Noah Berlatsky / December 9, 2020

Ursula K. Le Guin is generally thought of as a progressive, even as a radical, on the strength of her utopian novels. Her 1974 classic The Dispossessed imagines a functioning anarchist society; 1969’s The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a planet where everyone is a hermaphrodite, which means it is a world without patriarchy. Yet Le Guin was always ambivalent about revolution, and especially about revolutionary violence. 

The clearest statement of her counter-revolutionary side is the 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven. It’s a book that is generally discussed primarily as a tribute to Philip K. Dick, and it certainly picks up that author’s obsession with the construction and breakdown of reality, and with the distinction between sanity and insanity. But less discussed, and just as important, is Le Guin’s debt to anticommunist dystopian imaginings—books like George Orwell’s 1984 and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, in which the utopian strivings lead to regimented, life-crushing dystopias. Like those novels, The Lathe of Heaven warns that even dreaming of a better future can result in nightmare. In doing so, it shows how Le Guin’s most famous fictions were inspired by the Cold War, and how they were constrained by it.

The Lathe of Heaven is set in Portland, Oregon in a future dystopia of 2002. The world is overpopulated and impoverished; life is grimy, run-down, and hemmed in. The protagonist, George Orr, is an inconsequential draftsman. At the beginning of the novel he is arrested for borrowing another’s rations of drugs in an effort to keep himself from dreaming. He is assigned to mandatory therapy with psychiatrist and sleep researcher William Haber.

George explains to Haber that he wants to stop dreaming because his dreams can alter reality; when he dreams an “effective” dream, George alleges, he remakes the world. Haber doesn’t believe him at first, but after hypnotizing George he gets him to use his dreams to change a picture on Haber’s wall. Usually no one but George remembers the previous reality, but being present at the instant of dreaming allows Haber to see and retain the change. He quickly decides he can use George to transform the world for the better.

But George’s dreams are an imperfect tool, and whenever Haber hypnotically suggests a dream, that dream goes awry. When he tells George to reduce overpopulation, George dreams a plague that kills billions. A request for peace between humans results in a devastating alien attack, which unites the world against the invaders. A command for racial harmony leads to a world of grey people, who unleash their aggression in ritualized, bloody sports events, rather than through prejudice.

Even so, Haber is unconvinced. He is a determined, remorseless do-gooder, asking Orr: “Isn’t that man’s very purpose on earth to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?” His gusty, bearish good humor metastasizes into a kind of ominous mechanical benevolence. At first he really wants to help George overcome his fear of dreams. But as he gains power to do good, means and ends become tangled until it’s impossible to separate the quest for power to do good from the quest for power. Each time Haber changes reality he gives himself more status and influence—a bigger office, more influence with the government—until he is one of the most important men in the world. And in his relationship with George, he becomes increasingly aggressive and sadistic. “To dominate [George], to patronize him was so easy as to be almost irresistible,” Haber thinks.

Haber’s research eventually allows him to simulate George’s effective dreaming so that he can do it himself. “There will be none of this tension between your will to nihilism and my will to progress, your Nirvana wishes and my conscious, careful planning for the good of all,” he exults. But when he tries to dream a better world, the result is nightmarish chaos. Existence melts and changes; buildings turn to jelly. The revolution undoes organic connections, and everything loses form and meaning. “It was the presence of absence: an unquantifiable entity without qualities, into which all things fell and from which nothing came forth. It was horrible, and it was nothing. It was the wrong way,” Le Guin writes. Or, to quote another reactionary vision of a hollowed-out modernity that has discarded the past: 

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

If changing the world inevitably unmakes and destroys the world, the only alternative is quietism—and George is in fact a kind of inaction hero. “I don’t want to change things!” he tells Haber early on. “Who am I to meddle with the way things go?” Haber views George’s refusal of responsibility and action as a flaw; in his eyes George is a “meek, characterless man.” But Heather, a lawyer who becomes George’s wife in some realities, sees him differently: “he was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from the center.” The dreamer who can change the world is strong because of his Buddhist-like commitment to not change the world. George won’t meddle with karma. 

Refusing to change the world doesn’t just mean that George doesn’t want to implement grand revolutions. He balks even at minor acts of personal kindness. When Haber asks George if he would help a woman bitten by a snake by giving her antivenom, George hesitates. “If reincarnation is a fact, you might be keeping her from a better life and condemning her to live out a wretched one. Perhaps you cure her and she goes home and murders six people in the village.” A fear of inorganic revolution slides helplessly into a reactionary taboo on lifting a finger to help a neighbor in immediate need. George might as well be a Republican official denouncing the socialism of mask mandates.

George’s weasily ethics-professor excuse for leaving a woman to die seems strikingly at odds with, say, passages in The Dispossessed about the exploitation of the poor, or the anti-slavery commitments of Le Guin’s 1995 Five Ways to Forgiveness. But it’s notable that throughout her work Le Guin very rarely puts herself or the reader in the perspective of an actual revolutionary. Even the anarchist Shevek, in The Dispossessed, who makes political speeches to mass rallies, does so only after traveling to a neighboring planet, where he is an outsider. He parachutes into a Cold War-like conflict between a capitalist and a totalitarian Communist nation to offer a third, non-binary option for peace via technological deus ex machina. Similarly, in Five Ways to Forgiveness the most vivid scenes of revolution are presented from the perspective of Le Guin’s beloved Star Trek-Federation-like Hainish interplanetary ambassadors and observers.  They are people who have a distance from the oppressions and injustice they are describing. They’re people who don’t have to take sides.

The contrast with Le Guin’s contemporary Joanna Russ is striking. Russ criticized Le Guin for mostly choosing to use male protagonists. Russ herself always wrote from the perspective of women—not least because she wanted to describe patriarchal oppression at ground level, as it is felt by those who experience it. Where Le Guin’s protagonists observe, and regret, and avoid violence, Russ’s revel in it. In novels like The Female Man (1975), We Who Are About To… (1977), and The Two of Them (1978), women turn to revolutionary violence not as a last resort or a regrettable necessity, but as a fierce joy in itself—an assertion of power, of revenge, of relief. When a wise man says, Orr-like, in Russ’s The Two of Them, “I am beginning to wonder about the wisdom of remaking culture, or even people’s lives,” the female hero considers his words carefully, then shoots him and liberates her sister.

