Stuff: Does anybody ask mystery writers what crimes they've solved?

The Gray Dame has an nice with-your-coffee-on-Saturday fluff piece that revisits that perennial favorite topic of horror "journalism:" what scares the folk who make the things that scare us? The nice thing about this particular piece is that the NY Times can pull together a list that would be the envy of even the most powerful blogging sites. Their mix of A-list names and notable horror indie types is one of the best horror conclaves I seen in ages.

Stuff: Fast food.

Long time readers will know that I'm kinda zombied out at this point. The shuffling corpses have had a hell of run, but I think it's time for the walking dead to hit the showers. I support legislation that would actually pay people working on zombie-themed horror projects to destroy their projects rather than follow them through, the way we control agricultural overproduction by paying farmers to burn market-deflating harvests.

That said, this is pretty boss: The Run for Your Lives 5K zombie run - a 5K run in which runners haul ass through a wooded obstacle course while being chased by "zombies." It's a combination of obstacle run, flag football game, and the opening run-to-the-river bit of 28 Weeks Late.

Stuff: "I have a problem with mirrors."

Over in the UK, the Portsmouth branch of the National Health Service (NHS) is trying to combat what the BBC delicately calls the region's "traditionally poor levels of dental health" with a new public service campaign. Bad teeth? Solution: vampires. Enjoy.

Due to Blogger's sudden inability to size video worth a damn, I'll also provide this link to AdWeek, where you can see the ad in its full ratio aspect: Take me to where they know how a video should treated!

Stuff: "What's nice about Selphyl is you're only using that person's blood."

It's a good Wednesday when you get to announce a "vampire body modification link dump." If only 'cause it's fun to type the phrase "vampire body modification."

Link the first! Unlike vampires, who stay sparkly fresh for all eternity, pure strain humans get old. It's true. Along with nipples on men, confirmation bias, and the fact that at least one of us became Daniel Tosh, it ranks one of homo sapiens' most notable design flaws. And, while you'll still eventually die, the "vampire face-lift" can help ensure that your corpse's face is pleasingly wrinkle-free. The procedure gets its name from the fact that plastic surgeons use the patient's own blood to fight the wrinkles. From the ABC News article:

The technology is called Selphyl, and it involves injecting a mixture of blood products into the affected areas. It's also called the "vampire face-lift," although calling it a face-lift is not accurate. Selphyl is a nonsurgical procedure akin to filler injections, while a face-lift is the surgical repositioning of facial tissues that have become loose over time.

Curiously, the procedure's ghastly nickname seems to be part of the draw. Again, from the article:

"I think this whole recent theme in the entertainment industry ... of using vampire, Dracula themes, has definitely caused a lot of the interest out there," Berger said.

Perhaps this marks some final stage in the vampire's transformation from folk nightmare to harmless pop confection: the use of the term vampire can now make a somewhat grisly-sounding product more palatable to the market.

Link the second! The Sun has a brief profile of lawyer and tattoo artist Maria Jose Cristerna, a.k.a. "Vampire Woman." Cristerna, pictured above . . .

. . . says constant beatings and abuse at home triggered her reinvention and led her to ink nearly 100 per cent of her body.

Maria has also added multiple piercings to her face and titanium implants to create "horns" under the skin on her temples and forehead.

The mum-of-four, 35, has even had dental implants to create "fangs" to complete her look — but claims to live a "normal life".

The smirkingly superior attitude of The Sun aside – I see what you're doing with the "claims" bit there – she's a fascinating, and even inspiring woman.

Stuff: Pause for reflection.

Over at The Atlantic, they're using a piece by Nathan Fox - artist of the comic ANTSS just posted about - to illustrate a lightweight think piece called Our Zombies, Ourselves. I'm not sure that writer James Parker drops any science the average ANTSS reader doesn't already know, though he gets points for correctly identifying the earliest known English appearance of zombies: William Seabrook's over-the-top voodoo study, The Magic Island. Plus, he opens with an interesting question to ponder. Why didn't the modern zombie arrive earlier?

