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.

Movies: The two Palmer girls.

One of the finest pieces of horror criticism comes from Bart Simpson. During the first "Treehouse of Horror" special, Lisa reads Poe's "The Raven" to her brother (who agrees to be subjected to a book only after Lisa assures him that he will not learn anything). When the narrator of Poe's "The Raven" searches for the source of tapping at his chamber door and finds an empty hall, Bart says, "You know what would have been scarier than nothing? Anything."

Bart's objection is, I think, demonstrably false: the world's full of anythings that aren't particularly scary. That said, the more general assertion that "The Raven" just isn't scary is spot on. It is a point even Lisa concedes later when she speculates that earlier audiences of poem simply must have been easier to scare.

Though, honestly, even early audiences of "The Raven" didn't find it particularly scary. Elizabeth Barrett, in a letter to the poet, claimed the poem produced "a fit o' horror" but admitted the mixed emotional response when she claimed that "Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it and some by the music." The poem's style, more often than its supposedly horrific content, was the source of most criticism, favorable and negative. Though, notably, one critic for the Southern Quarterly Review seems to have agreed with Bart and Lisa, claiming that the poem's scares would only work on "a child who had been frightened to the verge of idiocy by terrible ghost stories."

So, even adjusting for shifting cultural context, one comes to the conclusion that "The Raven," one of the cornerstones of the American horror tradition, simply isn't that scary.

In the horror blogosphere, many many posts have been dedicated to parsing out the experience of horror. We draw fine distinctions between various flavors of dread and speculate about their sources and the effects that best produce them. Less attention has been given to the odd phenomenon of horror that isn't scary. We should take care to separate this subgenre from horror that fails to be scary. It's possible to try to scare your audience and not succeed. Instead, what were considering is a genre of horror that purposefully chooses some other emotional register as primary mode. The dread in "The Raven," despite its gothic mood and trappings, is more akin to melancholy than fright. It's a grim meditation on death. A dark mirror of the transcendent function dead lovers served in Renaissance poetry, Poe's poem is about the inescapable and inevitable pain of loss that eschews the trope of redemption (completing a program of literary subversion that began 300 years earlier with Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella" poem cycle). It's about being epically sad.

It might not seem like such a leap from fear to depression, but one can just as easily find comedies that would be welcome on just about any horror blog. Erotica, adventure, romance . . . we could go on, but that belabors a seemingly obvious point: Horror, as a genre, seems almost boundlessly flexible, even to the point of undermining the emotional response that the genre's name would seem to elevate as its highest and clearest goal. Though perhaps the point isn't particularly obvious. One still finds people attempting to work up definitions of horror that will exclude random work X from the genre by appealing to some reductive, "purified" definition of the genre. Looked at from the position of how the genre is experienced by creators and consumers, such efforts seem always already doomed.

I bring this up because Lake Mungo, the 2008 faux-documentary ghost tale from Joel Anderson, is one of the best horror films of the first decade of the 21st century. And it is too good a horror film to worry about being scary.

I'm a couple years late to this particular party, so I'm not going to bother with a long summary of the plot. In short: The Palmers, a New Zealand suburban family, lose their teenage daughter, Alice, on an outing to a local swimming hole. They gain a modicum of fame when local media outlets find out the dead daughter is haunting their house. The haunting turns out to be a hoax. However, after the media loses their interest, weird things keep happening. In an effort to get to the bottom of these strange events, the family uncovers a second life that their daughter led and these secrets overturn what they believed they knew about Alice.

To get the whole review-function out of the way, I liked this film. In fact, it's been a long damn time since I've seen a horror film so involving.

There, that's done. Let's talk about the flick now.

Lake Mungo is, curiously, the anti-Twin Peaks. Both works center around the excavation of the hidden life of a deceased teen girl. Alice and Laura share the same last name - Palmer - so it is fair to point out a certain family resemblance. Both works capitalize on the intrusion of the surreal on to mundane world of middle-class life (curiously, despite the idea that Twin Peaks was a logging town, blue collar concerns - union/management conflicts, the tension between resource limitation and jobs, and so on - surfaced obliquely; Twin Peaks was, locale aside, just another suburban nowhere).

What sets them apart is Lake Mungo's sympathy for Alice.

Laura is part of vast horde of fictional young women who meet their demise because they were spoiled. Laura's secret life follows a familiar dramatic arc: The perfect girl wanders off the path. Her sexual awakening is squalid, it marks not so much her introduction into adulthood, but the death of her virginal innocence. And, ultimately, this taint of sexualized corruption is connected to her literal death. Laura Palmer appears wrapped in plastic, washed up on the edge of a lake (another connection between Alice and Laura) because she ceased to be a clueless innocent. Her journey from clueless youth to active agent in the in the demimonde of Twin Peaks was just the first half of her march to the grave.

To be fair, this isn't an overtly wrong-headed notion. For everything that growing-up is, it is also the progression to the grave. In the sense that Laura is moving forward in her life, she's also moving towards her death. Still, this idea of the fatal corrupting crisis has a distinctly feminine slant to it in our culture, especially once sex enters the picture. Male coming of age stories can have a touch of sadness about the edges: think of a bittersweet narration of "and then we never saw one another again, but they are still my best friends" of countless Stand By Me-ish films. But, mostly, the quest for sexual maturity for boys is presented as an adventure or a comedy. More importantly, whatever the tenor of the tale, the central theme is one of completion rather than downfall. At the end of any given "we have to lose our virginity before we go to college" film, the male protags have gone from boys to men. They've become whole. In contrast, the women emerge from the same adventure irreparably broken.

What's interesting about Lake Mungo is that it uses it's dead-pan tone to wreck that idea. Alice, like Laura, kept secrets. But, unlike Laura, her death was, in the end, an accident. She drowned. It had nothing to do with the life she was living. It was the sort of dumb, senseless, stupid death that can befall anybody at any moment. It does not come as a judgment upon her.

Furthermore, the excavation of Laura's life is, oddly, invasive. Meant to solve the mystery of her death, there's something obscene about it. In death, Laura is defenseless and the investigators keep stripping her rep naked. It's investigation as rape. Here, the exploration into the Alice's life is driven by the presence of the ghostly Alice herself. It isn't an unveiling or a confession, but something more personal and profound. It's not unusual for ghost stories to trot out the "unfinished business" trope, but rarely is the business so poignant: Alice haunts her family because she wants the people to love to know her, entirely and truly know her.

And this, ultimately, is what sets Alice apart from Laura. Laura's a McGuffin. Her life exists to give others meaning and every decision she makes is a puzzle piece to fit into the story of her murder. She's a little girl converted in a tragedy by forces that rob her of life. Alice's life, by contrast, isn't a simple narrative. It's a awkward, opaque series of decisions made by a young woman quietly balancing the demands of two worlds.

Uncanny, sometimes heartbreaking, Lake Mungo's a powerful little film.

Movies: Three's company.

I think I dropped the ball on Paranormal Activity. I suspect that you had to see it in the theaters to truly get what this movie was about. You had to be sitting in an audience of a hundred and fifty or more willing participants, all hyped and eager to get scared. That's what the movie was meant for.

In fact, the formal and visual elements of the movie seem tailor built for mass participation. Last time I was in a social group and the title Paranormal Activity was dropped, the title was greeted with a collective "hunh" of unknowing. Outside of the horror fancy and their loved ones, it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact. On the assumption that there are readers of this blog who are not here for the horror but rather the comedy of watching me ramble on about cannibals and the like, I'll briefly spoil the plot. Micah, a day trader (back when that "profession" didn't sound like a slang term for sucker), and Katie, a student pursuing her education degree, live in an absurdly large home: Two floors, three bedrooms, two + plus baths, kitchen, dining room, I live in New York so it's important to me, living room, large yard with pool. Oh, and a functional fireplace. Kidding aside, we're going to discuss their house later, so this isn't just an apartment renter getting a rubbery one over some choice housing pron.