That’s not to say that Russ is right and Le Guin is wrong. The latter is hardly a mindless counter-revolutionary, even in her most counter-revolutionary novel. George returns to the story about the snakebite victim and recognizes that the analogy—and his own arguments—were “false.” “You have to help another person,” he thinks. “But it’s not right to play God with the masses.” And even there, in extremis, sometimes playing God is in fact the right thing to do. The world George grew up in ended in a nuclear holocaust. He dreamed the overpopulated world into existence at the last moment before his death, creating not a good world, but a slightly better one.

Haber also is not, notably, just a stand in for communists and radicals. Most of his political commitments—antiwar, antiracism—are recognizably left. But his motivations are rooted in good old American exceptionalism, white saviorism, and pulp. “I frequently daydream heroics. I am the hero,” he tells George with gusto. “I’m saving a girl, or a fellow astronaut, or a besieged city, or a whole damn planet. Messiah dreams, do-gooder dreams. Haber saves the world! They’re a hell of a lot of fun—so long as I keep ’em where they belong.” 

Those Messiah dreams really have caused harm; Hitler’s piles of corpses and Stalin’s piles of corpses and (closer to home for Le Guin) Lyndon Johnson’s smaller but still horrific piles of corpses all lay in mute testimony to the potential dangers of Haberism, and the deadly imposition of happy endings. 

Still, it’s striking to see a dreamer write a tract against dreams, and a utopian thinker write a novel warning against utopians. You could see it as a sign of Le Guin’s depth and ambiguity, her ability to see every side. George, Haber reports, is “so sane as to be an anomaly,” his psych profile in the exact middle of extroversion/introversion, dominance/submissiveness—“a peculiar state of poise, of self-harmony.” Le Guin is clearly drawn to that centrist anti-extremist view from nowhere. The Cold War demanded side taking. Her writing shaped by that imperative, Le Guin in The Lathe of Heaven searches for a perspective with neither sides nor violence. She could only find it in dreams.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

I have recently acquired the original superheroes that Timmee turned into fantasy figures after they gave up their liscense with Marvel.  Their was only one run of the superheroes and each figure came in just one color.  All of the Hulk, Green Goblin, Doctor Octupus and Namor figures are green.  All of the Red Skull, Spiderman, Ironman and Human Torch figures are red.  All of the Captain America, Thor, Dr. Doom and Falcon figures are blue.  

I do not believe I have seen any pictures of them side by side before.  So, just for fun . . . . regular and color ehanced versions.  

 The oldest Regiment of the Freestate, and the only fully organized regiment in service today.

Alex Adams / December 3, 2020

1987’s Predator pits Arnold Schwarzenegger against a fearsome extraterrestrial creature that hunts men for sport. One of the great 1980s action blockbusters, it is memorable for its muscle-flexing machismo, its tight, quotable dialogue, and its magisterial practical effects. Its enduring allure, though, comes most of all from its creative rearticulation of colonial imagery in a Cold War context. For as well as being a tremendously enjoyable sci-fi horror romp, Predator is also a novel engagement with the iconography, aesthetics, and politics associated with Cold War-era military interventions in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.

1980s action films are known for the bombastic ways in which they echo, amplify, and disseminate a particular Cold War militarism that served, intentionally or otherwise, as a sort of informal PR discourse for Reagan’s international interventionism. Swaggering, cigar-chomping, opportunistic movie producers like Joel Silver, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Dino De Laurentiis churned out smash after vivid smash in the Reagan years: noisy, sweaty, and uncouth adventure stories regularly chock full of beefcake bodybuilders such as Dolph Lundgren, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and, of course, the two heaviest hitters, Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Predator’s director, John McTiernan, would go on to make the iconic Die Hard—in which Bruce Willis has a towering-inferno punch-up with sneering Eurotrash terrorists—in 1988, and he adapted Tom Clancy’s debut novel The Hunt for Red October in 1990. As entertaining as they are reactionary, these movies overflow with expertly choreographed violence, sassy one-liners, and muscular anti-Soviet ideology. 

A biography of Schwarzenegger claims that Predator began life as an industry joke rooted in Cold War politics. After Stallone’s Rocky Balboa symbolically won the Cold War by defeating the coldly murderous Ivan Drago in 1985’s Rocky IV, he would have to fight an alien if they wanted to make Rocky V. The clash of terrestrial empires finally settled, there would be nowhere for him to go but space, nobody for him to punch but Martians. Writers Jim and John Thomas had been working on just such a script since 1983, an interplanetary rumble in the jungle set where the Cold War was hot: in the opaque world of proxy wars, irregular combat, and covert operations. Stallone’s shark-jumping patriotic symbolism meant that the Thomas Brothers’ script’s time had come. 

Fighting the Cold War without embracing mutual nuclear annihilation meant fighting or funding grimy counterinsurgency wars in Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Congo, Laos, and elsewhere, and these wars had a profound and multifaceted influence on popular culture. Viscid rainforest undergrowth supplanted World War trenches as the default setting for combat scenes; enemies no longer stood before you on the battlefield, but picked you off with sadistic traps; a greater focus than ever was placed on the permanently deranging effects of warfare on the human psyche. The astuteness of the Thomas brothers’ jungle setting in Predator is that it fuses a hostile encounter with a technologically advanced alien civilization with pre-existing mythologies of first contact that had gained new currency in the wake of these wars, in which American troops were sent to countries on the other side of the planet to endure unimaginable conditions fighting utterly unfamiliar populations. Though 2010’s Predators would retroactively specify that the first film was set in Guatemala, nobody in Predator names their exact location, and this vagueness allows the story to be set in a firmly imaginary “otherland” where anything can happen. A rich tapestry of colonial iconography, Predator is a fable about a near-indestructible alien that sloshily and freely synthesizes the aesthetics of colonial war movies, dark fantasies about the cannibals in the shadows, and Conradian imagery about the inscrutable danger of the uncivilized places on the map.

Invasion is the thematic and formal core of Predator, a war movie invaded by science fiction horror. Dutch (Schwarzenegger, at his absolute peak) and his team of battle-hardened troops are hoodwinked by Dillon (Carl Weathers) into doing CIA dirty work behind enemy lines, attacking an enemy encampment and preventing the Soviets from launching a coup. As they make their escape, the group still smarting from their betrayal and fraying under the stress of the heat and the ”badass bush” that “makes Cambodia look like Kansas,” the alien hunter strikes.