The most surprising thing about the modern zombie—indeed, the only surprising thing about the modern zombie—is that he took so long to arrive. His slowness is a proverb, of course: his museumgoer’s shuffle, his hospital plod. Plus he’s a wobbler: the shortest path between two points is seldom the one he takes. Nonetheless, given all that had been going on, we might reasonably have expected the first modern zombies to start showing up around 1919. Twentieth-century man was already moaning and scratching his head; shambling along with bits falling off him; desensitized, industrialized, hollowed out, metaphysically evacuated—A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many … Had some trash visionary produced a novel or play about the brain-eating hordes, or a vers libre epic of viral undeadness, it would have gone down rather well, at this point.

Stuff: La Muerte Baila la Samba!

Just a quick Friday post-lunch treat: over at the appropriately named Morbid Anatomy blog, you kind find a small, but delightful, collection of Spanish pulp novel covers featuring skeletons.

Stuff: CRwM and the Case of the Bed-Bug Free, But Still Slightly Haunted Bed.

This sign was posted on a discarded box frame near my wife's shop in Fort Greene.

Stuff: "A buffet of flimsily contained id."

Sloane Crosley, the publishing marketer turned essayist shown above eating who knows what, is so totally over the Halloween thing.

Scare quote, as it were: "Perhaps it’s because this city has such a buffet of flimsily contained id to begin with. There are a whole lot of people living here who don’t need to let loose on Halloween — their psyches are pretty unstructured on an average Tuesday."

Stuff: The roots of lycanthropy.

Sorry I've been flying under the radar for so long. While I toil away on the next review, here's some quality reading to keep you occupied. First, from the late, great Martin Gardener comes this study of lycanthropy.

This choice bit describes the origins of the term lycanthrope:

The Greeks worshipped the wolfgod, Zeus Lycaeus and there are many stories of ordinary men being transformed into wolves and other creatures. In Graves' translation of Greek myths an account is given of the inhabitants of Parnassus who followed a pack of howling wolves to a mountain top where they established a new city, Lycorea. According to the myth, the Parnassians practiced Lyacaon's Abomination, a ritual where a boy was sacrificed and his guts made into a soup which was eaten by shepherds, one of whom would then turn into a tormented werewolf who was condemned to wander the countryside for 8 years, regaining his humanity if he refrained from eating human flesh. According to this legend a full recovery was possible as illustrated in the legend of Damarchus who went on to win a boxing prize at the Olympic Games after rigorous training in the gymnasium. The connection with cannibalistic practices is further illustrated in the legend of Lycaon, King of Arcadia, who was changed into a wolf as punishment for secretly feeding Zeus human flesh.

The article traces the cultural history of lycanthropy (as late as the 1700s, epidemics of lycanthropy would break out and, in one case, a French judge is reported to have condemned more than 600 sufferers to death) and ends on a curious note that suggests our own affection for werewolf fictions may have replaced religious inspirations for the disease. In short, movie werewolves might be creating modern lycanthropes:

To gain an understanding of certain bizarre psychiatric symptoms it may be helpful to consider the effects of religion and culture. At the time of the Inquisition, when the werewolf was a feared satanic representation, the incidence of lycanthropy peaked. As religious beliefs have changed, the perception of the devil as a wolf or goat-like creature has receded but is not entirely unfamiliar. These beliefs may be revived in those suffering from severe depressive illness where they are incorporated into delusions of guilt and sinfulness. Similarly, the cannibalistic and aggressive qualities of the lycanthrope can be traced back to the content of ancient myth and followed through the centuries when the werewolf retained these characteristics. Despite the passage of time, the werewolf remains a powerful and evocative image. The influence of myth and legend has been filtered and obscured with the passage of time but it is likely that the symptom of lycanthropy will continue to be seen as long as tales of the wolf-man can frighten us.