Now, given their level of affluence, Micah must be a wiz at choosing stocks, predicting fluctuations in futures markets, and sniffing out poor folks who won't be able to pay off their housing loans. But he's an absolute bonehead when it comes to choosing a female companion. Turns out Katie has been ground zero for freaky deaky demonic possession style activity for like forever. Since she's been eight, an supernatural entity with no respect for the property or sleep habits of others has been stalking her on and off. Micah and Katie attempt to take proactive action to rid themselves of this infernal pest guest, but that sparks an escalation of activity that eventually leads to fatal consequences. Like these things do. Truly a child of the Girls Gone Wild and YouTube age, Micah captures the whole downward spiral on camera. In essence, the flick alternates between day time scenes, in which Katie and Micah stress about what they should do, and nighttime scenes, in which Katie and Micah find themselves pretty much at the mercy of their invisible tormentor.

The alternating day/night scenes - the pattern of theater illuminating sun-kissed full color shots and stretches of pale grey and green porny night vision - gets everybody in the audience working the same groove as reliably as the animated bouncing ball used to do in theater sing-along shorts. (What a sad day it was for popular culture when we crew to cynical for that. Even that horrible "Citizen Soldier" song from Nickleblind 182 would be tolerable if, throughout the add, a little bouncing animated smiling National Guardsman's face encouraged the entire audience to sing along.) It gives the audience a breather to laugh and make fun of the reactions of others, throws in some chatter for the bloggers to theorize about later, and then focuses everybody's attention again by dimming the lights. The transition from day to night in this flick works not unlike the dimming of lights in a movie theater: "Alright people, time to pay attention." In a gentler era, William Castle would have dubbed the night vision effect Demon-O-Vision and audience members would have all slid "Vatican-designed protective goggles" on to prevent demonic possession via the eyes. Even without the Castle-isms, it's a brilliant use of a simple visual pattern to marshal viewer expectations. The film quickly trains the viewer to watch it. It's nearly a Pavlovian reaction: As soon as the lights dim, viewers find themselves scrutinizing the nearly static image of Katie and Micah's room, searching for the slightest hint of supernatural shinanigans. Who knew you could make a nicely effective fright flick out of Warhol's Sleep? Go fig.

Not that such intense scrutiny is necessary; when the baddie does act, it isn't anything you'd miss. In fact, its the viewers tendency to subject the screen to hyperscrutiny whenever the lights are dimmed that makes the low-fi scares director/writer Oren Peli deploys so effective. When you're scrutinizing every inch of the screen for the slightest tell-tale twitch of activity, suddenly moving the door to the bedroom a few inches seems like a monumental shift in what you're seeing. This is how a flick that, for most of its running time, threatens its characters with nothing more sinister than the inexplicable flicking of light switches managed to land such high spots on so many best-of lists last year. The film knows how to prep the willing viewer. This is also, coincidentally, why there's so much bad data in so many reviews of this flick. Not only have reviewers consistently overstated the amount of ruckus the invisible stalker commits - a single light flicked on and off becomes a tour of the house with lights going on and off as the demon moves from room to room - but have overstated elements of the flick that occur during the daylight scenes - transforming the milquetoast Micah into the equivalent of an abusive spouse. This is the oddest critical transformation since Micah's biggest sin seems to be that he's a bit of a tech geek and slightly overconfident. In the relationship, he's the weaker of the pair. He capitulates to nearly every whim of Katie's, apologizes for the one time he doesn't, and never even tries to force an apology out of her for knowingly bringing this monster into his life. Honestly, who is more at fault here: Micah, who can sometimes be insensitive about what he's recording, or Katie, who neglected to mention her superpowered, unstoppable demon stalker before Micah moved in with her? People are so keyed up that they lose sense of perspective, both visually and thematically.

Since I missed out on what I think it the quintessential Paranormal Activity experience, I'm going to just share some observations in lieu of the standard review.

Size does matter, but in the opposite way.

Micah and Katie live in a huge house. One that, honestly, doesn't really seem like theirs. They have three bedrooms, all of them done up with queen-sized beds. No junky storage room. No office for Micah, though he supposedly spends most of his days there "at the office." The middling efforts to disguise the set aside, the real issue is that their house is too big for them keep an eye on what's going on. The demon can play with their heads for so long because there's so much unsupervised room for the demon to roam around in.

In contrast, if the movie featured my wife and I in our apartment, we would have reached the do or die moment with our tormentor in the first 10 minutes of the film. We wouldn't have any "Did you see those lights go on?" moments. No slamming doors, no need to have one person wait vulnerable in the bedroom while the other explores the attic or whatever. Nope. We can pretty much do the whole sweep for demonoid phenomenon from our bed.

That saved time is something to consider if you're demon haunted and looking for new digs.

Don't negotiate with terrorists from beyond.

Depending on which ending you see, either Katie and Micah end up dead or Micah ends up dead and Katie gets demonified. Variable details aside, it's fair to say that they get royally screwed regardless of the ending you prefer.

I bring this up because Micah and Katie regularly fail to pull the trigger on getting outside help because they fear that bringing in exorcists or the Ghostbusters or whatever will upset the demon. And if they upset the demon, the demon might kill them both. Or kill one of them and demonify the other. Better not risk upsetting the spirit of evil that dwells in their house and wishes to harm them. After all, the demon might get so mad it will wish to harm them even more harmfully.

This would also be an opportune time to mention that their fears of what might happen if they upset the demon that wants to eat their souls or whatever are crystalized by an account of a similar case of possession that ended with the death of the demon-haunted woman involved. When the woman sought outside help, the demon killed her. It's worth noting that they find the story following a clue the demon left them. That's right. Essentially the demon sends them to "proof" that they'll die if they try to get help. Why the demon might be trying to scare them away from getting outside help doesn't seem to cross the collective mind of Katie and Micah.

What's the take home? Don't hesitate. Don't listen to the soul-craving embodiment of all that's unholy. Get help immediately. Get a bunch of collar-wearing pros to hit this mammer jammer with the smells and bells and take the fight to him. Don't let the demon set the agenda and don't play by his rules. He's pure evil. Nothing you are going to do will make him eviler.

The alternate ending isn't all that.

Though much has been made of the clumsy CGI at the end of the theatrical release, less has been made of the narrative opacity of the original ending. In the original, despite the fact that we've spent the whole movie learning that the demon "wants" Katie for some reason - presumably possession, I guess - the demon uses his handful of minutes within her to make he commit suicide. Which means that really the demon just wanted to kill her, I guess. But he's been inexplicably waiting 20 odd years for just the right night for it. Maybe demons are just really picky about when they off somebody or maybe it took more than two decades for the demon's bad-emotion-o-meter to fill up to it Finishing Move threshold. I dunno.

Honestly, the original ending strikes me as if it belonged to a film in which we were never clear whether or not Katie was haunted by an invisible monster or whether she was just crazy. Then the last image of her cutting her own throat would be ambiguous. Was she under demonic possession? Is she insane? (In fact, if we have to allegorize this flick, I propose we ditch the untenable domestic violence allegory for an allegory of what a resurfacing mental condition can do to a household. It's like The Metamorphosis, but being haunted by a demon replaces turning into a bug as your symbol for mental illness. The rest falls loosely into place: fears that treatment might be worse than the disease, her significant other's powerlessness, getting dire news but no real help from specialists who pass you on to other non-helpful specialists, etc. It's a start.) But since the filmmakers firmly establish the reality of the supernatural threat, it forces you to wonder why the demon didn't just drop a magic piano on Katie's head years ago.

Awkward as the visuals may be, the theatrical ending at least makes sense with the film's own established narrative. Between the two, I found it the more satisfying.

Mad science: "The case of the haunted scrotum."

Vaughan of Mind Hacks discusses an unusual case human's seeing meaning - specifically, in this case, a human face - in random data. He tells it better than I do:

This is quite possibly the oddest example of an illusory face I have ever discovered.
Seeing meaningful information in meaningless data is a psychological effect known as pareidoia or apophenia and this is an example that was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1996:

The case of the haunted scrotum

A 45-year-old man was referred for investigation of an undescended right testis by computed tomography (CT). An ultrasound scan showed a normal testis and epididymis on the left side. The right testis was not visualized in the scrotal sac or in the right inguinal region. On CT scanning of the abdomen and pelvis, the right testis was not identified but the left side of the scrotum seemed to be occupied by a screaming ghostlike apparition (Figure 1). By chance, the distribution of normal anatomical structures within the left side of the scrotum had combined to produce this image. What of the undescended right testis? None was found. If you were a right testis, would you want to share the scrotum with that?