Sapient, sophisticated, and near-indestructible, the predator is a tremendously evocative creature, evocative enough for Predator to sire a franchise including three sequels, two Alien Vs. Predator crossover movies, and a rich gamut of print fiction, video games, comics, and graphic novels. There is some great stuff here (and if you want a controversial hot take, I will claim 2004’s Alien Vs. Predator as the only sequel really worth a watch, because it at least has a sense of fun and is ambitious in scope), but in general the sequels and spin-offs all suffer from the same problem faced by any number of sci-fi franchises: slow death by over-explanation. Over the course of the series, the increasingly elaborate lore explains the predators’ technology, their language, their species variation and, most often, the specifics of the predators’ hunter-warrior culture, examining their abductions of “elite” humans to be tracked for sport, their attempts to hybridize with humans, and, perhaps silliest of all, their history as the original ancient astronauts who colonized the Earth. In the process, the creature’s mystique is buried under a barrage of precision that only serves to make it less interesting. But the original is compelling in a way that its offspring are not because, like the best monster movies, it is built around ambiguity, mystery, and suggestion.

This generous inexactness allows the predator to reflect an abundance of meanings, slippery and overlapping, unencumbered by all that goofy backstory. He is suggestively mammalian, slimily crocodilian, part gorilla, part crustacean chameleon, with insectoid mandibles and infrared vision. Most of all, though, the predator aesthetic draws on a rich and layered archive of colonial depictions of the “uncivilizable savage”: his loincloth, dreadlocks, and his collection of skulls; his fearsome blades, exposed skin, and his symbiotic intimacy with the jungle; his incomprehensible clicking language, his animalistic posture, and his thirst for barbaric violence. The final Cold War enemy is not only an alien; he is, simultaneously, the prehuman savage of colonial nightmare. Neither the alien nor the savage, to recall the joke about how Predator the film came to be, inhabit the same planet as the Reagan-era action hero.

The horrifying allure of the predator is sustained, in part, by the Grand Guignol spectacle of the ways it kills. The creature commits forms of gruesome murder that echo the irregular combat tactics and war crimes that were attributed to the guerrilla forces the U.S.  military faced in its small dirty wars. One by one, the soldiers are picked off by the unconventional tactics of an unseen enemy who hides in the trees, like the faceless Vietminh fighters of so many American-made Vietnam movies. The predator desecrates his victims after death in chilling ways, flaying them, ripping out spines, and making trophies of skulls in ways that recall the mutilatory obscenities committed by the cannibal tribes in exploitation flicks like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) or Cannibal Ferox (1981).

And yet, it is not only FX maestro Stan Winston’s creature design that reinterprets colonial iconography. Thematically, the movie rearticulates ideas central to many Vietnam movies and the military fiction of writers like Robert Elford (Devil’s Guard) or Jean Lartéguy (The Centurions). War is a furnace, a state of brutal nature in which masculinity is tested; fighting against unconventional guerrilla forces is like fighting the jungle itself; the hero must “go native,” or become one with the wilderness, in order to defeat the primeval savagery of one’s adversary.

At the film’s climax, Dutch, the sole survivor, slathers himself in mud to hide from the predator’s infrared vision, becoming a primal, torch-wielding warrior, to fight his fearless enemy on something approaching an equal footing. The scene pulpily recalls the climax of Apocalypse Now (1979), in which Willard rises from the steaming swamp to murder Colonel Kurtz, the elite soldier driven mad by the jungle and transformed into an exterminationist demigod by his exposure to the myriad foulnesses of war. An essay on the meanings of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz as filtered through Francis Ford Coppola’s operatic depiction of hell on earth could go on forever; suffice it to say that Kurtz is a shady, uncertain vessel into whom has rushed the murderous soul of colonial war, slavery, and exploitation. Reading the predator as an incarnation of Kurtz allows us to read Schwarzenegger’s confrontation with the monster as yet another form of essentialism: in fighting the savage, we are fighting against the immortal, devilish soul of war itself. Such a confrontation is not only primeval; it is permanent, eternal.

And yet, Predator is also tethered very directly to its specifically nuclear context. In the film’s closing moments, the predator initiates a colossal explosion, a mushroom cloud pinpointing the site of its demise. Knowing that Dutch has defeated it, the beast detonates himself, cackling a monstrously polyvocal laugh. This is a clear invocation of the political fear that “savages” will gain nuclear weapons, and that they will be self-destructively insane—or simply spitefully reckless—enough to actually use them. This abundance of signification, in which the predator is a volatile enough image to represent at once an alien, a cannibal, a guerrilla adversary, “the demon who makes trophies of man,” and a rogue nuclear state, is what makes the antagonist such an attractive and compelling monstrosity.

Intriguingly, in an unexpected coda that attests to the elasticity of popular cultural meaning, Predator has also exerted an influence over the post-9/11 war on terror. What, after all, do we call the unmanned aircraft that can kill silently, from a distance, and that can detect human body heat in order to track and destroy its targets? It is tempting to speculate about the naming of the Predator drone. Perhaps, like the naming of the NSA’s machine-learning surveillance program SKYNET, it is more than just further evidence that popular culture and political discourse are irretrievably fused. What can it mean for the self-image of the U.S. when its own military names its technological innovations after monstrous sci-fi villains?

Alex Adams is a cultural critic and writer based in North East England. His most recent book, How to Justify Torture, was published by Repeater Books in 2019. He loves dogs.

 Perhaps one of the earliest books related to "War Gaming", or at least recreating historical battles with model figures.  It's available for free on Google books as a pdf or epub file.  it's really a  delight, with wonderful illustrations of the sort of German import "bleisoldaten" painted pewter figures common in American toy stores from before the Civil War until the First World War.  Notice they are usually colored and designed for European armies, which is part of the imaginary fun!

M.L. Schepps / December 1, 2020

When 30-year-old ad-man James Herbert set out to write a novel, he had a simple goal in mind: “to show you what it was really like to have your leg chewed by a mutant creature.” He succeeded admirably. 1974’s The Rats was a genuine cultural phenomenon upon release, a blockbuster that sold out its initial print run of 100,000 within three weeks and, in the words of The Observer, “irrevocably mutated British horror,” tearing it “from the grip of the bourgeoisie” by “writing about working-class characters” and squaring off against the ugliness and frank brutality of contemporary life.

Herbert would go on to become an author of global significance, his 23 novels eventually selling over 54 million copies worldwide in 34 different languages. He would develop as an author and an activist, tempering the trademark gore with more refined language and higher literary aims. But during his first decade as a professional writer, Herbert excelled at what the British called “nasties,” publishing a novel per year, including two sequels to The Rats that completed a trilogy. 

