Halloween Art

 Art for an upcoming comic called Writhing Harvest, as part of my series The Secret Tongue (along with A Stalker Outside Time). 

 (c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2024

The Empty Room illustration

 

Fear of Water illustration

The Empty Room, illustrated

 

Fear of Water, illustrated

The Man Behind the Wall, illustrated

 

The Twenty Ninth Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTY NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I finished watching a further series of Mad Scientist horror movies from the past week. These include: The Nest (1988), about genetically altered super-roaches let loose by a shady corporation; The Flesh Eaters (1964), about genetically altered super-amoebas let loose by a Nazi scientist working for a shady corporation; and a re-watch of David Cronenberg’s best mad science films, including The Brood (1979), The Fly (1986), and Crimes of the Future (2022, which inherits its title from Cronenberg’s early student film, about a plague unleashed by a Mad Scientist). 

Cronenberg is known as the great master of body horror. But he should also be known as the great reinventor of mad science horror, as the majority of his films feature the antics of Mad Scientists in some capacity. His masterpiece, The Fly, is perhaps the greatest mad science horror film ever made. The Fly’s protagonist, Seth Brundle, is a tragic hero in the classic Frankenstein mold. He toils selflessly out of exuberant passion for science and a genuine desire to transform the world for the better. But because he must rely for funding on a corporation that jealously guards its secrets in order to maintain monopoly control, Brundle must work in isolation, without the oversight of colleagues to ensure safety. Thus, in a moment of impulsiveness while drunk, there is no one to stop him from using his new machine on himself, which literally does not yet have all the bugs worked out. Thus, like Frankenstein in the original novel, an instance of personal weakness in an otherwise heroic scientist, who has been forced to work in isolation, is all it takes for a worthwhile, potentially revolutionary experiment to produce a gruesome outcome. 

In contrast, Cronenberg’s earlier film The Brood, another masterful work of indelible horror cinema, features the toxic male egotism of Dr. Hal Ragland, who has invented a metaphysical science called “Psychoplasmics” (one of my favorite sci fi jargon terms) that allows him to induce biological parthenogenesis in humans through highly abusive roleplay, under the guise of therapy. Although Dr. Ragland does succeed in his ultimate aim, his self-aggrandizing manipulation and abuse ruins the validity of his work as science.

This key contrast between Brundle and Ragland leads me to my overall thoughts on all of these works of Mad Scientist horror I watched this Halloween month. I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to break this subgenre down typologically is by using the MMO method of criminal investigation: the MOTIVE of the perpetrator, i.e. the Mad Scientist; the MEANS of the mad experiment; and the OPPORTUNITY, or lack thereof, created by social and institutional circumstances. 

MOTIVE: 

(1) Noble Intent: The Mad Scientist can be driven by the truly noble intent to benefit humanity through good science, making them a tragic hero, e.g. Victor Frankenstein and Seth Brundle. A real world example of this would be Oppenheimer—at least according to Oppenheimer. Another highly debatable real world case, one that is much closer in nature to Frankenstein and Brundle, is that of Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who successfully created the first genetically altered humans by illegally circumventing human experimentation laws and editing the DNA of twin girls in utero to make them HIV immune.

(2) Selfishness: The Mad Scientist can be driven by ego and ambition, which ends up delegitimizing their work when they cut corners to serve their self-interest, e.g. Dr. Ragland. A real world example of this is Dr. Mengele, who let hateful pseudoscience and pointless brutality totally eclipse any legitimacy his work might have had, out of a desire to please his masters and gain more power. 

MEANS: 

(1) Worthwhile Risk: The mad science experiment has a good chance of yielding results that will be highly beneficial to humanity, such that even the (consenting) endangerment of human life is worth the risk, e.g. Brundle’s teleportation project. Various real world experiments in space flight fall under this category.   

(2) Unnecessarily Destructive: The mad science experiment treats human lives as disposable fodder, and may even endanger humanity as a whole, for some minor potential benefit that is negligible compared to the cost, e.g. the mind control experiments in Strange Behavior. A real world example would be our own government’s ghastly attempts at mind control under the MKULTRA project, which left dozens of unwilling human subjects severely brain damaged, while yielding nothing of substantive benefit. 

OPPORTUNITY: 

(1) Open Support: The mad science experiment is conducted in the open, with full public knowledge and the support of major legitimate scientific institutions. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), where the first manned space mission results in an astronaut’s monstrous mutation after he returns to Earth, is one of the very few horror film examples of this. Meanwhile, in the real world, most of mainstream science conducted at academic institutions meets this standard.

(2) Underground: Whether because of the persecution of a superstitious public or the imposed isolation of a power-hungry organization, the mad science experiment must be conducted in secret, with little to no oversight. All of the horror films I watched this month took place underground in this sense—I guess secrecy is just inherently more dramatic. A real world example would be the truly horrific experiments conducted by the Japanese military during World War II at Unit 731, a hellish research institute that is still shrouded in as much official secrecy as Area 51 is in the US. 

So, what emerges from this horror subgenre taken as a whole is an implicit cultural critique of science. This critique suggests that tragedy can only be avoided when legitimate scientists with noble intent receive unrestricted public and institutional support in pursuit of a goal that is worth the risk taken. 

Of course, there are several problems here. First, only the scientists themselves can ever truly know if their motives are pure or are tainted by egotism. Second, it is often only in hindsight that we will know if the promised benefits in fact come to fruition and thereby outweigh the cost. And third, likewise, only in the future will we know if we are now being overly cautious and superstitious in putting limits on certain types of science, or if our caution is warranted. Meanwhile, under neoliberalism, there is not much we can do about power hungry organizations monopolizing and corrupting beneficial scientific innovation. 

These problems create ever-present gaps through which the horrors of mad science can erupt into our world, at any time. And the further science advances, the more horrific these threats become.