Stuff: The Jess List

In my review of I Sell the Dead, I mentioned that my wife generally hates horror films. When she doesn't find them boring, she finds them unpleasant. For her, watching horror is like sitting in a dentist's waiting room: uncomfortable, dull, occasionally punctuated by anxiety-inducing screams. During this explanation, I mentioned that there was a short list of flicks that passed the Jess Test. Though I meant this in an abstract sort of way, a couple of readers asked what films were on this list. So, I asked my wife to write up a list of genre treats that she actually does like. Not all of the works on the Jess List are, perhaps, horror-proper, but they're all what Jess talks about when she talks about horror.

Without further ado, I present to you the unedited, unabridged Jess List, straight from the woman herself:

Shaun of the Dead
The Frighteners
Ghostbusters
Jaws (but I hate the first shark scene)
I Sell the Dead
Bubba Ho-Tep
Hellboy 1 & 2
Army of Darkness
Land of the Dead
Universal Monsters: Creature of the Black Lagoon, Dracula, Frankenstein (Wolfman is a little lame)
The Thing from Another Planet + remake The Thing (but I have to squint at some parts)
Kaiju movies (Godzilla et al)
Interview with the Vampire (the first R-rated movie I ever saw in high school)
Rear Window (favorite Hitchcock)
Topper (with Cary Grant as 1/2 of hedonistic ghostly couple)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Disney version; this totally scared me as a kid but is now delicious.)



Jess NOT list (my least favorites):
These are not necessarily bad art. The fact that they linger in memory and come up in conversation indicates that they are in fact especially powerful. But they haunt me in ways I find entirely unpleasant. I have lost nights of sleep to these films, which I begrudge.
The Ring
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Hitchcock's Frenzy
Seven
book: Monster Island by David Wellington (zombie novel, too scary to finish)


TV shows:
Buffy (just the first season; I checked out pretty much after Angel went bad)
Dexter

Books:
Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow
Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link (practitioner of "the new weird")
American Gods & Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
Johannes Cabal, Necromancer & Johannes Cabal, Detective


Comics:
Sandman (mixed, sometimes nightmare inducing)
House of Mystery by (Fables creators) Bill Willingham & Mike Sturges
Hellboy & BPRD by Mike Mignola

DON'T STOMP THINKING ABOUT TOMORROW! If you haven't entered ANTSS Killer Kaiju contest yet, you freakin' should! It's as easy as stomping on your favorite scale-model city.

Stuff: “Scaled, forked-tongued Lizarde Men from the Deepe” and other hazards of life in the Royal Navy.

This is one of the most disappointing stories ever, but I share it here because I think there's a nifty idea behind it. Apparently, there was a long-standing rumor that the Royal Navy's archive of ship's logs contained a special collection of logs detailing the Royal Navy's various encounters with sea monsters. Sadly, this turned out to be BS. Here' the entire article from The Military Times's "Scoop Deck" blog:

Do the archives of the Royal Navy include volume after gilt-edged volume detailing secret encounters between Her Majesty’s warships and horrifying sea creatures? Do archivists in catacombs deep below Whitehall maintain stacks of leather-bound books with reports about ships battling giant squid, or sea dragons, or the dreaded kraken? Are there pages upon pages of hand-drawn sketches or official — but censored — woodcuts depicting men ‘o war being pulled under the waves by enormous tentacles?

In one of the lamest and most disappointing answers in history: No.

The Ministry of Defence says it has no centralized records of ships’ reports about sea monsters or other unusual maritime creatures. Officials acknowledge there may be interesting details in individual ships’ logs, but there is no immense room with immense, floor-to-ceiling shelves full of 18th Century-era reports like the one about the frigate HMS Sabre, which was lost off the Seychelles after the ship was overrun by what its surviving crew members called “Scaled, forked-tongued Lizarde Men from the Deepe.”

That said, what a cool idea for a novel series. Creative types, I give you the freebie, now scribble fast and get first to market.

Stuff: Sympathy for the poor devil.