Gory, puerile, and utterly appealing, the Rats trilogy has much to offer the modern eye. In addition to the unnerving horror and gore—neatly scaffolded by clean prose and the occasional purple flourish—we are given a glimpse of a vanished London, a city of vast slums, uncleared bombsites, abandoned docklands, feral children, casual racism, and lusty English perversion—a half-tamed London, not yet leveraged and financialized and vertical, but sprawling, old, and mean.

It is this London that James Herbert was raised in, and it is the one he viscerally evokes in the pages of his first novel. The Rats is, in the words of the author himself, “packed with metaphor and subtext.” In a 1993 interview with The Observer, Herbert relays the theme quite plainly: “the subtext of ‘The Rats’ was successive governments’ neglect of the East End of my childhood.” Herbert conjures up the decaying East End, centered around the dying Thames port known as the London Docklands, with righteous indignation. For centuries, the London Docklands were the beating, sclerotic heart of Empire. The wealth and legacy of untold peoples, developed over countless millennia, were ruthlessly extracted by the ships that plied those waterways, amassing vast amounts of cultural heritage, wealth, and treasure in the name of English colonialism while sending out fleets of gunships, grave-robbers, and bankers in exchange.  

By the 1970s, however, the area was in a state of absolute collapse. The docklands that survived the transition from East Indiaman to steam to diesel, that survived the Blitz and powered the world-historic growth and exploitation of the British Empire, died as a result of the proliferation and adoption of intermodal shipping containers, which led to larger ships that required deeper ports than the Docklands could offer. Shipping moved irrevocably to provincial centers like Felixstowe or further downstream to the Port of London, leaving the great bulk of the Docklands largely abandoned, the surrounding neighborhoods subject to flight. Between 1976 and 1981, the population of the area was reduced from 55,000 to 39,000. 

So, the East End of this period was one of decay and transition. Herbert said that he was raised in “an old slum that had to be pulled down,” a common occurrence in an area marked by decades-old bomb sites full of dangerous debris. When compared to the anesthetized, homogenized, health-and-safety-fied, thoroughly Wetherspooned London of today, Herbert’s childhood world seems almost unimaginably distant, the rotten strata upon which all the Gherkins, Shards, and legions of Pret-a-Manger rest uneasy. 

Written over a ten-year span, the Rats trilogy is fairly formulaic plot-wise. Take a London location (the East End, Epping Forest, and the rubble of post-nuclear exchange). Stir in some mutant rats. Add a stolidly generic middle-class man-of-action as the protagonist who urges common sense, morality, and righteous violence in the face of quibbling bureaucratic toffs and effete scientists, wins over the determinedly “modern” young woman (who nevertheless yearns for marriage), and survives the ravening rodent hordes. Salt in occasional vignettes in which characters are introduced (their life histories and often their crudest perversions) in close-third perspective, before having them destroyed in gory Grand Guignol fashion by rats (and, in the third novel, nuclear explosions). The primary storyline is interrupted repeatedly by these deeply personal vignettes, and it is in these sections that Herbert is most effective as an author, demonstrating the character-driven subjectivity and mastery of visceral horror that would develop substantially over his career. 

In the first book the protagonist is Harris, a former East End resident returned to work as a school teacher of “art to little bastards whose best work is on lavatory walls.” He is soon made aware of the presence of dog-sized predatory rodents that pursue schoolchildren and various other residents, tearing them to shreds while also carrying a deadly virus that ensures even the slightest bite is fatal. The creatures themselves are mutants, the product of breeding experiments performed by a mad scientist who used a shack in the Docklands as a lab in order to hybridize common black rats with their tropical cousins, irradiated as the result of nuclear testing in the South Pacific. This union results in a much larger, more intelligent, more aggressive species of rat, one that acts cooperatively under the mental command of psychic, two-headed albino rats who serve as overlords. 

Various bureaucrats and ministers propose various technocratic solutions to the crisis, like engineered viruses and ultrasonics. The infestation is deemed solved again and again by authorities, only for the monsters to subsequently reemerge and eat the inhabitants of tube stations, cinemas, and schools. By the end, Harris has to take matters into his own hands, dispatching the two-headed rat leader with an axe. 

In terms of Herbert’s stated theme of East End neglect, the metaphor is not a particularly subtle one. The residents know there is a problem (urban decay/radioactive rodents), while the government either ignores them or attempts the bare minimum before declaring victory. It’s a pattern painfully analogous to contemporary global catastrophes like the coronavirus pandemic and climate change. 

Deeper themes are present in the novel as well, indicative of older prejudices and contexts. The monsters are hybrids, the product of rodent miscegenation and genetic tampering. They are foreign. They operate with a communal intelligence and willing self-sacrifice. The fears of the foreign other, of a caricatured communism and of what the protagonist refers to during a visit to the Royal Shakespeare Theater as the “multi-racial accents that destroyed any hope of atmosphere,” are present throughout the initial novel. They aren’t the predominant themes, but their presence is notable—and somewhat glaring—to the modern reader.

The Rats is an ugly and propulsive book, with scenes of depravity and gore whose power is no less diminished four decades later. While I have never been consumed by rodents (mutant or otherwise), sections like the following seem to capture the flavor (as it were) of the experience:

Rats! His mind screamed the words. Rats eating me alive! God, God help me. Flesh was ripped away from the back of his neck. He couldn’t rise now for the sheer weight of writhing, furry vermin feeding from his body, drinking his blood.

 Shivers ran along his spine, to his shocked brain. The dim shadows seemed to float before him, then a redness ran across his vision. It was the redness of unbelievable pain. He couldn’t see any more—the rats had already eaten his eyes.

Respectable reviewers were aghast. Martin Amis’s infamous and vinegary assessment in The Observer set the tone: “By page 20 the rats are slurping up the sleeping baby after the brave bow-wow has fought to the death to save its charge… enough to make a rodent retch, undeniably—and enough to make any human pitch the book aside.” When Herbert went to his local W.H. Smith’s to ask if they had a copy, he was told, “no, and nor were they likely to.” 

Despite the critical drubbing, the books were an immediate sensation. There is a raw vitality to The Rats, a kind of atavistic anger and verve. At times it has the feel of outsider art, a hint of Henry Darger in the sheer excess of gore coupled with the violations of “good taste” and narrative expectation. In his 1981 book of nonfiction cultural criticism Danse Macabre, Stephen King called it “the literary version of Anarchy in the U.K.” 