The Nineteenth Night of Halloween

ON THE NINETEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I finished watching the entire Hammer Film series of Frankenstein movies, made between 1957 and 1974, all directed by Terence Fisher and all starring Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein. (I'm excluding The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) and The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), as these are not directed by Terence Fisher and are out of continuity with his series; I did watch them and can confirm that they are not worthwhile.) (Also, to out-pedant the “Frankenstein is the name of the doctor, not his monster” pedants, in fact Victor Frankenstein is technically not a doctor, he hadn’t earned his doctorate by the time of his fateful experiment, after which he ceased studies due to “brain fever.” In this series, he does often pose as a doctor under an alias, but his actual title is Baron Frankenstein.) 

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) is Hammer’s version of the original novel. Like the Universal version, its monster is an unintelligent menace. This is of course an egregious departure from the novel, where the monster is as intellectually eloquent and profound as it is physically powerful. (Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein (1994) gets this right, however, which is one of many reasons it is my favorite adaptation.) Fortunately, the creature effects distinguish themselves from Karloff’s iconic blockhead in being much gorier and creepier. Cushing’s take on Frankenstein also differs from the novel in that he is not a romantic hero but is instead cold and fixated on his Promethean quest to the exclusion of any concern for human life. Though Cushing masterfully evolves the character over the course of the series, coldness and reckless fixation remain his defining traits.

The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) is the direct sequel to Curse, picking up where it ended, with Victor’s scheme to escape the guillotine. Revenge is the best in the series (though I personally enjoyed rewatching Monster from Hell more). Unlike every other Frankenstein sequel before it, Fisher has the novel idea to tell a NEW STORY with the character! Incredibly, we get to see that Victor really is a superhuman scientist when he comes up with a NEW EXPERIMENT that is the logical next step in his project, rather than just doing the same old stitch-up-and-shock routine (which is all that the Universal version ever did (though Bride is great), to the point of becoming a two dimensional caricature, as lampooned in Young Frankenstein). Here he is focused on growing brainless but otherwise normal human bodies that he can then transplant the existing brains of living human donors into. Nothing that Victor does in this film is overtly villainous. And the process he is working to perfect is an obviously beneficial and transformative breakthrough for humanity. He first transplants the brain of a man debilitated by a degenerative disease into a healthy body. Then, Victor’s own brain is transplanted into a fresh copy of his body when he is mortally wounded. So he really is just a straightforward epic hero of science in this film. The true villain that forces the narrative mode back to tragedy is society’s prejudice against scientific progress. And this becomes the thesis of Fisher’s whole series: if society would stop persecuting Frankenstein, and if the scientific community and other institutional authorities would support him in his endeavors, humanity would be saved. In other words, according to Fisher, Frankenstein does nothing wrong (in essence); superstitious conservativism is what causes him to do reckless things that lead to disaster. And actually, this was also the thesis of Mary Shelley’s original 1818 version of the novel (religious outrage led to the later edition being mangled). Contrary to common cliché, Shelley’s novel is not a warning about the overweening hubris of science. It is rather about how prejudice against pioneering ideas in science leads to hidden experiments in private where individual human, or individual institutional, failings (cowardice in Victor’s case, avarice in the case of corporate and military science) precipitate catastrophe—an outcome that in turn gets twisted back into confirmation of society’s bias against science. So in this way, spiritually, Revenge is more true to Shelley’s intent than most other adaptations. 

The following three sequels never surpass Revenge but rather serve as lesser variations on the same theme.     

Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) sees Frankenstein again changing things up with his experiment, this time on a more metaphysical tack. It seems that he has discovered a means to trap the human soul before it leaves a freshly dead body, inside of a kind of dome-shaped laser forcefield. This allows him to transfer the soul of his wrongly executed assistant into his girlfriend. Perhaps due to body dysmorphia (though I don’t know if Fisher was aware of this condition), the soul-fused creation visits a murder spree upon the people who got the assistant beheaded. This film again portrays Frankenstein as a sympathetic benefactor who is unfairly persecuted by a fiendish popular mob. 

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) is well-made but is largely a repeat of Revenge, with Victor again focused on brain transplantation. What sets this one apart is that Victor has become a much nastier character, coldly murdering for the pieces he requires and implicating a young couple so as to pressgang them into his service. It’s not clear to what end Fisher takes this darker turn, other than to say that years of being unfairly treated like the villain by society has caused Frankenstein to lean into this role out of spite.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) is really fun, I love it. It is the most gothic and grotesque of the series, which it achieves by elevating atmosphere and style over realism and depth. An older Frankenstein has managed to take over a Bedlam-like asylum from the inside. And he uses the asylum's facilities to create the gratuitously hideous titular Monster. Seemingly at this point he does this out of simple love of his ghastly craft, having resigned himself to the fact that humanity at large will never accept his gifts. One of the best moments of the entire series comes at the very end: After his latest spawn has predictably wreaked gruesome havoc and been destroyed, he immediately starts sweeping up to prepare the lab for another go, leaving us with the parting words, “We must get this place tidied up so we can start afresh. Now we shall need new material, naturally ...” Thus he shows us that he will gladly keep repeating the same cycle forever. Truly the perfect ending for a character that only ever grows more relevant.

The Seventh Night of Halloween

ON THE SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I watched Strange Behavior (1981), directed by Michael Laughlin. This was surprisingly good! I loved the first half especially. Then it kind of loses steam in the second act. When they confront the Mad Scientist for the first time, the film had the opportunity to up the ante with brain-washed mayhem loosed upon small town America, but instead it drags its feet with predictable melodrama. All in all though, it's pretty awesome. Laughlin also directed the highly underrated Strange Invaders, the second entry in an intended "Strange" trilogy. 

The Mad Scientist here is certainly a real scientist, but not one of the Frankensteinian tragic-hero ilk. She does not work in isolation but rather with the full backing and facilities of mainstream academia, possibly in collaboration with the military. And she does not undertake her MKULTRA-inspired mind-control experiments altruistically or with a pure devotion to discovery but rather with a gleeful megalomaniacal vision of remaking society through mental hygiene.

...