Over at the Frontal Cortex blog, Jonah Lehrer discusses the insights psychopaths give us into moral behavior. His takeaway is that morality is an emotional, rather than a rational, response to the world around us. His argument rests on the fact that psychopaths "seem to have perfectly functioning minds. Their working memory isn't impaired, they have excellent language skills, and they don't have reduced attention spans. In fact, a few studies have found that psychopaths have above-average IQs and reasoning abilities; their logic is impeccable." The problem is that their emotional reactions are stunted or nonexistent. Which leads us to the part that gets interesting for horror fanciers:

When normal people are shown staged videos of strangers being subjected to a powerful electrical shock or other painful stimulus, they automatically generate a visceral emotional reaction. Their hands start to sweat, and their blood pressure surges. But psychopaths feel nothing. It's as if they were watching a blank screen. Most people react differently to emotionally charged verbs like kill or rape than to neutral words like sit or walk, but not psychopaths. The words all seem equivalent. When criminologists looked at the most violent wife batterers, they discovered that, as the men became more and more aggressive, their blood pressure and pulse actually dropped. The acts of violence had a calming effect.

So, despite the conventional wisdom assumption that psychopaths would show an obsessive interest in media violence – think of Patrick Bateman's use of Texas Chainsaw Massacre as porn – the research suggests otherwise: Horrific images bore psychos.

This reminds me of an assertion made by horror writer Joe Hill that the defining characteristic of horror was sympathy. In his Heart-Shaped Box his smuggles in something of a manifesto: "Horror was rooted in sympathy, after all, in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst."

Perhaps psychopaths reveal something fundamental about the sensation of horror. One of the traditional knots of horror fandom is how one should divide the horror experiences into a taxonomy. The explicit versus the implicit, terror versus horror, the uncanny versus the possible, and so on. But, the odd immunity of psychopaths to horrific imagery might suggest a common, more primal connection. Perhaps, no matter how you slice it, all horror, regardless of final affect, starts with a moral sympathy. Before you can anticipate the terrible or revolt at the image of the horrible laid bare, you have to be able to create a connection between the suffering or threatened other and yourself. That link is a prerequisite act of sympathy.

Thoughts?

Stuff: The Men in Black speak.

Even the most sinister of secret black op sites needs a surprising number of independent contractors to keep the place running. Take Area 51, for example. Sure it might be filled to the brim with nameless spooks and technocrats dissecting alien bodies and all that. But there's also a whole cadre of support staff and minor tech support guys who just punch the clock and make a living at the place.

Which poses a problem: You can't have these minor players blabbing about the alien microwave gun the lab boys are using to make crop circles. The conspiracy-minded might suggest eliminating these loose strings. Heck, if we can bump off foreign leaders, we certainly can snuff a cafeteria lady or the random radar operator. Here's the thing though, in the remote locales suitable for secret installations, labor isn't an inexhaustible resource. Not only will you work your way through all the qualified mechanics pretty quickly, but eventually your rep as a place where workers vanish will scare off the rest of the talent pool.

No, as unsexy as it is, better to just swear the little guys to secrecy too.

In Area 51's case, the contractual obligation to secrecy for many minor employees extended 47 years. Which means, for those keeping count, employees who worked the site in the 1950s and '60s are now free to discuss what they witnessed.

Sadly, no aliens.

The Seattle Times interviews are few Area 51 vets, like James Noce, formerly the radar operator at the infamous site. Though Noce has no tales about alien crashes, his recollections about the crash of a A-12 spy plane in 1963 should sound familiar to any UFO fancier.

Noce remembers when "Article 123," as one of the A-12s was called, crashed on May 24, 1963, after the plane stalled near Wendover, Utah. The pilot ejected and survived.

Noce says he was among those who flew to the crash site in a giant cargo plane loaded with several trucks. They loaded everything from the crash into the trucks.

He remembers that a local deputy had either witnessed the crash or had quickly arrived at the scene. There also was a family on a vacation car trip who had taken photos.

"We confiscated the camera, took the film out," says Noce. "We just said we worked for the government."

He says the deputy and the family were told not to talk to anybody about the crash, especially the press.

"We told them there would be dire consequences," Noce says. "You scared them."

As an added incentive, he says, the CIA arrived with a briefcase full of cash.

