on the suicidal stupidity of Cold War nuclear brinksmanship, what's most surprising about Shambling Towards Hiroshima is how light and nimble the slim book is. Dexterously gliding over some of the greatest horrors of the 20th Century and the nightmares they inspired, the ultimate theme of Shambling might be how the horror genre's job – if one allows mass cult art a social function – is to trivialize the nightmarish aspects of the real world, turning them into easily consumed treats. Fully aware of this weird trick, Shambling take the madness of the nuclear era and turns it into humorously goofy shaggy dog story.