So, I'm going to focus on making more illustrated creepy flash fiction over the coming NIGHTS OF HALLOWEEN, which I will post when finished. Then I will share my summary thoughts on the Mad Scientists of all the horror movies I watch while drawing, closer to SAMHAIN. HAPPY HALLOWEEN MONTH!

The Sixth Night of Halloween

 

ON THE SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Donovan’s Brain (1953). This was kind of like a feature-length episode of the original Outer Limits. Actually, I know there was at least one episode with this same premise, and it was better done.

At least the Mad Scientist this time is an actual scientist, though. Dr. Cory wants to keep brains alive outside of the body. His experiments to this end are all conducted in a lab put together in his own home, cut off from any academic institution. It’s suggested he does this because his experiments are unorthodox or forbidden by mainstream science. Of course, it just so happens that a mortally wounded man is brought to the lab, and his life can only be saved by turning him into a self-aware brain in a vat.

So, Dr. Cory is in the classic Victor Frankenstein mold of a brilliant adept of the most advanced sciences, who is driven to change the world for the better through innovation upon the natural order, but who is forced to work outside the system, in isolation, in defiance of ethics and laws, due to the particular practices involved in his work being shunned as fruitless or dangerous or both. His well-intentioned but overweening ambition then results in tragedy when the very act that vindicates his experiment at the same time proves its danger.

The Fourth Night of Halloween

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Kevin Smith’s Tusk (2014). Predictably, Smith’s intrusive unfunny comedy ruined this for me, even though the sections of genuine atmosphere and psychological terror unquestionably make this his best movie.

Anyway, the Mad Scientist here is once again not actually a scientist. Rather he belongs to that subclass of horror villain we may call the Experimental Surgery Fetishist. Due to a traumatic incident at sea long ago, he has made it his mission to transform people into walruses. He does this by imprisoning them in his backwoods mansion, amputating limbs, sewing together joints, and performing major skin grafts to create jagged human sculptures that resemble walruses in form and function. His motive for doing this is to somehow honor the walrus he forced to kill to survive at sea. He certainly qualifies as mad, in company with the mad doctors from films like Eyes Without a Face, Skin I Live In, Human Centipede, and Cronenberg’s recent Crimes of the Future, who take forced body modification to the furthest extremes in pursuit of some form of twisted love. But as such, they should probably more properly be thought of as Mad Artists than Mad Scientists.

The Third Night of Halloween

ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I watched The Monster-Maker (1944). I chose it because I’ve decided to focus on the MAD SCIENTIST in horror movies this year. I don’t plan on summarizing or analyzing each movie as whole—you’ll have to look it up on Wikipedia if you want to know more (or this case, watch the whole thing for free on Youtube, where it’s been uploaded multiple times). Instead, I’m just going to focus on what is unique about the take on the Mad Scientist archetype and theme.

Here, we learn the Mad Scientist is not actually a scientist at all but a demented thief and con artist. He killed and stole the notes of a scientist working on a cure for Acromegaly. This is a real degenerative disease that causes progressive growth and distortion of the face and extremities. He has done this because he thinks that if he can derive the cure from the scientist's notes, he can become rich by withholding it from the world and charging vast sums to treat the afflicted. So, what makes him mad in terms of the science is his hope to exploit sick people for profit. Thus, by this film’s definition, every real world pharmaceutical company today is a monstrous Mad Science outfit. Which is not at all wrong!

A Stalker Outside Time preview, pages 1-3

 (c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2024

A Stalker Outside Time, page 3, panels 1 & 2

 (c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2024

A Stalker Outside Time, page 2

(c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2024

A Stalker Outside Time, page 1

(c) Eric Byron Nelson, 2024

A Stalker Outside Time, page 1, panel 6

 

(c) Eric Byron Nelson, 7.2024

A Stalker Outside Time, page 1, panel 5

 (c) Eric Byron Nelson, 7.2024

A Stalker Outside Time, page 1, panels 3 & 4

 

A Stalker Outside Time, page 1, panels 1 & 2

 

How a Homunculus Is Born

Have you ever been at a loss for the right response to your homunculus' awkward questions? Questions like, “What am I?” “Where do skin babies come from?” or “Why was I created, only to suffer hideously and crave retribution?” Well, look no further than this convenient infographic!

Let Me Live in Your Blood (Incanto 3)

Though my skin and my blood in the night may be frozen, onward I crawl

to your door, to your tower that sees me, signals and shows me the way.

Though I die at your door, by your fire I awake alive in your blood.

I’m unharmed but embraced by your arms at the heart of spiraling walls.

But by day you have gone, and I shiver and ache for night by your fire.

In the streets and the alleys below you are cursed and hated by all.

Distain for their cowardice drove me to seek your redoubt, out of spite.

While they fear you and blame you for plagues, I know you protect them withal.

When I see you tonight, I will show you my thanks—allow me to stay.

If you’ll shelter me still, can I love you and touch you gently tonight?

Before dusk, since I’m already well, I climb up the steps when I’m called.

But this ivory-ebony stairway would leave even princes enthralled,

such as phrases inscribed here can’t hope to reveal or hope to embrace.

Though perhaps I may hint at the love to be found in the blood of a vampire.

With such thoughts in my head I climb up the tower of twilight as a doll

that lives just to pose for you, thinking of nothing but pleasing your sight.

At the ledge of the belfry, where darkness then falls, in your wings I’m caught.

The Lady Friend’s Statement (Incanto 2)

The desire to wander the woods at dusk until lost

must arise from the will to leave this life for the dark.

The woods by the lake, where my lover took me last March, 

where the pieces had lately been found of those hikers tossed.

He took me because I wanted to see where they died.  

At first in disgust he refused to drive me, he cried.

(Should I speak up? My teeth, I fear, are unwashed …)

But imagine the fangs of a beast have pierced your throat,

and your blood erupts down its gullet and soaks its coat.

Each hiker there died in this way, at dusk and in frost,

their carotid rent by those jaws. Their corpse into parts

was then hewn and strewn by a helpful man—but why?  