"I think it was like 25 grand apiece, for the sheriff and the family," says Noce.

Stuff: "That was a safe assumption, of course, until . . ."

In Details magazine, Jeff Gordinier profiles Matthew Roberts, a rock musician and strip-joint DJ whose search for his biological parents took a turn for the weird that instantly quailfied him for a post on ANTSS.

The adopted son of a "straight-laced" Illinois couple, Matthews started the search for his biological parents in 1999. From the article:

In 1999 he called an adoption-search organization in the Midwest, coughed up a few hundred dollars, and was given her name. She was living in a cabin in Wisconsin without a phone or a car, he says. "The adoption lady kind of warned me, 'Your mother's a little bit off.' Then I got a letter from my mother, and she was talking about her rhubarb and her cats, and I thought, well, she's just kind of a hippie. But at a certain point it became obvious that there was something wrong with her. Mentally." The woman, a Wisconsin native whom he calls Terry, said that his first and middle names at birth had been Lawrence Alexander. According to Roberts, she sent him food in the mail after warning him, in a weirdly winking way, that her own mother had suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disorder that can lead parents to poison their children. "One time she sent me a jar of, like, mystery juice," Roberts says. "It had things floating in it. Then she asked me, 'Did you drink the juice?' And I said, 'No.' And she said, 'You're smart!' "

Roberts was beginning to get a sense of where those night terrors might have come from. Only gradually, he says, did his mother let the narrative wrinkles slip out: that he had been conceived during a hippie orgy in San Francisco in 1967, that his mother's participation in the orgy may not have been consensual, that there were four men present, that everyone at the orgy was dropping LSD, that his mother had apparently continued to ingest LSD in the months that followed. It was all eerily similar to Rosemary's Baby: Midway through Roman Polanski's 1968 film about the prenatal care and feeding of Satan's spawn, Ruth Gordon coaxes a pregnant Mia Farrow into gulping down a frothy, fetid glass of herbal goop. In the movie, Roberts says, "they were doing it to create an Antichrist. Well, in this case it just happened." That was a safe assumption, of course, until the day in 1999 that Matthew Roberts finally sent his biological mother a photo of himself, at about 30 years old, with his piercing eyes and his tangled nest of black hair, and she told him she realized which of the four men at the orgy had to be his father . . .

Go ahead. Look at the pic again and take a guess.

Inmate No. B-33920 at the California State Prison in Corcoran, otherwise known as Charles Manson, the most demonic figure in the annals of American murder.

Seriously, Matt. Ask for that couple hundred bucks back.

Stuff: And the gift shop is killer.

If you're in DC, and you happen to be a criminal psychologist, an F.B.I. agent, or the haunted survivor of an infamous serial mass murder who is obsessed with avenging the death of your teen friends, then you might just think about swinging by the Evil Minds Research Museum: a by-appointment research museum that hosts a collection or documents, art, and artifacts gathered by the Bureau's Behavioral Science Unit in their endless hunt for America's deadliest serial killers.

BSU head Greg Vecchi makes the pitch:

One of the most exciting research projects that we have, is we’ve have started what we have labeled the 'Evil Minds Research Museum.' And what this is, this is actually a research museum where we are collecting serial killer and other offender artifacts.

And so these artifacts are like paintings, John Wayne Gacey paintings. Paintings that he was the Killer Clown back in Chicago several decades back, who would kill men and boys, and he would dismember their bodies and put them under his floor board. Well, after he was caught, well, he turned out to be a so-called killer of the community [NB: this is a transcription error, Vecchi actually says 'pillar of the community'], and he would dress up as a clown and do gigs doing clown stuff for the kids. And so he would draw pictures or paint pictures of clowns, and he had clown paintings in the room where he dismembered the bodies. And he had clown paintings that he did after he got arrested and when he was basically on death row.
And so we got those paintings and we are studying those paintings. We want to look at the brush strokes. We want to look at what drives him, what changes, because the pictures are completely different. Before he was arrested, for instance, the clowns were Flippo the Clown, very happy clowns, very colorful; afterwards his paintings were very dark. It was basically a skeleton or a skull dressed up or painted up to be a clown.