Adaptations of The Rats followed in short order and included a groundbreaking Commodore 64 game, among the first that set out to intentionally frighten the player. The survival horror game won praise for innovations that included the titular creatures eating right through the player’s screen. A 1982 film version was made in Canada as Deadly Eyes, trading the atmospheric decay of London for bland Ontario provincialism. The rats themselves are played by costumed dachshunds, and these unwitting actors were and are the subject of considerable scorn. They look like what they are: plump little pups wriggling beneath latex and fur overcoats. Still, watching these costumed dogs (and puppets in some scenes) in 2020 produces an uncanny valley discomfort, the primal recognition of distorted reality, a sensation that has almost vanished entirely within the weightless wonders of our CGI age.  

***

The first sequel to The Rats, 1979’s Lair, moves the action from the rotting labyrinth of the Docklands to the green and gentle hills of Greater London’s Epping Forest. Our new muscular protagonist (an exterminator this time) encounters the surviving vermin, while the rats encounter (and eat) various philanderers, exhibitionists, and innocents. Bureaucrats and ministers get in the way of things, problems are thought solved and then, inevitably, the ravaging rodents return. The book ends with rat revolution (reminiscent of Caesar’s ape revolution in the original Planet of the Apes series) as the grotesque two-headed albino psychic overlords are overthrown by the rank-and-file, who then make their stealthy return to London itself. 

While there is some novelty in the setting of Epping Forest, and Herbert’s depiction therein of a truly English patchwork of bucolic woodlands, raunchy public sex, earnest scouts, depraved flashers, and rotten feudal privilege abutting modern development, Lair is a bit of a letdown. Where The Rats benefits from the sheer audacity and verve of Herbert’s amateur prose, its sequel is a liminal book, in terms of both Herbert’s development as a writer and the period when it was written, the so-called “Winter of Discontent”—which would fuel the rise and electoral triumph of Margaret Thatcher. 

Written five years later, 1984’s Domain, the third book in the trilogy, drips with anger and disdain towards the seismic upheavals convulsing British society, the widening gulf between the machinations of the elite stewards of the neoliberal state and that of the socially integrated individual. Herbert terms this divide in Domain as the “Them” and the “Us.” By this point, the ancient Docklands that had so influenced both the life of James Herbert and the plot of The Rats had been transformed. A firestorm of tax breaks and development subsidies cleared away the rubble and decay (along with venerable neighborhoods and communities), and the new office blocks and skyscrapers of Canary Wharf began their long vertical climb. In Domain, multiple hydrogen bombs are responsible for the razing of the Docklands. In reality, it was Thatcher and the Tory vision of “urban regeneration.” 

Domain begins with absolute devastation, with London laid waste by a series of nuclear explosions. Amid the rubble of the city’s ancient roots, a beleaguered group of survivors huddles within a fallout shelter. Among their number is the cold-blooded representative of the government, some hot-headed working-class maintenance staff, and the requisite muscular protagonist, a pilot named Culver. There is bickering, a love-interest, and, of course, a massive horde of waiting, hungry mutants. 

Things quickly fall apart, and the best laid plans of bureaucrats (and rats) go awry. The shelter is breached and the plucky human survivors attempt to find the government’s primary underground headquarters. The bulk of the novel takes place in the ruin of the city itself, one in which the destruction of Herbert’s bombsite-riddled childhood has been spread across the entirety of London. In Domain, the action stays rooted in character, the setting is fully realized, and, like a rock band that knows to save the old hits for the encore, Herbert includes his requisite vignettes in which we meet and sympathize with several characters shortly before their gory demise. While the atavistic blood-rite horror-magic of The Rats is unimpeachable, Domain is far more successful as a novel. When James Herbert reflected on the trilogy in a 2003 interview with the Evening Standard, he agreed, saying that “each one improved on the last. ‘Domain,’ I think validates the first two.”

The key theme in Domain is that of the hubris of the government elite, the “Them” who sought to “manage” a nuclear holocaust safely ensconced within sumptuously appointed fallout shelters (which include royal apartments for “the elite among the elite”). This hubris is punished by a problem they had already declared solved and subsequently ignored: the rats. The consequence of the planner’s plan is a great pit of gnawed, headless bodies, with Thatcher’s mangled corpse assuredly among them. Herbert delights in his own machinations, writing 

A failsafe refuge had been constructed for a select few, the rest of the country’s population… left to suffer the full onslaught of the nuclear strike; but the plan had gone terribly wrong, a freak of nature—literally—destroying those escapers just as surely as the nuclear blitz itself…. If there were really a Creator somewhere out there in the blue, he would no doubt be chuckling over mankind’s folly and the retribution paid out to at least some of its leaders.

This indifference and denial of the elite contributes to the bitter humor all throughout. There are multiple scenes where people vaguely remember some nasty business with a new breed of rat having taken place “a few years ago,” the characters emphasizing that thousands of Londoners devoured in a rodent massacre failed to make much of an impression when the victims were the working class residents of the East End.

***

While it may not be “fine literature,” reading Herbert’s Rats trilogy in 2020 gives the novels a new layer of subtext that, for all his horrific (and sometimes ridiculous) imaginative powers, the author couldn’t have conceived at the time. Even a revolutionary goresmith like Herbert failed to anticipate the myriad horrors of the neoliberal consensus and the entrenchment of hard-right conservatism: the long half-century of atomization, inequality, loss of empathy, and environmental degradation. Herbert could vividly imagine rats eating London’s impoverished alive by the dozen, but the thought of 130,000 being needlessly sacrificed at the altar of the great god Austerity was too much horror, even for him. 

The theme of elite neglect and conscious denial that runs throughout the Rats trilogy has a remarkable resonance with contemporary Western society’s response to the novel coronavirus. Wishful thinking, denial, and elite arrogance have proven no substitute for painful and necessary action. Throughout Herbert’s novels, government officials declare the issue of ravening mutated rodents gnawing their way through the populace “solved”—mission accomplished—after a minimum of effort, simply because it’s easy to say. The parallels are obvious. 

Our leadership exacerbates the crises of pandemic through denial, half-measures, and simple nihilistic greed. It’s easy to make a ludicrous lie like “there is no second wave” an official government statement. It’s easy to urge the disposable “us” to “reopen” and return to our “normal life,” without having to make any of the necessary economic or political sacrifices to do so safely. When Boris Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings boldly breaks curfew or Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows throws a lavish indoor wedding, the arrogance and disdain is palpable. “We” must sacrifice so “they” can celebrate. As the size of our current COVID-19 wave swells ever larger, with no crest in sight, the true horror lurks at the edges, ready to assert its dominion yet again. 