To shield his lover, her human half having crossed

into shadow, the creature fully eclipsing its host.

(… that's to say, I mumble to hide the gore on my fangs.)

But sadly you bastards gunned down that man, then you brought

me, his lover, thinking me just a woman, to question inside.

Never Open the Door (Incanto 1)

To maintain your sanity, never open the door 

that has kept the withered and weeping hidden for years.

Don’t assume they want that which you, in their place, would want.

You can feed them by sending meat through holes in the floor.

But you claim you’ve come to change our infernal regime 

through your skill and care? Your compassionate mettle gleams!  

Though, the last to see them ate her own eyes so that more 

of their tears, she explained, wouldn’t drip down inside her mind. 

You must think I hint at a mystic power behind 

the scorn of weepers to inflict such madness and gore,

but I speak of domestic truths more worthy of fear.   

My father, my sister, my mother just want to live 

forever. By eating each other’s pain, they’ll endure.

Expired Elixir

 

THE THIRTY-FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE THIRTY-FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... it is the eve of the month of Samhain, and once again we welcome as our night guests, through the thinning of the veil between worlds, the ghouls, the Yūrei, the Fomorians ... and I am working on this, the first panel for the second sonnet, "Church of Cinders."

Have a Sumptuous Samhain Month and a Happy Halloween Forever!!

THE TWENTY-NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

 ON THE TWENTY-NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN (delayed post) ... I put together and finished "The Feeble Light of Dreams," as you can see below. My plan had been to do at least four of these illustrated poems, but as usual, my monsters wound up eating much more of my time than expected.

Meanwhile, I continued watching heaps of horror flicks, including the following group of non-supernatural but also not traditional slasher ones: The Invitation (2015); The Beast in the Cellar (1971); High Tension (2003); Creep (2014); and Dementia (1955).

The Invitation is another one I've had on my watch-list since it came out, but put off due to lack of interest in the subject matter, in this case a yuppie dinner party gone awry. The first two thirds seemed to confirm my suspicions, but the cold and sudden brutality of the betrayal that precipitates the climax won me over, making the long windup worthwhile.

The Beast in the Cellar is similarly very dull until the last third, when it is redeemed by a flip of the script with the identity of the monster, contrary to both narrative and social prescription. This British work of biddie horror masquerading as a subhuman maniac slasher has some great ideas, but it would have worked much better as 45-minute Tales of the Unexpected episode than a 90-minute feature.

High Tension has the opposite problem: its first two thirds functions as a bone-crunchingly well-executed (ahem) slasher that is fatally tripped up by a nonsensical "twist" with no clear point (other than maybe casual homophobia?). Maybe the twist was more effective in 2003-- plots where it turns out one of the main characters was the whole time a figment of another character's imagination, with the latter actually carrying out all the hallucinated character's actions, have since become obnoxious and laughable through overexposure.

Creep doesn't have either problem: it is incredibly tense and hypnotic from beginning to end. It's a first-person mockumentary/found-footage film that serves as a claustrophobic character study of the titular psychopathic Creep, who has enlisted the POV videographer through a Craig's List ad to come out to his remote cabin and document a day of his life before his supposed imminent demise from cancer. Though there is no gore until the final shot, the emotional violence of Creep is more jarring than most slasher kills.

Dementia is an awesome '50s art horror film with no dialog. It documents the nightmare of young woman lost in a labyrinthine expressionist city populated by film-noir archetypes. Every moment is beautifully shot and contributes to the propulsive narrative's momentum, which mirrors the way the protagonist is carried along by the dictates of dream logic and her own urges. It was shot outside the studio system, self-funded via the filmmaker's profits from the theater he owned in Portland (the J.J. Parker theater, which is still operating as the Guild Theater on Taylor and 9th). As a result, it mystified critics at the time and was pegged as an experimental film by an outsider artist, which it really isn't. It's a straightforward and entirely legible work of noir-infused, Twilight-Zone-esque horror that just happens to have no dialog.

THE TWENTY-THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

 ON THE TWENTY THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I finished drawing this, the last drawing for "The Feeble Light of Dreams." On to the next sonnet!

Since previously, some of the horror movies I've watched include the following supernatural witchy ones: To the Devil a Daughter (1976), The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), The Devil's Candy (2017), A Dark Song (2016), and Saint Maud (2019).

To the Devil a Daughter is a mash-up of The Exorcist, The Omen, and Rosemary's Baby. It is very much an attempt by the legendary Hammer Productions to eschew their usual gothicism and cash in on in the 70s satanic possession craze. The result is an awkward, often dull narrative that nevertheless contains elements that Hammer can always be counted on to nail: an awesome Christopher Lee performance as a warlock cult leader; charming and surprisingly bloody creature effects; and innovative ritual sacrifice scenes.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe, The Devil's Candy, A Dark Song, and Saint Maud are all recent indy horror films that critics lauded and horror fans embraced, as reflected by their frequent appearances on best-of lists. However, I've put them all off until now, and as it turns out, in all but one case, my lack of interest was justified. The Autopsy of Jane Doe is well-made, competently written, and stars the highly entertaining Brian Cox. But it really fails to capitalize on its setting, instead betraying a weird prudishness toward both disgusting anatomical detail and the suggestion of salacious deviance. It's also unclear why the reveal of centuries-old witchcraft as the culprit comes so late, given that this is the film's only intriguing aspect. The Devil's Candy is also well-made but fairly rote and safe in delivering its whispering demon house narrative. It drops a lot of references to metal music culture, with a metal-infused score, but since metal has no clear and direct connection to the plot, the main purpose with this aspect seems to be to pander. Saint Maud is well-made too, even exceptionally well-made, with powerful performances by its leads. But once again, it could have gone much further with its subject matter, which in this case is monomaniacal religious delusion. I'm not sure why these three films are so widely recommended when God Told Me To, Carrie, The Shining, Necromantik, and various other classics do so much more with their respective topics.