We’ve have got thousands and thousands of pages of correspondence between a number of serial killers. Richard Ramirez, the night stalker. We’ve got Keith Hunter Jesperson, another famous serial killer, his complete manifesto of why he killed, written in his own handwriting. We have greeting cards, we have photos, we have serial killer art. But the museum itself, and here is where the value of it is, for the most part, almost all of the research of law enforcement is usually done interacting with the subject rather through an investigation, or, in what we do, more of a research-type of approach, where we would sit down with protocols and interview them like we do with the serial killers, or like we are doing with the hostage takers now. This is stuff that is taken out of their most personal possessions. Things that were not taken as law enforcement, but were taken on search warrants, or provided, maybe after they were executed, by their family. And so it gives a completely different perspective of their mindset—where they are coming from because this is correspondence to themselves, correspondence between them and their loved ones—their mother, their father—correspondence between them and other serial killers, and even correspondence between them and the many groupies that write to them and develop a relationship as a pen pal. And so this is a very exciting research, this research museum, where we are looking at their motivation and try to understand them from a perspective that, as far as we know, has never been undertaken.

That's entertainment!

But don't pack the kiddies in the station wagon just yet. You need to be a genuine researcher with the F.B.I.'s visiting scholars program to check out all the fun.

But fear not, you can visit vicariously through the pages of Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association (he said "annals"). They've got a downloadable PDF article on visiting the museum with plenty of photos. Enjoy.

Stuff: The future, only more polite.

An old friend of mine recently shot me an email about a project she's cooking up. I thought I'd let all y'all in on it. Here's the back story from one of her co-conspirators:

I grew up in a house full of old books and mildewed magazines. The entire eastern wall of my childhood bedroom was taken up with with bookshelves to store the collected and forgotten words of my parents. The novels and encyclopediae would hold my interest from time to time; Agatha Christie and J.D. Salinger and Encyclopedia Brittanica 1972. But the true heart of the library was in the magazines. My mother's collection of National Geographic and my father's collections of Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov's Science Fiction.

In Asimov's autobiography, he describes growing up in the twenties and thirties, reading the pulp science fiction magazines. Over time, he says, the authors published in those pages came to seem as demigods to him. And he realized that what he wanted, more than anything else, was to be a demigod himself. I can't tell you how strongly I empathized with that feeling.
Science fiction was in my bones. I loved everything about it. I couldn't get enough. And, while there was a definite appeal to the majestic films and the grand multi-book series of the genre, it was always clear that the purest distillate of science fiction was to be found in short stories. It is a literary tradition built upon anthologies and magazines.

In college, I maintained subscriptions to On Spec and NFG, the two big Canadian science fiction magazines. Of course, I couldn't afford subscriptions to the American magazines, but I would read them all cover to cover standing in the magazine aisle at the big Bloor Street bookstores. Then NFG stopped publishing and On Spec shrank to a fraction of its former splendour.

And so it came that, last summer, I was lamenting that there was no longer a single Canadian science fiction magazine that qualified as an SFWA-approved market.

Well, Maya Angelou said it best: If you don't like something, change it.

So, I teamed up with my old friends Adam and Helen to see what we could do. We figured out that for just ten grand we could get a new magazine off the ground. And hey, what's ten grand in this era of interwebs and micropayments, right? Seems like a pretty piddling barrier between us and the awesome.

So look, we're not really asking you guys for money. I mean, if you're looking to give, we're not saying no, but we know that most people here are about as skint as we are. Really, what we're hoping is that you'll think this is a pretty great idea and help spread the word to those who might have a penny or two to share.

If that stirred up your love for the old pulps or appealed to you militant Canadian nationalism, check out the kickstarter page for AE and help a brother out. My friend, don't be a hoser.

Stuff: From blood-sucking outsiders to kosher sparkles.