J R Harding

Consultant Radiologist, Royal Gwent Hospital

Pic below:

Stuff: And Mrs. Barrett would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you kids!

Forgive me if my recent infatuation with the archives of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle is wearing thin on you screamers and screamettes who don't dig the wacky Victoriana. But this story from August 29, 1901 issue had a goofy charm to it and I couldn't keep it form myself.

Cryptically titled "Only One Foot Was Visible," today's story covers a haunted house that caused a stir in Fort Hamilton, a neighborhood that grew up around the Fort Hamilton Army Garrison in Brooklyn.

The ghost, described a female figure about 35 years of age, appeared regularly in the windows of an abandoned home on Fort Hamilton Avenue and Ninety-second Street. Occasionally she was robed in white, but some spotted her dressed in black. Witnesses – and there would eventually be many witnesses – claimed that audible moans came from the house whenever the ghost would appear.

As luck would have it, the building across the street from this haunted house was the home of two Brooklyn police officers: Patrolman Frank Many, who lived with his mother, and Detective Martin White, who lived with his wife. Mrs. Many was the first to spot the ghost. According to the story, Mrs. Many saw the ghost several times. When she told her skeptical son of the restless spirit, Frank "scoffed at the idea and paid no attention to the matter at first."

I can only assume that, eventually, his mother's nagging wore down Patrolman Many's resistance to the idea of the continued existence of the spirit after bodily death. Without a word of explanation as to why Many changed his mind, the article states that Many "spent several nights trying to solve the mystery of the ghost, but although he would see her, yet she always eluded him."

Having now seen the specter, the patrolman called for back-up and enlisted the aid of Detective White. White, apparently without the aid of Many, also "for several nights . . . kept vigil, but failed to capture the woman."

By this point, the presence of the ghost had the whole neighborhood in an uproar. Speculation about the identity of the ghost became a popular pastime. As nobody could think of a suitably tragic candidate from the house's past, many wondered if it wasn't a a spook that had immigrated from some more tragic place. Crowds gathered around the house nightly. Some nights more than 200 people came to see the spirit. The ghost was seen regularly, but then, inexplicably, disappeared for days. After several nights, the excitement began to die down and the crowds dwindled away to nearly nothing.

Then, as suddenly as she had vanished, the ghost re-appeared. Accord to witnesses the spirit was "robed in white" and she "appeared at the window, uttered a few mournful sobs and disappeared."

A frustrated Detective White decided that he'd had enough and he broke into the house. A mob of men and children followed him. From the paper:

They searched every hole and corner of the house, and just as they were about to give up the hunt, White saw a woman's foot inside the old fireplace. Stooping down the detective discovered the ghost. He dragged her out into the room, tore away a sheet from the woman's head, and discovered a trim, but greatly frightened woman. She was Mrs. John Barrett, who had making her home at the house, and the ghost business was merely a sham to keep people from entering the house.

Jinkies!

Stuff: Portrait of a Victorian ghost hunter.

After the digital archives of the Brooklyn Eagle yielded up the odd story about a cult of blood-drinking faith healers, I decided to poke around some more. Subsequent poking around led me to the gentleman pictured above: Edward Drinker Cope, paleontologist and ghost hunter.

In 1894, the town of Mapleton on Long Island was caught up in a ghost panic. The public hysteria began on the first day of August. Passengers on a commuter train spotted the phantom near Woodlawn station. The Eagle quotes Richard Larke, superintendent of the road, who was a passenger on the train at the time:

We had just passed Woodlawn, the only station between Coney Island and Mapleton, without stopping, and had rounded the curve, when Fireman Van Pelt pulled my coat sleeve and pointed ahead, over to the left of the track. I saw what seemed to be a tall white figure. It seemed motionless at first, and you may believe me or not, but I'll take my oath that it was standing, or appeared to be standing, just where last Sunday's suicide occurred. It was tall and shadowylike. It had the appearance of a substance gradually melting into a filmy white nothing, and seemed to be covered with a long white, filmy veil. Two seconds after I saw it it began moving over toward the railroad track. It moved slowly at first, waving its long draped arms. I could see distinctly, as we approached nearer, that it motioned to us, gesticulating as one would do trying to stop a train. Engineer Mailon then saw it. He began to blow his whistle with a sucession of sharp toots and put on brakes. The thing didn't get out of the way, though it was careful to avoid the light of the head lamp, and the train was brought to a standstill. Just as the train stopped the thing glided off the track and skimmed along toward the woods, all the time gesticulating as if motioning someone to follow. It disappeared in the woods.

The same article includes a description of the phantom, though the source of these details is unclear.

It is about the size of a woman. It crouches. It has eyes of fire and is as big as a tree, but gets smaller when you look at it. It may have genuine feet, but perhaps they are imitation, for what use would feet be to a ghost? It can wail in a lonesome and despairing manner. Of course, it can glide. The most ordinary kind of a ghost can glide.

"Sunday's suicide" refers to Margaret Barning. She's a blank in the record. We know she killed herself with a pistol not far from the tracks. Witnesses, Mapleton residents, and reporters quickly linked the ghost to suicide and assumed the ghost was the restless soul of Barning.

After the initial report, Mapleton resident Jere Lott and his coachman came forward with their account of the apparition. They claimed to be the first residents to have seen the spirit. Mr. Lott describes the encounter:

I'm the first man, I believe, who ran against that ghost. Thursday morning, about 12:30 o'clock - and that was a whole twenty-four hours before the train stopped out here to let the thing get out of the way - I was awakened by hearing a tapping at my window pane. It was gentle at first. Then it got louder and oftener. I woke up with a kind of a start, but lay right still. I thought it was birds at first, but soon found it was no bird's sound. Then I began to get up, and, as I stirred about, the tapping stopped, and I heard a brushing sound against the window and then all was still. Next morning, when I had the ghost had been seen by the train folks I knew that's what I'd heard.

On August 11, just ten days after the first reported story, the ghost appeared to a rail work crew.

Saturday night the Sea Beach railway had a work train out in charge of Conductor Hilger and Engineer Kirk. A gang of laborers was along. This train was on a side track just below Mapleton, near Woodlawn, waiting for the 1 o' clock train from Coney Island to pass. The latteh [sic – CRwM] train was running in two sections to accommodate the crowd. After the first section of twelve cars had gone by, Mike Clooch, one of the laborers on the work train, emitted a blood curdling yell, pointed toward the woods, where the ghost had been seen to retreat, and made for the locomotive. Everyone divined at once the cause of his fright. The other employees caught the alarm and a general panic ensued.

Over the next couple of weeks, the number of sightings skyrocketed into the hundreds. These sightings, and others left unreported by the Eagle, were enough to attract the attention of a team of would-be ghost hunters. This crew was led by Edward Drinker Cope.

Edward Drinker Cope was a notable paleontologist whose fame in his chosen field of study has been stunted due to his occasional flights of theoretical fancy and his heroic capacity for engaging in reputation destroying rivalries. Cope's successes demand respect. He identified the Triassic class Archosauria, he was a brilliant taxonomist, a renowned field researcher, and the discoverer of two distinct dinosaurs. Even today he holds the record for scientific publications: Cope has more than 1,200 published papers. His theory that evolution tends towards increases in body size, known as Cope's Law, is still referenced in evolutionary theory, though its application is understood to not be universal.

Despite all those accomplishments, what Cope's best remembered for is his vicious feud with fellow paleontologist O.C. Marsh, a long running and mean-spirited rivalry that became known in as "The Bone Wars."

Both Cope and Marsh inherited a vast amount of wealth. Using their family's money, they launched on massively expensive fossil hunts that, over time, turned into a sort of bone-collectors race between the two deep-pocketed scientists.