A Dark Song, however, is worthy of all the praise it's received: its exhaustively well-researched tale of a protracted and brutal occult ritual both pulls no punches and is truly unique.

THE SEVENTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE SEVENTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I continued working on this, the last drawing for "The Feeble Light of Dreams."

I also continued watching a bunch of horror movies, which included revisiting some I hadn't seen for a long time: Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988), Q The Winged Serpent (1982), The Night Flier (1997), and The Spider Labyrinth (1988). 

Killer Klowns is kind of like Human Centipede in that its concept alone suffices to immortalize it, but its execution is mediocre. It does have some truly creepy vignette scenes in the middle, though, when individual Klowns are out on the town. This movie absolutely terrified me as a kid, particularly the idea that some homovorus creature could pass as a grotesque human and perform light entertainment to get closer to us. Something about the mocking tone of horror comedy made it much scarier to me than straight-faced horror.  

Q The Winged Serpent is a Larry Cohen classic that I remember being played on late night cable a lot. It's one of the few giant monster movies that actually works as horror: first, because the titular flying creature is worshipped by a cult that offers it gruesome human sacrifices; and second, because the creature stalks, snatches, and devours individual victims on rooftops, diving unseen out of the clouds from above. Very fun, weird movie! 

The Night Flier is another one that I would see parts of on late night TV. It's the only TV adaptation of a Stephen King work that is both good and less than 2 hours long. And Miguel Ferrer is great in it as a compellingly detestable tabloid reporter. 

Finally, The Spider Labyrinth is an Italian horror film that should be much more renowned, up there with other late 70s-80s Italian classics like Suspiria, The Beyond, and Demons. It's the only Italian film that really understands and nails Lovecraftian horror. In fact, it's one of the few films period that accomplishes this so well with an original narrative. And that narrative-- wherein a young anthropology professor's struggle to escape his predicament in a strange Eastern European town only serves to entangle him more and more in the seductive web of a spider god cult-- is perfect. I wish there were 100 more movies with exactly this plot.

THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I finally finished this, the drawing for the third stanza. Only the coda left.

While working on it, I also watched a bunch more horror movies, including: Humanoids from the Deep (1980), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), The Human Centipede (the first one), and The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014). Humanoids from the Deep is notorious for its lecherous fish people, but I just found it disappointing: even the monster impregnation scenes were boring. The Human Centipede is obviously one of the most notorious exploitation films of the 21st century, but this reputation is entirely down to its concept (which is admittedly stomach churning). The actual movie is merely competent and much less disturbing than one would think. Meanwhile, the notorious I Spit on Your Grave is too disturbing for its own good, shocking us by venturing way out of its depth, into horrific trauma that its cartoonish slasher script can't handle.

But I'd definitely recommend The Taking of Deborah Logan. This is an excellent found footage horror film that both avoids the common absurdities of the sub-genre and delivers lots of surprises and genuine scares. It's best known for one "nightmare fuel" shot near the end, but it's no one-shot wonder-- instead, that shot is indicative of the creativity of the whole thing.

THE FIFTH, SIXTH, SEVENTH, AND NINTH NIGHTS OF HALLOWEEN

Catching up ...

ON THE FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I watched easily the best Gray-alien horror movie, Dark Skies (2013). It does everything right. We never see the aliens fully or up close. To the extent they are shown, they look more like shadow people than typical rubbery sci fi aliens. Instead, the horror lies in what each member of the protagonist suburban family fails to remember about the traumatic intrusions they have been experiencing. This horror manifests in the harrowing psychophysical side-effects and fragmentary evidence of their brains being edited and remixed every night. Throughout, the Grays remain both incomprehensible and omnipotent, so that the characters never stop feeling as helpless as field mice under an owl's shadow. Dark Skies never even shows us a ship, wisely withholding any definite details that could trigger disbelief. 

And by disbelief, I don't mean the usual kind that we suspend in order to engage with supernatural fiction, but rather a stronger disbelief that describes the bounds of real plausibility. After all, this is what makes the Gray alien an interesting monster compared to ghosts or vampires or squirming abominations-- it retains a real plausibility for our secular world that the other legendary creatures have lost. The problem with so many Gray-alien horror films, though, is that they break one or more of the viewer's private rules of reality, which differ for everyone but are always far more fragile than rules of fictional coherence. 

Through flexible ambiguity and unrelenting focus on the characters' subjective experiences, Dark Skies somehow doesn't break even the strictest of these rules. And besides passing this crucial test, Dark Skies is just a really well-made thriller, with strong performances, nuanced characterization, and detail-attentive storytelling. Probably owing to a distaste for the subject matter at the time, it was poorly reviewed upon release, but it has since received positive reassessment and become a cult favorite.

ON THE SIXTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I went back and watched the 1975 NBC TV-movie, The UFO Incident, which is a dramatization of Barney and Betty Hill's testimony in their 1961 case of alleged abduction. All subsequent instances of purported alien abduction derive from their paradigmatic encounter narrative. Flying saucer sightings had become a major public phenomenon by the 1950s, coinciding with the height of Cold War paranoia about Soviet spy-craft and nuclear weapons, along with the golden age of alien invasion B-cinema. But before the Hills' testimony (excepting a couple of cases in Brazil that diverge markedly from  the canonical tropes) there had never been a serious claim of direct contact and prolonged interaction with the extraterrestrial pilots of the saucers. With the Hills, all of the classic elements appear fully formed: sighting a UFO overhead while driving down a lonely road at night; electrical disturbances in the car; the deliberate suppression of memory of the subsequent abduction, resulting in "missing time"; recovery of the suppressed memories under hypnosis; small gray-skinned humanoids with very large eyes who communicate telepathically and control the minds of the experiencers; capture and conveyance aboard the alien craft, where the abductees are stripped, probed, and surgically altered in some sort of medical lab; and a concurrent rash of UFO sightings in the area. Even the proper name for the Grays, Zeta Reticulans, derives from Betty Hill's claim that she was shown a star map to the beings' home world, which she later drew and found to be a match for Zeta Reticuli, a binary star system about 39 light-years away. (Of course, it's quite possible that these events occurred in reverse order: she consulted stellar charts first, made the drawing, and then "recalled" under hypnosis having been shown something resembling her drawing.) 