The rats are still here, monstrous as ever. And they’re hungry.

M.L. Schepps lives in federally occupied Portland, where he takes many photos of birds. He spent the last year developing a deep appreciation of Kate Bush while also writing a book about 19th century Chinese immigration and Arctic exploration. Find more of his work at MLSchepps.com.

Sam Moore / November 19, 2020

It’s easy to spot an exploitation film by the cover of the poster or DVD. Maybe more so than any other type of art, you can judge it by its cover: a woman, often barely dressed, holding some kind of weapon. Think Pam Grier on the cover of Coffy or Foxy Brown. Even contemporary grindhouse fare like Planet Terror embraces this tradition, with a machine-gun-legged Rose McGowan among the most immediately recognizable images from the film. That’s because exploitation films always know what they’re selling. That’s where the name comes from; there’s something in these films—normally sex and violence—that is being exploited in order to lure an audience. And that’s where Russ Meyer comes in, the filmmaker whose Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) takes everything about the exploitation genre and ramps it up to an eleven. It’s a strange film that at once knows the genre’s problems and is willing to embrace them. 

In the film’s poster, true to form, instead of one woman, there’s two, and the angle of the camera seems designed entirely to highlight Varla’s (Tura Satana) chest. She’s thrown a man to the ground, and there are two cars, engines roaring, behind her. In many ways, it’s the perfect crystallization of the film itself: women, breasts, violence, fast cars. This excess is a “come hither” moment for exploitation audiences, taking everything that they love and blowing it up to extremes. That’s what makes Pussycat so compelling, the strange combination of exploitation and the reverence with which it treats its objects, like a piece of lurid pop art, amplifying and magnifying the tastes of the seediest corners of grindhouse cinema.

One of the ways in which Pussycat challenges the nature of exploitation is by approaching these common tropes—oversexed and ultraviolent women—with a kind of self-awareness, looking at the genre with a nod and a wink. This is made clear from the very beginning of the film, and the way it uses voiceover narration—there’s no other voiceover in the film after this, which is unusual—that beckons the audience by welcoming them to “violence, the word and the act.” The voice goes on to talk about the way in which the “favorite mantle [of violence] still remains sex,” and the “voracious appetite” that the film gives to its leading ladies is something that obviously applies to the audience as well. Pussycat is explicitly designed for an audience that’s hungry for the intersection of sex and violence, for images of powerful women—as long as they’re not too powerful.

The women in Pussycat are fascinating contradictions, something that the film explores through the ways in which the gaze of the camera operates, often changing to enhance different aspects of the characters, from their sexuality to the power they possess over men. As the film begins, Varla and her soon-to-be partners in crime, Billie and Rosie (Lori Williams and Haji), are go-go dancing. The camera loves it, obsesses over and objectifies their bodies, the way that they move, embracing the male gaze at a level that almost feels like parody, even though it’s clearly played straight as can be in every possible way. But beyond just leering at the women, this sequence establishes the fact that they are powerful, with a shot straight out of Film School 101: with the camera low down, looking up at them, it makes the women seem bigger and more prominent—in more ways than one, they fill the screen. As the camera cuts between the dancing women and the borderline rabid men who watch them, bellowing “GO, GO, GO,” it becomes clear that this is, for better or worse, a film about women—about the power they can exert, about the way that they’re looked at. The opening voiceover offers a warning about the kind of women capable of violence, and it’s clearly aimed at men, with examples like “your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist, or a dancer in a go-go club.” It’s power through the lens of female characters, but clearly designed for the consumption of men, the great contradiction that defines the gaze of Pussycat, and much of the other exploitation fare of the era.

The women are placed among a landscape of things that define American masculinity, and the object most rooted in this is a fast car. Driving, racing, and time trials animate much of the drama and narrative of the film. Varla, Billie, and Rosie race through the California desert; they play high speed games of chicken with one another, and the film climaxes in a chase sequence that takes place both on foot and on four wheels. The three women are placed in a position normally associated with masculinity, which is what makes them such fetishistic objects of male wish fulfilment. The camera never lets the audience forget about the assets of these women, but they’re also shown to be “one of the guys” in the way that they drive, fight, and flirt. They can—up to a point—hold their own against the men, and there’s often a kind of role reversal in terms of gender.

In action films, with the James Bond franchise being a prime example, it’s the men who are good drivers and use women purely for sex. But in Pussycat, the women do that, with Varla’s attempted seduction of Kirk, a man she’s hoping will lead her to some money that’s been stashed away. There’s something striking about the way in which, in the moment, Pussycat engages in this role reversal without any asterisk or caveat, simply allowing the women to be powerful and sexual on their own terms. This understanding of how sexuality works on screen comes through in one of the most common exploitation tropes—the catfight, which occurs early on in the film. Billie and Rosie fight each other, their shirts get wet, and it’s all set to a strange, almost dissonant jazz score that undercuts the sexploitation angle of the scene. If the score had been different, then it would seem lifted directly out of porn.

This strange combination of a kind of female empowerment (one built on having the characters embody ideas of strength that are typically associated with maleness and masculinity) and exploitation fare is what makes Pussycat a unique, more aesthetically curious film than a lot of its contemporaries. And some of these images: the cars racing across the desert, Billie and Rosie in the water after a catfight, are reminiscent of pieces of perverted pop art. Pop art as a movement was all about taking the lowbrow and mass-produced elements of American culture, from Warhol’s soup cans to Lichtenstein’s comic strips, and elevating. This relationship between commerce, mass-production, and artistic merit is something that is rooted in a uniquely American tradition; Jasper Johns even reproduced the American flag itself. All you need to turn stills from Pussycat into a Lichtenstein print are some kitschy captions and speech bubbles.  

Meyer’s relationship to exploitation film is a lot like the relationship that pop art has with capitalism. They’re both at once slyly aware of what the systems they exist in are doing, and they are either satirizing it (the dissonant jazz score over the catfight highlights the absurdity of the trope) or embracing it in all of its ugliness. The difference, sometimes, is almost impossible to distinguish. It’s easy to imagine Varla, for instance, even at her lowest point, aping Lichtenstein’s famous Drowning Girl. The original contains the thought bubble “I don’t care! I’d rather sink — than call Brad for help!”, and while the words don’t appear in Pussycat, Varla might have said exactly this, replacing Brad’s name with Kirk’s. The film is even willing to lampoon the misogyny that defines so many responses to independent and powerful women, notably when the Old Man whose family the dancers ingratiate themselves with in the hopes of finding money says: 

Women! They let ’em vote, smoke and drive—even put ’em in pants! And what happens? A Democrat for president! A bunch of smoke up your chimney! Russian roulette on the highways! Can’t even tell brother from sister, unless you meet ’em up close.