More than professional jealousy was at stake in this mad race to accumulate specimens. Both men believed that accumulating data in the form of fossils would allow them an edge over their rival in solving one of the pressing scientific issues of the day: the historical role of evolution. Marsh was a Darwinian. Marsh's reconstruction of the evolution of the horse over sixty million years is widely credited as the first substantial fossil proof of evolution. Cope could not accept the absence of divine design in nature due to his religious upbringing. He became a leading exponent of the "Neo-Lamarckian" school of evolution, which relied on a proto-intelligent design premise. At the time, Neo-Lamarckian evolution was more popular in American than Darwin's ideas.

The two rivals also represented two differing paradigms of scientific endeavor. Cope was, in some ways, a throwback to the self-made polymath gentlemen scientists of the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries. A youthful prodigy, Cope was college educated, but disdained what he felt was the creativity-crushing organization and intellectually isolating atmosphere of university life. He never managed to score a degree (though he obtained honorary degrees from several institutions) and preferred to work as far on the fringes of academic life as possible.

In contrast, Marsh was educated in private schools, graduated from Yale, studied mineralogy in the US, learned anatomy in Berlin, an was an excellent example of a new kind of international, college-trained, theoretically-rigorous scientist-as-professional.

The first great fight between these two occurred in 1869. Marsh discovered a serious error in Cope's reconstruction of a Plesiosaur, a giant ancient sea monster. Cope had mistakenly put the skull of the giant beast on its ass-end, capping its long tail instead of its snake-like neck. This started a two decade-long tit-for-tat game of public corrections and humiliations between the two men. (Though Cope screwed up first, Marsh's biggest blunder is still with us. Marsh put the wrong head on an Apatosaurus body and dubbed the new species "Brontosaurus." Though the scientific community has long since debunked the bronto's existence, its popularity with lay people keeps the beast alive and well.)

From 1877 to 1892, the two men rushed to get new fossils discovered. In their dash to claim the next big find, Cope and Marsh's work led to the discovery of over 140 new dinosaur fossils. At one point, the rivalry got so fierce that Cope and Marsh's digging teams attacked one another with stones. The "wars" came to an end when Marsh's funding dried up and a financial crash dealt a blow to Cope's personal funds.

In 1892, Cope was given a position as the professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania. The small stipend helped stem the financial fallout of the Bone War, but it also tangled him up in the spiritualist movement. Since 1889, with the formation of the University of Pennsylvania Seybert Commission for Invesigating Modern Spiritualism, the school had thrown resources at some very unorthodox studies. Cope's 1894 ghost hunt was part of the same trend.

What Cope's stake in the study of spiritualism was is unclear. An 1888 article in Knowledge magazine summarized Cope's attitude to the is of life after death in the following terms:

Professor Cope seems to regard immortality as possible in spite of apparent evidence against it, but doubts the persistence of personality.

Still, Cope's skepticism did not rule out more general belief in the existence of a spiritual dimension to life and his own religiously influenced views of evolution were often described (as in an 1887 issue of Popular Science Monthly) as "spiritualistic conception of evolution." Perhaps Cope's sudden interest in the supernatural was a logical extension of his feud with Marsh. The Bone Wars had ended inconclusively for Cope. In sheer numbers of animals discovered, he'd actually come out behind Marsh. Though that wasn't as bad as the fact that the rapid accumulation of data did nothing to unseat Darwinism. However, evidence of the supernatural would seriously undermine the materialist basis of evolution.

Cope's ghost hunting expedition arrived in Mapleton on August 21, 1894. The team included Colonel John L. Burleigh, who, the Eagle claimed, was responsible for "offensive, defensive, and tactical movements." What sort of trouble they expected from the tree-sized specter of the late Ms. Barning is unclear from reports. Economist, statistician, and geographer Henry Farquhar took a short leave from his government post in Washington D.C. to join the expedition. In Mapleton, at the team's headquarters in the Clarendon Hotel, the team was joined by novelist William Hosea Ballou. Ballou had made a name for himself cranking out hack dime novels like A Ride on a Cyclone, before gain a reputation as a naturalist (though many felt that he was little more than a partisan propagandist for Cope in his long-running feud). Ballou's expressed reason for joining the team was to gather material for a new novel. Finally, an unidentified reporter from the The Brooklyn Eagle rounded out the team.

The team left the Clarendon Hotel at 10:00 and marched to the site of Barning's suicide. The site itself was in the middle of an untended field bounded by train tracks on one side. At the exact location of the suicide rested a "stone with a white cross on its face . . . level as a billiard table . . . it is the only stone in the field."

At 11:00, the team began searching a tree that, according to reports, was the site the ghost most frequently materialized from. To Cope's surprise, the team uncovered another team of would-be ghost hunters! Two members of the South Brooklyn Dramatic Society were conducting their own investigation in the hopes of creating a play from their research. If the sudden appearance of second Mapleton Phantom project upset Mr. Ballou, the Eagele did not report it.

Finding no evidence near the tree, the now seven-man team took positions in a nearby ditch to spy upon the haunted rock. Out of boredom, Ballou began making bad puns. He pointed to the gas-lamp glow of the nearby town of New Utrecht and questioned the newly-joined dramatists what town it was. When they answered New Utrecht, the novelist responded, "When was New Ute wrecked?" The Brooklyn reporter said that he didn't get it. Ballou repeated the joke several times. Professor Cope told everybody to ignore him.

The conversation turned to the question of personalities surviving after death. Cope expressed the opinion that it does not. He also stated he'd attended many séances, but all he'd ever witnessed was faked up stage gimmicks. Colonel Burleigh, however, claimed to have felt the presence of a departed spirit. According to Burleigh, he'd made a deal with five other soldiers that the first one to die would attempt to communicate from the dead. Burleigh claimed that he had been approached, in daylight and on a crowded city street, by the spirit of one of his dead comrades. He supplemented the story with several anecdotes from the Civil War regarding spirits and ghosts.

At 1:00, the members of the expedition grew quiet as, across the field, several dark figures approached the haunted stone. One of the figures rapped on the stone and the members of the expedition leap from the ditch and rushed them.

It turns out to have been a third ghost hunting party: several drunken ensigns from the ships the San Francisco and the New York. The ensigns were, it turned out, heavily armed. Only their inebriation had prevented them from firing on Cope's team.

Convinced that the ghost would not come out tonight, the all three groups of ghost hunters returned to town to catch the last train to Brooklyn. According to the reporter, the naval personnel remained roaring drunk and Ballou kept up the steady stream of awful puns.

Cope died in 1897. He suffered from gastrointestinal problems that were exacerbated by the fact that he was self-medicating with a derivative of formaldehyde. After he died, his brain was removed and given to the Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Cope's bones were extracted and studied by anatomy students at the University. Many theorized that Cope had died of syphilis. However, in 1995, Dr. Morrie Kricun a professor of radiology declared there was absolutely no evidence of bony syphilis on Cope’s skeleton.

Movies: Over and out.

I have a soft spot for movies that pit their supernatural baddies against members of the armed forces. Properly done, the militarization of the victims of a horror film imparts a sense of genuine conflict. When a bunch of boozed up co-ed nymphomaniac camp counselors find themselves the target of an eight-foot tall semi-undead mass murderer, the action that follows resembles either a ritual sacrifice or the relentless grind of a factory farm meat processing plant. But, replace those teens with a squad of soldiers and you've suddenly got a ball game. The presence of significant levels of firepower, a pre-existing command structure meant to handle decision-making in a crisis, the willingness and capacity to meet violence with violence, training that facilitates teamwork between tactical assets, and an assumed minimal-level of individual competence all suggest that, whatever the flick might throw at them, the soldiers have a real chance at surviving.

Of course, this perception is largely illusory. My wife's mother likes to say, "God never gives you more trouble than you can handle." Horror films work on the opposite premise: The danger you face must always be greater than your capacities. Usually this works through a simple logic of escalation. Evil always rises to the occasion. If you've got a bunch of teens on a summer holiday, then a serial killer will come after them. Replace one of the teens with an ex-cop packing a .44 Magnum and the standard-issue serial killer will upgrade to a tribe of mutant cannibals. Dump the teens, remake the cop into a British soldier, add a half dozen other troopers, and the cannibal tribe will transform into werewolves. And so on and so on until you've got the entire military of a nation on one side and a giant city-stomping monster on the other.