The TV movie itself is a serviceable dramatization of the Hills' testimony. The Grays are only shown briefly in muddled dream-images during the hypnosis sessions, but even these glimpses are too much, given how terrible the masks are. Despite such flaws, however, I recommend watching it just for James Earl Jones' incredible performance as Barney Hill. Jones not only carries the whole production but actually elevates it to peak Gray-alien horror on par with Dark Skies. His portrayal of stark-frozen terror unto and beyond the brink of madness is so real, it honestly seems to shock the other actors. 

Only a few days after The UFO Incident aired, Travis Walton reported his own abduction by the Grays, which supplied the material for his book, Fire in the Sky. Then, in the wake of the Hills' and Walton's success, Whitley Strieber's Communion appeared-- and the genesis of a legendary American monster was complete.  

ON THE SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I tried to watch something called The Fourth Kind, but it was so terrible, I gave up. Instead, I went through various lists of Gray-alien horror movies and watched a bunch of trailers. I didn't find anything notable that I hadn't already seen.

As for the reality of the Grays: My own personal rules for what a real extraterrestrial visitor could be and do are set by three suppositions based in hard science: (1) faster than light travel will never be feasible for a galaxy-scale civilization (at least, not for one that can avoid detection); (2) all or nearly all sufficiently advanced civilizations become post-organic machine or bio-machine civilizations; (3) if another civilization exists in our galaxy, it is almost certainly millions of years older than ours. From these suppositions we can conclude that if extraterrestrials have visited our solar system, they have done so using undetectable autonomous robotic probes. This scenario falls under the "zoo hypothesis" solution to the Fermi Paradox. (I.e., the paradox that is really more of a question: if intelligent life eventually develops on most planets with Earth-like conditions, then there should be many interstellar civilizations besides our own in our galaxy; why, then, have we not seen any sign at all of their existence?) The zoo hypothesis claims that at least one civilization has spread throughout our galaxy, but it masks its presence in order to prevent disastrous colonial contamination; instead, it opts to study other intelligent species surreptitiously. This would make Earth a kind of wildlife reserve. 

The Zeta Reticulan narrative also falls under the zoo hypothesis, but it violates supposition (2), if not (1) as well. It simply wouldn't make sense to send organic beings that require life support in large spacecraft so as to study an alien civilization for millennia in secret, nor would it be feasible without faster than light transportation, nor would this even be an issue for a post-organic civilization. Thus, extraterrestrials would not come in spaceships. They would be the spaceships. And these autonomous probes would not be large visible objects either. This still leaves open the possibility that something like the Grays could be real insofar as unseen alien zoologists in our solar system could be watching us and might even have come to Earth in the past to study human biology up close. But the canonical Grays derived from the Hills' testimony and made iconic by The X-Files et al. almost certainly don't exist. This in turn means that very few if any of the claimed alien contact cases can be enlisted in support, however tenuously, of the only plausible scenario involving the presence of intelligent extraterrestrials in our solar system. 

This realization has killed the capacity for most Gray-alien horror to terrify me, at least for any considerable duration. Which is what I'm actually concerned with here: the fear generated by the possibility of the Grays' reality. I guess what I have been chasing after with this topic is the experience of pure terror I felt as a child when I saw alien abduction documentaries on cable and believed 100% that the Grays were out there grabbing and experimenting on people and wiping their memories. No other monster has ever scared me so much. 

But I feel that the Gray is now going the way of the changeling and the vampire and becoming simply another nightmare creature that serves as an analogy for terrestrial human pain and helplessness, as exemplified by No One Will Save You. In any case, I have found that with even the best Zeta Reticulan horror films, I'm only able to make contact with ephemeral flashes of the excitingly sleepless, look-over-your-shoulder terror I once felt. Which is sad. 

ON THE NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I wrote this! And drew some more. Up next: more drawing. 

Pictured: Betty and Barney Hill and Delsey the dog

THE EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I worked on this, the third stanza illustration. 

I also continued watching a bunch of horror movies featuring the Grays, aka the Zeta Reticulans,  which I will report on soon in a gap nights list.

THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN (and into the FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN) ... I finished drawing this, the second stanza illustration. Phew, spent more time and energy on it than planned! I did also continue my investigation into the Grays in horror movies while completing this. I actually found a good one! Will report on tomorrow night.

THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I started this, the drawing for the second stanza of the same sonnet.

While drawing, I continued on down the rabbit hole of horror movies about being abducted by the grays and re-watched Fire in the Sky (1993). Like Communion, this movie adapts a purported real-life abduction case. Though it definitely breaks my rule of never directly showing the grays, it does at least delay their reveal until literally the last 15 minutes. I remember watching this movie in the theater with my dad when I was a kid and being quite terrified by the ending. And it does hold up. Even among horror films that don't reveal the full monstrosity until the climax, Fire in the Sky is unusual in that for first hour and ten minutes it doesn't even try to be a frightful-- it's all just unspooky character melodrama. So, it has the structure of a movie-length jumpscare. The abduction sequence is also intrinsically horrific because it's so disorienting. Nothing in the grays' ship makes sense, and most of it is disgusting. It's quite inventive and well-executed. Nevertheless, I would still say it doesn't make good use of the grays per se because it turns out that these aliens actually look like unshelled turtles. They just wear space suits that resemble the Communion grays. More importantly, they don't have the mind-control and memory-altering powers that make *True Grays* distinctly scary.

THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I finished this drawing. Which, again, is an illustration for the first stanza of "The Feeble Light of Dreams." On to the second stanza.

While working on it, I decided to go ahead and watch the movie I mentioned last night, Communion (1989), about Whitley Strieber's purportedly real-life abductions by the grays. I had seen parts of it previously but never the whole thing.