This line highlights the biggest problem with Pussycat’s relationship to the grindhouse: while it’s more than willing to show these women being sexual, strong, and violent, it always reins them in when the male characters get too uncomfortable, a response that typifies a kind of masculinity that both objectifies, and is afraid of, powerful women. The film makes them monstrous, in a way—they always exist in counterpoint to the sweet and innocent Linda, who they’ve kidnapped and who offers a different kind of womanhood, one more palatable to male audiences once the credits have rolled. It’s no wonder that Varla’s demise in the climactic finale—in a moment of what feels like purposeful irony, she’s run over by a truck driven by Linda—that she gets described as “nothing human” by Kirk, before he and Linda drive off into the sunset in the very truck that she used to kill Varla.

In a way, the end of Pussycat is the only way that such a distinctly American exploitation film could end: after a whirlwind tour of tropes associated with male action heroes, set against a uniquely American desert landscape, normalcy returns. The power (and gender) dynamics of the real world—where your secretary or doctor’s receptionist are unlikely to kidnap your girlfriend, or try to seduce and rob you—are reinforced by the violent end that the subversive women meet. In contrast to this, the sweet Linda and righteous Kirk ride off into the sunset together to begin a quote-unquote normal relationship. Exploitation cinema reached its heights in the early 1970s, and while the template of Pussycat is there, the films that came in its wake were less willing to embrace the larger-than-life aspects of their characters and stories. Pussycat remains unique for the ways in which it refuses to look away from the complicated relationship that its characters have with the gaze of both the camera and the audience. These women are simultaneously manipulating that gaze and being manipulated by it, something that makes Pussycat the kind of gaudy pop art that you could only ever find on 42nd Street.

Sam Moore‘s writing on queerness, politics, and genre fiction in art has been published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Little White Lies, Hyperallergic, and other places. Their poetry and experimental essays have been published in print and online, most recently in the Brixton Review of Books. If their writing didn’t already give it away, they’re into weird stuff.

Mike Apichella / November 17, 2020

The first music videos to air on MTV and broadcast television were chaotic blurts of arty nonsense defined by pastel colors, cheesy dance party theatrics, and avant-garde visual effects. Often realized by student auteurs working with little to no budget, even the weirdest of these clips didn’t aim for scares.  

Early heavy metal videos were an exception. Sans any playful abstraction, these emerged as S&M nightmares brandishing dystopian, Mario Bava-esque atmospherics, and other classic horror movie elements. Iron Maiden, W.A.S.P., Ratt, Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, and the ever disturbing Ozzy Osbourne were some of the earliest metal acts to dabble in these themes, and headbangers were mega-stoked to find their favorite shredders interspersed among skinny tie New Wave bands, foppish New Romantics, Barnes & Barnes’ “Fish Heads,” and all the other tamer acts that typically formed music video programming in the age before American Idol and reality shows.

No heavy metal chiller got more immersive or confrontational than the 1984 video Don Coscarelli directed for Dio’s “The Last In Line” (watch it here). By ‘84, Coscarelli was already well known in the genre circuit for cult classics like Phantasm (1979) and The Beastmaster (1982). The work he turned in here is a claustrophobic melange of suspense and political subtext, overflowing with scenes of torture and psychological horror.

The clip starts off with a courier (child star Meeno Peluce) bicycling in a peaceful California suburb, gliding through a squeaky clean business district. Sporting long curls, a dangling earing, and tight Levi’s, it would’ve been tough to find another actor who looked more like a young suburban rocker. Once he arrives at his office-plex destination, a beardo in an old sports car (Dio member Claude Schnell) gestures ominously with the sign of the horns, possibly an attempt to stop the kid from entering the glassy industrial space. Confused and annoyed, the teenager avoids the mysterious hairball. As he enters the building, the music chimes along with a folky lilt and forlorn vocals describing “a ship without a storm.”

The kid gets in the elevator, going up, then makes a sudden high speed plummet as the guitar distortion kicks in, crashing deep beneath the Earth’s crust. The elevator doors open to an attack of screaming riffage that ushers our hero into a murky, post-industrial Hades. Freakish processions of enslaved deformity mob the kid: shambolic zombies, doomed souls covered in infectious scars and pockmarks, and hastily assembled androids (including one that’s extremely Borg-like in appearance, years before the Star Trek: The Next Generation characters made their debut). The hapless creatures are pressed into electronic torture chambers by cyborg storm troopers armed with glow-in-the-dark cattle prods.

Several images here signify economic blight. One zombie can be seen clutching a grocery cart filled with sundry garbage (a boom box, a broken record, scraps of fabric) while dressed in a tattered trench coat. A balding middle-aged man limps along in filthy business attire wearing a cracked pair of reading glasses. Their vacant stares are fearsome, but also touched with overarching sadness and tragedy. Some of the less monstrous extras appear to be outcasts from L.A.’s Skid Row (whose hordes of homeless the LAPD was desperately trying to “clean up” on the eve of the 1984 Summer Olympics).  

Of the video’s many scenes of suffering, there are two big standouts. The first occurs as our hero finds a fenced-in arcade where kids are chained to video game machines. Their wrists are locked in manacles that shock them whenever they make a mistake. If they lose a game, they’re fried to death. An obvious interpretation here involves criticism of consumer culture and the moral panic surrounding video games. 

Another interpretation involves game theory—the belief that dog-eat-dog competition is a major building block of civilization. So Long Sucker (originally Fuck You Buddy) was a board game co-created by the infamous RAND Corporation and Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., a paranoid schizophrenic whose battles with mental health weren’t publicly known until several years after his research had concluded. In the early 1950s, Nash and RAND conducted a series of experiments in which people were monitored while playing So Long Sucker. They hoped the project would yield undeniable scientific proof of game theory’s validity. According to RAND’s own documentation, their first experiment was a failure; the others were successful, but occurred in an environment much more tightly controlled than that of the first one. Regardless, after many years of therapy and introspection, Nash later declared his belief in game theory to be nothing more than a bi-product of the paranoia brought on by his mental illness.