But bigger baddies only get you so far. There's a pragmatic cap on the logic of perpetual escalation. Eventually you end up trafficking in such enormous levels of destruction that it becomes virtually impossible to conceptualize a threat that could withstand the onslaught. One workaround for the escalation problem is to hamstring the troops. You can give them incompetent leadership, place them in a training context that requires they have fake weapons, or cast "weekend warrior" National Guard types as your military personnel. Clever directors can also exploit the martial assumption that superior firepower, expertly applied, is what every situation calls for. Pit the troops against a virus, ghost, psychic phenomena, or other un-shootable thing and you've pretty negated their major advantage. Regardless of how it's done, we know on some essential level that being soldiers won't actually help the film's protags.

Still, the idea that being soldiers should matter is crucial to carrying off a good army versus monster flick. We have to feel that we're watching humanity's last line of defense, the people you'd call to handle this sort of thing, do real battle. If the mechanics of the plot are too naked visible, the actions of the characters take on an insignificance that fails to grab us.

The 2008 mercs versus monsters flick Outpost starts as a serviceable horror/actioner. But the logic behind its villainous otherworldly sci-fi Nazi immortals (not actually "zombies" in any conventional sense of the term, as is often stated) so overwhelms the agency of the soldiers of fortune at the films core that the flick's stripped down structure tips from pleasingly Spartan to smotheringly arbitrary. What starts as tension devolves into a forced march. There's plenty of gunfire, gore, and a rich layer of pulpy technobabble to act as eye glue. But once the audience has grokked that the actions of the protagonists don't have any effect on the plot's direction, the narrow pleasures of the film are undermined by the sneaking suspicion that they're just waiting for the film to run out of bodies.

The film starts with a pleasingly bare bones plot. The representative of a mysterious and unnamed cabal of investors pulls together a seven-man team of mercenaries to retrieve an unidentified item from a long-abandoned World War II Era bunker in an unnamed Eastern European country. This lack of information gives the flick a user-friendly, almost videogame-ish feel that makes up for in narrative efficiency what it lacks in depth. (Some of the deleted scenes available on the DVD include extended sequences that build character backstory and motivation, but director Steve Barker wisely left such distractions on the cutting-room floor).

Shortly after their arrival at the target, the crew is fired upon from dense woods surrounding the bunker. Convinced that they're outgunned, they hunker down. As they explore the bunker, they crew begins to fall prey to a seemingly unstoppable enemy who, despite the mercs best defenses, slips in and out of the bunker, killing with impunity.

In the meantime, their employer reveals that the target of their search is a "unified field generator," a bizarre bit of strangely Buck Rogers-ish tech that sits at the heart of this otherwise straightforward run and gun. Though I recall many Brits bemoaning the historical inaccuracies of American flicks, the backstory regarding the UFG shows that Americans have no monopoly on bad history or science. Attempting to explain the UFG, the employer explains that four forces govern the behavior of matter in the universe. He doesn't say what they are, but so far, so good. He explains that unified field theory explains the link between these forces. Then, he goes of the rails. Basically, in this film, the unified field acts like the "one ring to rule them all" of time and space. With a unifed field – which is less a mathematic explanation of the links between nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism than a new super energy – people could bend the rules that govern physics. We're told that Einstein was working on the unified field until he saw the detonation of the test a-bomb at Los Alamos. Worried about its destructive potential, he stopped working on it. (In fact, Einstein wasn't at the Trinity test, the a-bomb has little to do with unified theory, and the famed physicist never stopped working on unified field theory.)

The Nazis, it turns out, were ahead of the curve on the UFG and used the unified field to experiment on their own troops, turning them into silent, shambling things that can teleport, become solid or immaterial at will, and exist in a sort of timeless neverwhere outside of their bodies (which are piled up, perfectly preserved, in a cell in the bunker).

The rest of the flick follows our ever-dwindling crew as they slowly come to terms with truth about their unbeatable foes and getting soundly thrashed by Nazi ghosts from beyond time and space.

Though somewhat formulaic, the pick gets creativity points for its innovative and quirky monsters. I suspect the repeated use of "zombie" in reviews and commentary about this flick has to do less with intellectual laziness than with the fact that they're virtually impossible to classify using standard horror beast taxonomies. Furthermore, even in its less innovative aspects, the film's shot with a crisp confidence that carries the viewer over the less interesting bits. The acting is well handled, though nobody is given much beyond broad character types to deal with.

Ultimately, the real problem with the flick is that you can practically see the characters' strings being pulled by the director. For all the shouting and firing, characters are powerless to stop what comes their way. This powerlessness drains the fight and kill scenes of their drama and raises questions about the seemingly nonsensical way in which the Nazi unified field ghosts, or NUFGs, behave. (Even the script gives a nod towards this problem by having a character wonder aloud why the seemingly invincible NUFGs are taking so long to kill them all. He receives no explanation.) The end result is a sort of viewer indifference.

Movies: These shoes are just killin' me.

Korean director Yong gyun-Kim's 2005 The Red Shoes, a spookshow about a cursed pair of pinkish-red high-heels, is notable in part for its curious influences. Although the flick traffics in images and plot points familiar to Western audiences from the Ring-led J-horror invasion – ghost girls with long black hair in their faces, puzzle-like curses, and so on – it draws inspiration from two unlikely sources: Hans Christian Andersen and the 1948 British melodrama The Red Shoes.

The first unlikely source is Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of The Red Shoes. Andersen actually snags a posthumous co-writing credit. Bowdlerized versions of this story have a young woman finding a magical pair of red shoes. She slips them on and they make her the best dancer in the town. As befits the psychological needs of our modern validation-desperate whelp, the girl comes to learn that it was her own desire and, perhaps, her willingness to dare to greatness (in a way that wouldn't alienate others or take undue advantage of the varying skill levels of the other dancers, natch) that made her such a good dancer. Optimally, we also learn that sharing is caring, we're all special, and meat and sugar are the biochemical basis of homophobia. Little of this, of course, has much to do with Andersen's original fairy tale. As he penned it, the girl, Karen, puts on red shoes to go to church. This is a no-no – black shoes for church, people – that Karen will be punished for to an absurd extent. The shoes start to dance and Karen can't take them off. She dances all day and night, cursed by neighbors and even angels, until she finds a kind village executioner who will chop off her feet. The dancing shoes, feet still in them, dance off into the sunset and Karen repents the sin of wearing inappropriate church clothes.

Read that to the wee ones just before beddy-bye.

The second, un-credited source, is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classic The Red Shoes. Itself supposedly an adaptation of Andersen's tale, this well-loved flick currently rests in the number 8 position on the British Film Institute's irregular ranking of their domestic product. The film tells the story of a young ballet artist, Vicky Page, trapped between the affections of a young composer, Julian, and her brutally forceful director, Boris. Vicky quickly rises to fame in the ballet world, but Boris is insanely jealous of Julian and demands that Vicky choose between her lover and dancing. Vicky, surprisingly, chooses to stay with Julian and leaves the troop. But married life does not suit Vicky, who was meant to be on the stage. Boris bullies and seduces her to run away from her husband and perform again. Julian finds out Vicky's ditched and shows up at her dressing room with an ultimatum: the ballet or our marriage. This time, Vicky chooses a third option and commits suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. With her last breath, she tells Julian to remove her red shoes.

Yong gyun-Kim's horror version reintroduces the element of magical footwear, but borrows liberally from the imagery of Powell's justly worshipped film. Kim's film opens with a warm-up scare on a nearly empty subway platform. A young girl, exasperatedly waiting for a late friend, spies a pair of empty, red shoes near the edge of the platform. She picks up the shoes and puts them on. Suddenly, her friend appears and claims the shoes as her own. They argue and wrestle and, finally, her friend snatches the shoes and walks off. The friend puts on the shoes and begins making her way to the station exit. Before she can reach it, however, she's halted by a ghost who takes back the shoes, destroying the young girl's feet, and leaves her to bleed to death through the raw stumps on the end of her legs. Ouch.