In the Forward, writer Allison Gaudet Yarrow does a pop-light dissection of the Jewish subtext of the modern vampire. Horror fans might not find much new info here, but I took note of a curious bit on vampiric overtones in the story of Jacob and Esau.

Rice may have made a straight trade, from vampires to Jews, in her latest book, but it’s not just contemporary literature that pits those strangers from the East as either one or the other. Some claim that the original myth of the vampire comes from Genesis. A famously hairy and spurned brother struggles with whether to kiss his twin’s neck or to bite it. The parsha reads: “And Esau ran toward him and embraced him, and he fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.” Sounds like a surprisingly joyous reunion (Jacob had cheated his brother of his birthright, you will recall), but rabbis point to the dots above the Hebrew word neshikah, “kiss,” which indicate another meaning.

Louis Ginzberg writes, in the book “Legends of the Jews,” “In the vehemence of his rage against Jacob, Esau vowed that he would . . . bite him dead with his mouth, and suck his blood.” This midrash plays with the closeness of the words neshikah and neshicha — kiss and bite, respectively. About as close as the spellings of Hanukkah and Chanukah, but with distinctly darker overtones of fratricide and vampirism.

Quickly, Jews were transformed from victims of night prowlers to the blood-sucking outsiders themselves. One of the hoariest old axes of antisemitism — the blood libel — is that Jews drink blood, or mix it into their matzo. Erik Butler, a professor of German studies at Emory University who studies vampire psychology, says that historically, vampires were symbolic of any persecuted group, and legends about them grew around whatever images the culture had to present. Hence, subjugated Jews became as good an outsider for vampires to represent as any.

The author goes on to ponder the implications of the vampire's mainstream status, from vaguely Semitic boogyman to romantic lead.

Now, of course, vampires are as often the good guys as the bad. Sarah Jane Stratford charges vampires with stopping the Holocaust in her debut novel, “The Midnight Guardian” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). Her vampires are both morally responsible and self-interested: They use their considerable powers to thwart genocide while combating hunger, as Hitler’s death camps are killing off all their food. These millennials transform the traditional vampire into a monogamous do-gooder. One called Eamon is even a cross-averse Jew himself, having led a pious life before being bitten. Now he’s too busy hunting Nazis to light Sabbath candles, but he can enter churches, unlike the formerly Christian night creatures.

If vampires are equipped to cripple the Holocaust, surely they can manage the suburbs, where they have descended upon diners and high schools. “Twilight” series writer Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon, but Melissa Rosenberg, who is responsible for the Twilight screenplays, is a Jew. She told Los Angeles’ Jewish Journal that the vampires of “Twilight” are “kosher,” if “kosher” is a synonym for “cool.”

With the current ubiquity of vampires, perhaps they’ve outlived their metaphorical life. No longer the “other,” they now just highlight a chosenness to star in their own fiction. In the 2009 film “Daybreakers,” everyone’s a vampire. The outsiders are human. But can these emblematic outsiders depicting minorities (Irish, women, blacks, Jews) still wear that badge now that they have entered into the mainstream? Maybe not. Maybe we’ll turn to mummies instead.

Have vampires lost their ability to represent the outsider because the "outsider" status has lost so much specificity to audiences in a relatively heterogenus and liberal culture?

Stuff: For when the weather outside is frightful.

Here's a ski mask tribute to everybody's favorite mind shattering terror. It's the eyebrow ridge that seals the deal on this thing.

Stuff: Neat!

Thanks to Mr. Cattleworks for finding Mr. Lewis and snagging his John Hancock for me.

Stuff: Consider the bloodbath.

Because I'm a horror blogger, I don't feel weird saying that I've been pondering a bloodbath. Specifically, I've been pondering the claim that the Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Báthory Erzsébet in Hungarian) bathed in the blood of her victims to preserve her youth and beauty. I've just completed The Blood Countess, the Andrei Codrescu. This literary shot of, literally, blood-soaked Eastern European history has given me a curious appreciation of one of Eastern Europe iconic historical monsters. But let's just talk bloodbaths today.