It is deeply silly. The best thing about it is Christopher Walken's iconically unhinged performance as Strieber. However, I will say it is creepier than No One Will Save You (and similar fare like Signs), as the grays remain both inscrutable and godlike throughout. There is also a meta-creepiness to projects like this, where at least one of the main people responsible devoutly believes the grays and their doings to be factual. Inhabiting the mind of such a person is unsettling regardless of the credibility of their claims.

The biggest mistake Communion makes as a horror film is showing the grays too much-- or showing them at all really. All of the alien effects are laughably bad. But more importantly, because of the all-powerful mind-control and memory-wiping powers of the grays, there are some truly tense scenes before we see them, where the characters know that what is happening at that moment is terribly wrong, that there is something unbelievably horrifying in the room with them, but they can't see it. And they can't remember what happened later. And the film doesn't show us what it is either. It just confirms that the terribly wrong thing is real. Communion could have built its paranoia up to genuine terror if it had never violated this constraint. Just never actually show the grays first-hand. Only show second-hand evidence, e.g. drawings, along with objects or animals that remind the characters of them. Moments like this when done right are look-over-your-shoulder spooky!

THE FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN

ON THE FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I drew this. I decided to do Inktober-ish posts this year instead of another horror movie analysis marathon. The drawings will mostly be illustrations of stanzas from some creepy sonnets that I have written. Probably one drawing every two-ish nights, four drawings for each sonnet. This first one is for the first stanza (in red) of the sonnet to the left, "The Feeble Light of Dreams." 

I did watch while drawing this (so, giving it only about 70% attention) a new horror movie I already knew I wasn't going to love, No Will Save You (freshly released to Hulu streaming). It was well-directed, well-acted, and had a clever ending I quite liked. But it banged again and again on my rawest pet-peeve nerve concerning aliens. The aliens in this are the classic Whitley Strieber Communion grays (if he had copyrighted that stunningly creepy design instead of claiming he really encountered the grays, he'd be very rich). But instead of vastly more intelligent beings, these grays behave like rabid bears, chasing the protagonist all around her house and getting stabbed by her-- even though it's later shown they can easily anti-gravity-beam freeze her wherever she goes and zoop her up without ever getting out of their ship. This is such a waste, repeating the mistake of Signs et al., because the grays remain creepy only because they are one of last otherworldly creatures the scientific secular mind can almost believe are real. That is, you don't necessarily have to suspend rational thought to be scared by them. But in order for this to work, maintaining strong credibility throughout is paramount. Anyways 😤

Church of Cinders (Sonnet 2)

A broken window, ashes whirling, chanting

heard between the slats—such mysteries here.

They worshipped at a ghoulish altar, planted

hooks in minds, controlled the rest through fear.

 

This church of secret faith, a burned out husk

of cinders now, but listen: rites abide.

You walk between the blackened beams at dusk

and find the stairs below, where something hides.

 

Though charred and dead, they still must chant to keep

their god asleep, their lungs with leather stitched.

You want to meet the worshipped thing, so creep

and cast your light, descend to vaults bewitched.

 

The bulb soon dies, but not before it shows

the rotting mouths that move and serve as host.

My Secret Teacher (Sonnet 1)

My teacher lures me out at night to meet

in spectral woods with rings of sculpted quartz.

He traces curves with bloody finger cleaved,

the curves of naked forms and chiseled art.

 

I learn my skin desires my teacher’s blood

when crystal-frozen shapes receive their taste.

Seduction makes my teacher’s teaching good,

my body aches for trials never faced.

 

The things inside the quartz are living minds,

imprisoned long ago for cosmic love.

They beat and howl against their crystal bindings,

stirred by bloody touch and stars above.

 

Now lustful screams and gleaming naked

skin compel their bone-white walls to break.

The Fairy Queen, sketch

X-Ray of an Ancient Brain-Computer Interface

The Worm in Your Ear

It could crawl in your ear while you’re sleeping, 

the worm with its hunger for dreams.

It would pull out the threads of your brain, 

and you’d play at its game as it opened your seams. 

In despair you have felt no one wanted your thoughts, 

but the worm could survive on their gleams.

And its curious call in the depths of the night 

that you’ve listened to silently, patiently, mumbles in streams.

When the line has gone dead, 

you have wandered and walked with the moon in its beams. 

But the call, was it sent to your house or your head? 

Did it ask, “Has the worm ever said what it means?”

Don't Be Shy

I tried to keep my blight from spreading—tendrils bloom

beneath my skin—but now my neighbor’s corpse is ash.

They want to know the truth, to end the pile of bodies’ rise;

I know that truth but do not wish to make a stir, or clash.

By dark our town has fallen quiet, though bursts

of choked up sobbing break in now and then.

At dawn a doctor all in white will come,

and house by house she’ll drag each family out to pens.

She’ll stick and test our flesh there, one by one,

and when she reaches mine, she’ll find the oldest line.

So, shyness forces me to spread the sickness further; 

wrapped to hide the truth abroad, I flee before the sun returns.

The truth is: death came quick for me last week,

but still I walked and spoke in town just fine.

Fear of Water

On the way to the sea, 

she says she’s always been afraid of water, 

since her father tried to drown her.

She’s never felt distain for him, though, 

like what she must now see on my face.

I ask her to explain, 

but she turns away. 

Soon our van reaches the beach, 

and we all pile out.

Hours later, at dusk, 

she whispers that she will answer what I asked, 

if I follow her down under the pier.

When walking with me nearer the water, 

she hesitates, trembles. 

She’d only sat and watched the rest of us swim all day.

Under the darkening pier, her eyes are wild. 

I propose we retreat above. 

But she only speaks of her father’s vision.

Her arms encircle me as the waves surge. 

Her father tried to teach her to fear water

because he foresaw her drowning here, with me. 

She’s not trembling now.

Stepmother Counts Her Teeth

Every morning, my stepmother counts her teeth. 