Once the wake up bit of nasty business is done, the pacing of The Red Shoes slows considerably. We follow the sad sack life of Sun-jae, a vision therapist and avid shoe collector, is trapped in domestic hell. Her husband in a callous jerk who is bagging exo-marital trim on the side and their only daughter, Tae-su, make no bones out of liking her father more than her mother. Sun-jae's crappy life takes a drastic turn when, having lost track of her daughter somewhere in the city, she runs home to see if the little one has shown up there. Happily, Tae-su did. Unfortunately, Sun-jae got there first and caught her hubby making the beast with two backs – one of which was definitely not hers.

Sun-jae and Tae-su move to the downmarket section of town, exchanging the sterile enormity of their old home for an apartment so rundown grungy that it appears to have been entirely washed in a coating of chewing tobacco spit. Sun-jae tries to start up a new eye clinic, falling in with a young, carefree architect who will be the flick's love interest. And - despite living in an apartment that is lit like a torture chamber and decorated in shades of sickly green, rust red, and inky black – things are kinda looking up.

Enter the shoes!

One night, riding the subway, Sunny J sees the shoes on the train. Being a shoe junkie, she takes the eponymous footwear home. Trouble begins immediately. Sunny J and her daughter immediately begin fighting, sometimes quite physically, over the shoes. Strangers begin reacting strangely to her, either fleeing her or attacking her and demanding the shoes. Her only friend steals the shoes, only to die in a nasty "accident" that ends with the removal of her feet. And, like the cat of camp song fame, the shoes just keep coming back. Again and again, the cursed clogs appear inexplicably in her daughter's clutches.

In an effort to escape the shoes' baleful influence, Sun-jae and her beau investigate the history of the house and shoes, linking the curse to a love triangle gone bad between a choreographer and two ballet dancers that ended in all manner of murder and supernatural carnage during Korea's era as a vassal state to Japan (1910 to 1945). But, in the course the investigation, Sun-jae's boytoy discovers that she's been pulling a snow job: Not only did she never divorce her husband, but the hubby has weirdly vanished from the scene. What up with that?

Red Shoes is an interesting, but uneven contribution to the growing body of Asian ghost stories available in the West. Filmmaker Yong gyun-Kim does a lot right. The film is a deft combination of Western and Eastern ghost story tropes. There's plenty of The Ring on display (the way that the style of a handful of manga artists became something akin multinational regional "official" style, the once cheapo subgenre of J-horror is becoming not only Japan's nation language of film horror, but the dominant mode of horror cinema for much of Asia). The long-haired ghosts, the flickering florescent light fixtures, the jump scares, the game-like curse rules, the soft and deep color palates, and a "gotcha" denouement are here for anybody who is an aficionado of the subgenre. But, to the betterment of the film experience, Yong gyun-Kim mixes in a wealth of extra-Asian influences and references. The ballet theme, the train, and the titular red shoes themselves, we've covered. Alert viewers will also catch nods to non-J-horror inspirations as disparate as Nightmare on Elm Street and American Werewolf in London. The narrative structure more resembles The Exorcist and Poltergeist than the countdown structure or repetitious drumming pattern of J-horror classics like The Ring, The Grudge, and Pulse. Not that the Western spookshow hooks are necessary superior. Instead, it simply lets a little fresh air into a formulaic approach the too easily becomes a straight jacket for filmmakers.

The negatives, however, aren't easy to overlook. The visual style is pretty derivative. This looks like a dozen other well-made but not particularly inspired J-horror spawned flicks. The acting is quite uneven, a feature that sticks out all the more due to the fact that the film's protagonist, the lovely Hye-su Kim, is really great at half her role. Though there are dozens of actors who look better slightly abused, Kim is one of the few actresses who is most captivating when she looks tired, abused, and trapped. Sitting on a subway train, half dead, after a long day's work, Kim touches some deep well of sympathy. Unfortunately, the flick also asks her to do a lot of somewhat absurd crap and that doesn't work out so well. Finally, and perhaps worst, is the "gotcha" ending that actually starts out promisingly but devolves into a phantasmagoric finale that is less otherworldly than lazy.

I enjoyed The Red Shoes. It's leisurely pacing drew me in and the domestic strife it depicted had the sharp edge of the real that good drama captures. The best ghost stories are, ultimately, about human relationships. Not only the victims, but the relationships that continue to bind the restless dead to this world. At its best, The Red Shoes gets that. But, the film loses its way near the end, ultimately failing to deliver on its early promise. Potential viewers should consider themselves forewarned.

Stuff: In which we learn what a dybbuk is, read smack about the movie "The Unborn," listen to an exorcism, and check in on Hitler and Judas.

On the Jewsih culture web site Nextbook web site, the new horror flick The Unborn gets some attention because its spectral villain is not just a ghosty, but specifically a "dybbuk": "In Kabbalah and European Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a malicious possessing spirit, believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person."

The Nextbook review of the flick isn't very flattering. According to the reviewer, the movie is lamely unoriginal in most parts and insulting where it is original. From the review:

The Unborn is not terribly scary, and it's humorless (unless you count the scenes with the homicidal six-year-old, which had the audience guffawing at the screening I attended). Aside from its Jewish angle it's as predictable as all the other horror films that studios dump into theaters every January. The old Hungarian, Sofi Kozma, is Casey's grandmother. She survived Auschwitz as a child, but her twin brother didn't. The siblings were subjected to one of Josef Mengele's perverse experiments, in which the brother had something toxic injected into his eyes to make them blue. (Since, you know, blue eyes were important to the Nazis.) The brother died, and then he came back to life. But he wasn't the same anymore—he was a dybbuk! Yes, here's a mainstream horror movie aimed at teenagers—complete with video IM'ing and babysitting and vodka-and-Red-Bulls—that has a dybbuk as its villain, and goes to awkward lengths to explain what a dybbuk is.

In her skillful accent, Jane Alexander says that she and her fellow kiddie Auschwitz prisoners could tell that her brother was no longer her brother. He had neon-blue eyes and a ghostly pallor. "So I killed it," she says. Yep, she killed her own brother at Auschwitz. (And you thought The Reader was the most deplorable Holocaust-exploiting film now in theaters.)

Shame the review makes it sound so dull; I wasn't interested in the flick until this review underscored the whole folkloric angle. The reviewer giveth and the reviewer taketh away, I guess.

The experience isn't a total washout though. The review contained this odd tidbit that I found interesting:

"My main source of research was watching real exorcisms on YouTube," Yustman says in the press notes.

There are exorcism videos floating around on Youtube?

No. Not really. Not that I could find. At least, no good ones.

One of the most popular seems is this collage of alleged images and audio recordings of the exorcism of on Anneliese Michel.



Michel was born of German Catholic parents. Her family belonged to a rebellious strain of Bavarian Catholicism that had rejected Vatican II reforms.

Starting in the late 1960s, Michel was plagued by repeated bouts of crippling mental illness. Treatments seemed to do little to help her and, with the help of various religious authorities, she diagnosed herself as demonically possessed. Michel's behavior, when possessed, was extensively catalogued by her family and members of the clergy. She would rip the clothes off her body, perform hundreds of squat exercises compulsively each day, and eat insects she caught in the home. For days on end she would crawl around the house and act like a dog. Once she found a dead bird and bit the head off. She would urinate on the floor that then, getting on her hands and knees, lap up the puddle.

During the first half of 1976, two Catholic priests performed the rites of exorcism on Michel 67 times. More than half of the sessions were recorded on tape. In these recordings, several possessing demons introduce themselves. In one of the stranger episodes, the spirits of Judas and Hitler make an appearance and actually answer questions put to them by the priests. On tape, the supposed spirit of Hitler mocks atheists for thinking there's no afterlife. Later, the spirit of Judas insults Hitler and assures the priests that Hitler has no authority in Hell.

Through the exorcisms, Michel’s voice sound very much like the voice of the possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist, which had been release in Germany two years prior to the creation of the Michel tapes.

About mid-way through 1976, Anneliese Michel began telling the priests that she believed she had to die in order to redeem the wayward youth of the world and save those Catholic apostates who believed in Vatican II reforms. She began refusing food. At her own request, no doctors were consulted. Before the year was out, Annaliese had starved to death. She weighed 68 pounds when she died.