From a historical standpoint, the reality of the countess's legendary bloodbaths are ill supported by the record. During the countess's semi-secret trial, which lasted from 1610 to 1611, Báthory's accusers compiled testimony from more than 300 witnesses. The court notaries were all-to-happy to record any scrap of evidence that Báthory was a psychopathic witch. Their records are full of descriptions of brutal torture and savage sexual abuse. And yet, despite the value such a story to prosecutors, the court records are entirely silent on the issue of bathing in blood.

The first written record of the famed Báthory bloodbaths appears in a 1729 tract titled Tragica Historica. This tract, written by a Jesuit scholar, is the earliest written account of the case. However, the scholar had no access to the court notaries' documentation (the witness testimony was not released until 1765 and was not published until 1817). Where this scholar heard these accusations is unclear. Perhaps, with their obvious themes of feminine vanity and blasphemy, the Jesuit simply made up the stories to make an instructive example to the faithful out of the Protestant countess's downfall.

From an anatomical standpoint, a bloodbath seems no more likely. First and foremost, there's simply not that much blood in the human body. The average human contains about 1.3 gallons of blood; that is just slightly more fluid than comes in a large jug of milk. That's plenty to splash over yourself, but hardly enough to fill a tub with. One could assume, of course, that Báthory used the blood of more than one victim per bath. (Claims of the total number of victims she claimed vary wildly, from the low 30s to more than 650. The latter number is unlikely, but, for our purposes, it the range allows the distinct possibility of multiple victims.) Let’s assume Báthory had a fairly small tub to bathe in and that she was trying to get away with using as little blood as possible, so we’ll say she needs 25 gallons.

By my way of thinking, the biggest hurdle Báthory would need to overcome to actually bathe in human blood is the conflict between the time it would take to desanguinate an entire human body and the speed with which blood congeals. Congeal-rates are hard to pin down because exposure to oxygen is a factor, so every specific container has a slightly different congeal-rate. But we can conduct a thought experiment. Just like breathing a fine red wine, the congealing of blood is a product of the surface area available for air/blood interaction. How much air touches the surface of the blood has an impact on how fast the blood congeals. In this case, we've got a scenario in which we have a deep reservoir of blood with a relatively small surface area exposed to the air. Unable to conduct any real experiment, I propose that an analogous scenario happens when people make blood pudding. To make blood pudding, you cook the blood in a large metal pot. Though the size is off, the proportion of surface are to depth isn't bad. According to a random selection of blood pudding recipes, cooks report that serious congealing begins in about 5 minutes. By 10 minutes, the blood congeals into solid lump. Again, a bath tub full of blood would be much larger and take more time, but even if we triple the congealing time, we're making a mess of this whole thing in about a quarter of an hour. Let's be generous and take an outside figure. Our hypothetical blood bath becomes a gooey, clumpy, gravy-like mess at the half hour mark.

So, how long does it take to desanguinate somebody? That's an interesting problem. First, desanguinating somebody is actually really, really hard to do. Even if you have a Hostel II scenario, in which a living victim is upside down and their heart is helping pump the blood out, only about four pints of human blood will leave the body before the person dies and the heart stops beating. With modern technology, you can pump the blood out yourself, but the process is not quick. With the tech Báthory would have had at her disposal, the time and effort increases greatly. And time is not on her side. Assuming you go low-tech, for each victim, you're only getting about half a gallon of blood every five minutes. Done serially, you'd have congealing problems before you got even three gallons. Theoretically, one could try to drain all the victims in parallel, but then you'd need an ever-larger draining pan, which would mean an increased congeal-rate as the surface are increased air/blood interactions.

Just taking into account these issues, we can see that truly bathing in blood would have been a massive undertaking. It would have involved at nine least victims, all extensively prepped. It would have required a pair of butchers that trained for the event. None of that would have been impossible, mind you. But it seems, given what an elaborate and not especially secret undertaking it would had to have been, unlikely that nobody in the voluminous court records would have mentioned it. Considerably less ornate and private instances of sadism made their way into the record.