She doesn’t know I watch her through the mirror.

She never finds any out of place.

Never too few, never too many.

My mother died before I could speak her name. 

And ever since, father has been alone—that is, until last month.

Even my jaded sisters love father’s new wife. Not me.

So helpful, so pretty—where did she come from?

After dinner, I happen to see her though a crack in the bathroom door. 

She pulls something from her mouth’s roof,

a white snapping thing she drops in the toilet.

Why didn’t I warn him? 

By morning, she’s gone.

And we find father twisting, convulsing, changing.

Between the Eaves

 I thought the tapping on my roof all winter was branches, 

until one day between the eaves I saw him.

A bony man, more a thing, slid back to cower in darkness, under the beams.

I told my older brother, who owns the property. 

He brought a ladder and a box.

He climbed to the hollow spot, shone a light in, saw nothing. 

So he crawled in.

I waited a minute, two, then called out, shouted. 

There was no reply, no change, only quiet dark.

My brother had always been stolid. 

It was impossible this was a joke.

I went up and thrust a rake toward the darkness that took him. 

 Right off the rake struck a wall of black moss.

As if the shadowed space had only been an illusion.

On the other side of the wall, in the attic, I found nothing. 

And nothing has come through the mossy wall since.

The Trick

 In a blink, as she steps on the path,

she sees her hand letting go of her little brother’s hand, forever.

That day, she was sure her brother was tricking her, trying to scare her.

Hours later, she was still sure.

And eleven years on, she’s back here, where he was last seen, alone.

All their searching found not one trace.

She’s clung to the same belief, though, ever since,

what they called denial, then fixation.

That her little brother is only tricking her.

Or perhaps, she sometimes thinks, the real trickster is life’s director.

He’s laughing at us all behind the curtain.

She used to take a boyfriend here and squeeze his throat during sex,

each time harder. Until, bruised, he left for good.

At twilight, turning to go, she glimpses a flash between a white oak’s roots.

Her brother’s eyes, unchanged, twinkle at her, then disappear.

Gifts

Small giftwrapped boxes were left on every doorstep in our neighborhood, early one misty morning.

Most of us refused to touch them, wondering who brought them and why.

Neighbors watched those who opened their boxes from outside windows, anxiously anticipating.

The folklore professor recognized the markings on his box as the runes of a lost people.

He drew down a tome and read aloud how these people schemed to give deadly gifts.

But this warning was ignored or unheard by the bitter widow, and the rest.

Inside the boxes they each found a mirror cut in a unique shape. And they each gazed into it.

The widow saw in hers a lost youth in a life she thought she should have had. 

For this life, she offered the mirror her face, by cutting it off and laying it in the box.

Screams heard all along the streets told us the mirrors commanded no less of the others.

The Thirty-First Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE THIRTY-FIRST NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … on this SAMHAIN, when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest, when phantasms, goblins, and Yōkai come through to visit us in the night … I made a FLOooOOoOoooOoOOOWCHART!!! 

The flowchart below attempts to categorize all the species of doppelgänger that we have discovered over the course of our cinematic investigations. Keep it handy in case you run into a doppelgänger and are having trouble identifying what kind it is.

CLOSING THOUGHTS:

I became more obsessed with the doppelgänger theme than I intended to. I just had noticed that a lot of the movies on my watchlist happened to involve doppelgängers, so I thought underlining that commonality would be a good way to add some flavor to this year’s series. As I went along, though, it became more and more clear to me that not only do most horror movies involve doppelgängers in some sense or respect (as I had suspected), but further, the doppelgänger itself is not so much a species of monster as the mother of many different types of monsters—a meta-monster, if you will. For this reason, the doppelgänger is an almost boundlessly rich subject of investigation, both aesthetically and philosophically. 

The higher order conclusion I have come to, though, is that the doppelgänger is able to proliferate in so many mutually exclusive forms, across so many fields and dimensions, because fundamentally it is the product of a paradox. The necessary and sufficient condition a doppelgänger must meet in order to count as a doppelgänger is that it be an entity that is what it is not. This apparent contradiction creates a paradox which can then be resolved in various ways, according to the senses given to the terms of the condition. If by “an entity that is what it is not” we mean an entity that appears identical to another entity but is not fully, substantively, or internally equal to that entity, then the condition is no longer contradictory. Entities that are only superficially the same are certainly permitted by logic. Or, if by an “entity that is what it is not” we mean a mind that has split into separate aspects that are antagonistic to one another and that may or may not occupy different bodies, then, again, the condition is no longer contradictory.

As we have seen, there are many other senses we can assign to the condition so as to resolve the paradox. Each of these senses produces a different type of doppelganger. So, my conclusion is that the reason the doppelgänger is the mother of many kinds of monsters is that, in essence, it is a walking paradox, which is in turn a monstrosity on a meta-cosmic level. 

It is a well-known maxim of classical logic that a standing contradiction permits any and all statements to be proven true. That is, if one stipulates that an entity X both exists and does not exist, then one can use an indirect proof, i.e. a proof by contradiction—where if a statement leads to a contradiction, we can conclude that it is false—to show that any claim at all that one can concoct is true. For instance, statement A says that psychic vampires from space control the media and that psychic vampires from space do not control the media. Given that A is true, if I then suppose that it is not the case that all readers of this post are immortal, I can conjoin this supposition with statement A to show that it cannot be true that it is not the case that all readers of this post are immortal. Therefore, all readers of this post are immortal. Then, instead of “all readers of this post are immortal,” I can substitute in any statement I want and prove that it is true as well. This is called the principle of explosion. 

For a monster (or meta-monster) to use its essential paradoxicality to threaten us with such an explosion of entities from the nether reaches of the imagination puts one in mind of Pandora’s box. If the Doppelgänger’s Paradox is allowed to stand, then the existence of all monsters is substantiated. That is, the gates of hell are thrown open and all the demons of our nightmares are free to walk the earth. 

And with that … thanks for joining me! See you next year, and have a Happy Halloween Forever!!!