After her death, both priests and both of Michel's parents were charged and convicted of negligent homicide manslaughter. All four defendents were sentenced to six months of prison time. That time was suspended and they were put on three-year's probation.

For genre fans, Anneliese Michel probably ranks just behind the "Roland," the teenaged boy from Cottage City, Maryland, that inspired the novel The Exorcist, for cinematic relevance. And since you could say The Exorcist franchise buried Roland’s story rather than immortalize it, one could argue that Michel’s story has had a more extensive cinematic run. Michel’s exorcism and death form the basis for two films: Requiem and The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

Movies: Master of (near) disaster.

Director Ma Wu's 1993 Exorcist Master, a kung fu action horror slapstick comedy mystery blowout, has no right to be as entertaining as it is. The sense of impending cinematic disaster hovers over every broad joke, every not so special effect, and every music motif that is rendered by the synthesized sound of dogs barking. And yet, somehow, when the last shot freeze-frames and the credits roll, you weigh the demands the movie made of you against the entertainment-value it returned and you have to conclude that you, lucky viewer, have actually come out in the black.

As small scale, goofy, and sometimes downright embarrassing as Exorcist Master (for the language title purists, that's Kui moh do jeung in Cantonese, Qu mo dao zhang in Mandarin, Exorcist Meester in Dutch and racist impersonations of Mexicans, Mestre do Exorcist em português, and Orcistexa Asterma in Pig Latin) can be, it boasts a clever plot, some deftly breakneck tonal changes, and an almost desperate determination to please any audience member that might stumble into the way of its non-stop spray of gags, kung fu stunts, plot twists, and pratfalls.

The plot breaks down thusly: The small Chinese town of Wine Spring, in the early half of the Twentieth Century, is home to "Uncle," a humorless Taoist monk and kung fu master who is the titular master at exorcism. Put out of your mind the relentlessly dour and ostentatiously semireligious witch-doctory of American exorcism films. As it is practiced in this flick, exorcism is a contact sport that's part spiritual ceremony, part kung fu showdown, part stage magic performance, and part Three Stooges routine. The movie opens with Uncle's two apprentices botching a routine exorcism. Uncle has to come in and put the boot to some ghost butt. Because the Internet is good and does truly love us, you can find a fine example of ghostbusting à la chinois on Youtube. It has to be seen to be believed:



Unfortunately, that short clip doesn't include the few seconds leading up to that slap fu battle, as the first appearance of the she-ghost is actually quite effective in building up some tension and producing some genuinely nice light-horror moments. If you had that added to the front, you'd basically get the film's entire MO in a single clip. With nearly manic speed, the film can shift from low humor to surreal absurdity to impressive action and well-handled horror several times a scene. Used extensively, these wild shifts would be more exhausting than exhilarating, but Wu saves his energy for a handful of key scenes. These rest he handles with a fairly heavy comedic touch. Even when restraining himself, there nothing subtle about Wu's sense of humor.

After this initial exorcism, akin to a Bond pre-title sequence, the plot proper begins. We learn that a Christian missionary is coming to re-open a long since boarded up church at that heart of Wine Spring. Uncle is against this, and not just because he lacks the proper ecumenical attitude. Uncle believes that a great evil is contained within the church and re-opening it will free this malevolent force on the whole town.

In one of the more clever twists of the plot, the missionary – a well-meaning but clueless bumbler – is supported by several prominent local townspeople. Not because they're Christian, mind you. Rather, this cabal runs the local cathouses, opium dens, and gambling joints. Uncle, previously the only religious authority in town, was putting the kibosh on their ventures. With a successful rival church in town, Uncle's authority will diminish. Furthermore, the missionary's total linguistic and cultural ineptitude means that the head of the new church will basically be ignorant of their activities. By showing how different factions of the population resist or exploit the Western newcomers, the flick puts a nice spin on what might otherwise be a tired East = Good, West = Bad exercise.

Supported by the corrupt elite, the missionary pushes past Uncle's objectives and opens the church. Things go well for a while, but the lid comes off when Uncle's assistants uncover a drug smuggling pipeline that operates under the guise of a vampire herding operation.

I kid you not.

In Chinese mythology, you can control vampires by attaching strips of paper bearing the correct magical words to their foreheads. A vampire shepherd is a guy who goes around from town to town gathering up the pacified vampires. He then takes them to the nearest church and destroys them. It's quite a sight. Chinese vampires don't walk but rather fly or bound about through a series of standing broad jumps. (I read once that this is because their bodies are supposed to be stiff with rigor mortis, though this explanation sounds apocryphal to me.) The vampire shepherd stands at the front of a long line of jumping guys, ringing a bell to warn travelers that he's coming through with a string of fresh vampires and throwing magic strips of paper over his shoulders to keep all the bloodsuckers sedated. It one of the film's neatest images.

However, the vampire shepherd and his flock are actually drug mules. Knowing that everybody will stay the heck away from a line of leaping undead, they use the bit as a cover for opium smuggling. Uncle goes to put the hurt on this scofflaws when the previously mentioned evil from the church – a vampire with abilities and costuming that will be familiar to Western viewers, but throw Uncle for a loop – makes himself known in a spectacular manner.

Which leads to all manner of kung fu exorcism wackiness. Flying crucified vampires, neon crosses used as weapons, ass-biting undead, and more. You won't be disappointed.

Not that there isn't plenty to be disappointed in. There's a lot of crap in Exorcist Master that viewers could do without. When Wu's firing on all cylinders, his broad humor has an almost Raimi-ish quality to it. And that's great, for the 60 percent of the time that Wu's firing on all cylinders. The rest of the time, the humor is more energetic than talented, more noisy than funny. The comedic strategy behind Exorcist Master is quantity over quality. A ton of wasted effort is the predictable result.

Worse than the dud gags is the soundtrack. Consisting almost entirely of songs that sound suspiciously like pre-programmed demo routines from a civilian-grade keyboard, the film's music is distractingly monotonous and pointlessly anachronistic. Occasionally it does lapse into unintentional humor – such as an extended bit that I think is synth-only version of Tone Lōc's "Funky Cold Medina" and something that we ended up called the Canine Love Theme, a repeated motif that is played with the synth's "dog bark" sound effect on – but these moments are too few and far between to redeem the film's score.

Finally, Wu is capable of producing some great shots that reveal a real sense of style and narrative technique. Unfortunately, he's also prone to underlighting his sets, losing the flow of action, or just flubbing his compositions.

These are real flaws and the pleasures of the movie aren't strong enough to make the viewer just forget them. However, the film's aims are so modest that stakes feel low and it makes you feel generous. It works hard to land every joke, slam home every punch. It wears its goal – to keep you smiling along for an hour and a half – on its sleeve and there's something infectious about its freewheeling spirit. I don't know if it is quite gonzo enough for the post-Psychotronic set of so-bad-it's-good fanciers, but for folks who have the necessary goofiness tolerance threshold to enjoy, say, Santo vs. [something that is about to get its butt whipped] films, this isn't a bad way to spend 90 minutes.

Link Proliferation: The dead stay with us.

The Body Part Bakery

Here's some video footage of The Body Part Bakery, a Thai bakery that specializes in making baked goods in the shape of human body parts. It's what the Texas Chain Saw Massacre would have looked like if it'd been an anti-gluten screed instead of metaphor for the horrors of factory slaughter.


The Scary Body Parts Bakery - More bloopers are a click away


The amazing tale of the Ovitz clan

At the fabu Human Marvels site, there's the amazing story of the Ovitz family, a clan of Transylvanian Jewish midgets who became the "research subjects" of the infamous Dr. Mengele.

From the article:

The Ovitz family were Transylvanian Jews. Their patriarch, Shimshon Isaac Ovitz, was a respected Rabbi and dwarf. The majority of his children, Elizabeth included, inherited his pseudoachondroplasia dwarfism and upon his sudden death his widow reasoned that the seven stunted Ovitz siblings could secure a financially sound career as a traveling music troupe. In relatively short order, the siblings formed the 'Jazz Band of Lilliput' and began touring Central Europe.

By 1942, despite the unstable status of Central Europe of the march of the Nazi army, the Ovitz family managed to continue touring by concealing their Jewish identities. Elizabeth was able to marry in May of that same year to a young theatre manager named Yoshko Moskovitz. The couple was forced to split just ten days after their marriage when Yoshko was drafted into a labour battalion. For another two years, the Ovitz family continued to tour, unfortunately they were in Hungary in March of 1944 when German troops occupied the country. On May 17 the Ovitz family was captured, loaded into a boxcar and sent off to Auschwitz.

There the family fell into the clutches of the infamous Nazi doctor.

Mengele had previously tortured, experimented upon and dissected dozens of twin siblings for no reason other than to document the similarities of their internal organs and in the Ovitz family Mengele saw the ultimate test subjects. In fact, Elizabeth quoted Mengele as enthusiastically declaring: 'Now I will have work for the next twenty years; now science will have an interesting subject to consider.'

At Auschwitz Elizabeth and her family were segregated and subjected to all manner of frenetic experimentation. As Elizabeth would write:

'The most frightful experiments of all were the gynaecological experiments. They tied us to the table and the systematic torture began. They injected things into our uterus, extracted blood, dug into us, pierced us and removed samples. It is impossible to put into words the intolerable pain that we suffered, which continued for many days after the experiments ceased.'

The gynaecological experimentation was so severe that even the doctors assisting the procedures eventually refused to continue out of pity, whilst citing the very real possibility that the family would not be able to survive further invasive procedure. Mengele relented as he did not want to risk the lives of his favourite lab rats. Instead, he concocted and implemented new sadistic experiments.

'They extracted fluid from our spine. The hair extraction began again and when we were ready to collapse, they began painful tests on the brain, nose, mouth, and hand region. All stages were fully documented with illustrations. It may be noted, ironically, that we were among the only ones in the world whose torture was premeditated and "scientifically" documented for the sake of future generations.'

Would that were true, Elizabeth.

When the death camp was liberated in 1945, Elizabeth and her family were freed. They continued to tour and perform for several years. Before the decade was out, Elizabeth immigrated to Israel, where she died in 1992. She outlived Mengele by nearly two decades: the Nazi butcher escaped to Brazil where he lived, free and un-prosecuted for his crimes, until 1979.


Crazy revenge wackiness, cubed

The fine folks over at Cubeecraft, mayhaps in protest over the proposed "not a" remake, have made an Oldboy cubee figure.

Park life

Here's Does It Offend You, Yeah's bizarre video for their tune "Weird Science." Though the special effects are pretty cheesy, there is a couple with a fused face and a decided non-surgical separation procedure which leads to a fair amount of blood. NSFW? You'll have to make the call. I refuse to play bad cop here. You're an adult and you can make these decisions on your own.




Another minute off the Countdown to Skynet Clock

Mad science marches on!

Scientific American has some footage of Israel's new intelligence-gathering, armament-capable robot soldier.

The thing actually has the Cobra-worthy name of Versatile Intelligent Portable Robot or VIPeR.


How our brains make ghosts

Those mad science experts as Scientific American are at it again. This time, an article in the mag discusses grief hallucinations: vivid multi-sensory hallucinations of the recently departed that are, apparently, not that uncommon.

From the article:

The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.

Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. One study, by the researcher Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg, found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved's passing. As a marker of how vivid such visions can seem, almost a third of the people reported that they spoke in response to their experiences. In other words, these weren't just peripheral illusions: they could evoke the very essence of the deceased.

More:

Occasionally, these hallucinations are heart-rending. A 2002 case report by German researchers described how a middle aged woman, grieving her daughter’s death from a heroin overdose, regularly saw the young girl and sometimes heard her say "Mamma, Mamma!" and "It's so cold." Thankfully, these distressing experiences tend to be rare, and most people who experience hallucinations during bereavement find them comforting, as if they were re-connecting with something of the positive from the person’s life. Perhaps this reconnecting is reflected in the fact that the intensity of grief has been found to predict the number of pleasant hallucinations, as has the happiness of the marriage to the person who passed away.

There are hints that the type of grief hallucinations might also differ across cultures. Anthropologists have told us a great deal about how the ceremonies, beliefs and the social rituals of death differ greatly across the world, but we have few clues about how these different approaches affect how people experience the dead after they have gone. Carlos Sluzki, the owner of the shadow cat and a cross-cultural researcher at George Mason University, suggests that in cultures of non-European origin the distinction between "in here" and "out there" experiences is less strictly defined, and so grief hallucinations may not be considered so personally worrying. In a recent article, he discussed the case of an elderly Hispanic lady who was frequently "visited" by two of her children who died in adulthood and were a comforting and valued part of her social network.

(Admittedly vaguely related pic awesomeness is my favorite photo from Diane Arbus)

Stuff: Torture couture.

I visited NYC's Fashion Institute of Technology yesterday. Their museum is currently hosting a wonderful exhibit on goth fashion: Gothic: Dark Glamour. At first, I was a little hesitant to go. I was worried that I was basically going to walk into a slightly upmarket showcase for Hot Topic-grade junk, but I was honestly blown away. The exhibit's relevance as a historical overview is secured by its scope and depth, while the artistic merit of the show rests on the fact that the designs and items collected are truly beautiful and fascinating.

The show tracks the development of the gothic look back to Victorian mourning clothing – notably the fashionable widow's weeds worn by young women: a look Victorians wittily referred to as "the trap rebaited." From there, you get a flowering of "dark" looks from the 1980s, with a second boom at the dawn of the Twenty-first Century. The exhibit's focus is on high couture designers and their works, but some room is made for examples of youth streetwear and a couple of examples of the "elegant gothic Lolita" look the developed in Japan.

There's a ton to discuss about the exhibit. The show covers the role of Japanese designers in redefining the gothic with a distinctly non-Western flare (interestingly, despite the gothic's Euro origins, the show is dominated by brilliant work from American and Japanese designers), the figure of the dandy, the role of the French Revolution in the development of the gothic novel, proto-vampiric imagery in fashion discourse prior to the publication of Dracula, and so much more that is really is a must see for anybody interested in what horror tropes do once they leave the confines of literature and film.

Given the scope of the show, I'll focus on a single element – the work of Japanese designer Kei Kagami.

Let's start with a comparison.

First, a movie poster:

Second, a fashion photo:

The former is, of course, a poster for Saw. The latter is a picture of a dress designer by Kei Kagami. Kagami's first solo runway show and the premiere of Saw both occurred in 2004. Apparently, while the folks behind Saw were developing their film's look, Kagami was developing a similar look based on his training at the Bunka Fashion College of Tokyo, Central St. Martin's College of Art & Design in London, and a stint as a studio assistant for John Galliano (one of the few non-Japanese or American designers heavily represented in the goth exhibit).

Here's more Kagami.

Interesting, despite the general tendency of horror bloggers – including myself - to go to great lengths to distinguish the nakedly industrial aesthetic of works like Saw and Hostel from the more Romantic look of traditional gothic fare, Kagami firmly places his work within the gothic tradition and sees no contradiction. He has referred to his look as "neo-gothic" and, more entertainingly, spins gothic tales about himself and his work. When singer and fashion reporter Diane Pernet asked Kagami about the inspiration behind a particular line of shoe designs, the designer gave the following story, with Kagami's caps-free writing style preserved:

let me tell you the story of ' a ghost rider that took me to a cemetery in North London '. this ghost story is not scary at all but what happened was true .

let me tell you the story of ' a ghost rider that took me to a cemetery in North London '.
this ghost story is not scary at all but what happened was true .

one day i went to a biker's cafe called ' Ace Cafe' in north London .
on the way home i found a beautiful vintage bike , maybe it was one called ' Vincent black shadow '( sounds already spooky ) , so i decided to chase it. it was a fast bike , i could not really catch up with it but i kept chasing it as long as i could see it .

but when i turned at the last corner , i could not see it anymore , it just disappeared .
i stopped my bike and what i could see was only the entrance of Highgate cemetery .
so i visited this cemetery in the weekend .
there was not the Vincent black shadow there but a beautiful world in shade of Highgate.

Kagami currently operates out of Milan. He has showrooms in London, Milan, and Hiroshima.