The deadly arcade serves as the proving ground for this cynical realm, ruled by a mutant military-industrial establishment. The players here, like the protagonist, are teens. Unlike the other haggard rogues, they’re fresh-faced and clean cut. The arcade of doom pinpoints and rewards those driven by the insane competition while rooting out and killing those who are not addicted to conquest. Presumably whoever endures gets a special place in the wretched promenade. 

The scariest torture scene unfolds when Peluce’s character wanders into a theater where another large group of teens have been fastened to metal racks, their mouths stuffed with big red ball gags, foreheads primed for lobotomizing. They all face a giant screen TV that plays footage of singer Ronnie James Dio belting out incendiary lyrics:

Two eyes from the east
It’s The Angel or The Beast
And the answer lies between the good and bad
We search for the truth
We could die upon the tooth
But the thrill of just the chase is worth the pain

In the track notes of the 2003 Dio anthology Stand Up and Shout, the singer described “The Last In Line” as an open-ended tribute to perseverance: “This song has many interpretations. You could be the last in line meaning, oh shit, all the good stuff is already gone. Or you could be the last, the strongest, and, to me, it’s always been that, the perseverance that comes from going through challenges in life. And when you get to the end and you’re the last one standing, and you ask yourself, ‘Was it worth it?’ You better say yes. That’s gonna be my answer.” The song’s revelatory chorus reinforces this sentiment:

We’ll know for the first time
If we’re evil or divine
We’re the last in line!
See how we shine!

No one goes further with over-the-top theatrics than Ronnie James Dio himself. The guttural overlord gets to do all the things that have rightfully made him a superhero to generations of heavy metal fans. In many scenes he’s shown standing on a bonafide pedestal! His greatest moments come at the end of the clip with a hilarious sequence that’d be a spoiler if given any detailed description.

The other Dio band members also get interesting cameos. They emerge as impartial overseers breaking the netherworld tension by hamming it up in one ridiculous arena rock pose after another. Along with Schnell’s cryptic allusion are the scenes where drummer Vinny Appice flails away at a zany bronto-bone drum kit, while guitarist Vivian Campbell solos atop a bashed up car before an adoring crowd of zombies all clad in skull-crunching electrodes that are actually hooked into his axe. The rapt attention that the ragged zombies give to Campbell and his guitar’s connection to their head gear combine to symbolize another great creator of iconic ‘80’s trance states: the Sony Walkman and similar portable stereo devices, distractions that could just as easily enhance or annihilate reality. The scene also refers to another great moral panic of the time: the idea that heavy rock could turn people into disciples of Satan. It was one of many irrational fears that inspired the anti-metal crusades of The PMRC and other right-wing Christian groups. 

Just like the dehumanizing repetition of factory work or the brain melt one experiences while stuck at the local post office or DMV, the prisoners keep on marching around and around, enduring the same endless cavalcade of machine-induced humiliation. In harmony with the lyrical themes, Peluce’s character stays focused on survival from start to finish, even when fear seems to control every expression. Coscarelli’s horrors only encourage the kid to resist the overwhelming bleakness. 

While videos for tracks like The Plasmatics‘ “The Damned” and Motley Crue’s “Looks That Kill” prominently featured dystopian aesthetics, “The Last In Line” is one of the few clips to serve as an unflinching commentary on defying the apocalypse. Don Coscarelli turned the Dio anthem into an ideal soundtrack for Reagan-induced nightmares of cruelty and destruction. Grotesque monsters, wayward youth, and the impoverished are all enslaved in the same excruciating hell—what lies beneath the glassy veneer of the suburban industrial park. To find a way out of this infernal world the young courier must move against the tide of pain. His will to survive—tenacious individualism is another Reagan-era requisite—provides the only path to freedom. 

Mike Apichella has been working in the arts since 1991. He is a writer, multimedia artist, musician, and a founder of Human Host and the archival project Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts. Under his real name and various pseudonyms, his work has been published by Splice Today, Profligate, Human Conduct Press, and several DIY zines. Mike currently lives in the northeast US where he aspires to someday become the “crazy cat man” of his neighborhood.

Noah Berlatsky / October 30, 2020

This is a revision of a piece that originally ran on Noah Berlatsky’s Patreon.  

The Omen is generally considered a bleak film because the devil wins. But it’s even bleaker as a picture of who the devil is supposed to be, and what kind of measures are needed to defeat him.

The movie stars an aging but still virile Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn, the American ambassador to Britain and a close friend (and former roommate) of the U.S. president. When the film opens, Thorn’s substantially younger wife Kathy (Lee Remick) is in the hospital where she has just delivered and lost a baby in a Catholic Italian hospital. A priest suggests the couple substitute a baby whose mother has died at almost the same moment. Robert agrees without telling his wife, which is a mistake because the baby, Damien, is the spawn of hell. After Damien grows into a disturbingly smirking toddler (Harvey Spencer Stephens), the child quickly uses mysterious powers and malevolent allies to murder, in quick order, his governess, his unborn sibling, his mother, and Robert himself en route to the apocalypse and the extermination of the human race (the last two heavily foreshadowed albeit not quite accomplished at film’s end.)

As with most Hollywood movies that focus on politicians, The Omen carefully has no particular politics of its own. We never learn what party Robert belongs to, and his own geopolitical views are unspecified beyond a general opposition to allowing the antichrist to drown the world in blood. Despite this wishy-washy reticence, viewers can draw some conclusions about the movie’s view of righteous order from context. Director Richard Donner’s cinematography is tasteful and high class, as are the Thorn’s lifestyles and sumptuous residences. Servants are thick on the ground, and little Damien’s fourth birthday party is celebrated with all the casual opulence the American de facto peerage can muster, including but not limited to an apparently rented merry-go-round. The good, the normal, and the safely non-demonic status quo is represented by opulent high ceilings and expensive clothes draped upon the trophy wife, who in one scene tosses a lavish piece of outerwear upon the pricey floor in preparation for what will presumably be equally pricey and opulent intercourse. 

Into this paradise of privilege slides Damien, whose sin, like the fork in a snake’s tongue, is twofold. First, he’s a child, and America in 1976 was notably anxious about the next generation. The Omen‘s most direct predecessor, 1973’s The Exorcist, is less shy about drawing the connection between the demon in the daughter at home and the demon in the daughters and sons out there protesting in the streets. But even if Vietnam is never mentioned in The Omen, Damien’s revolutionary assault on his elders’ government seems congruent with the nation’s contemporary traumatic generational conflict. The demon child’s remote murders of his various adversaries show up as dark, shadowy predictions on photographs—a priest bisected by a dark line, a governess with a shadowy, inexplicable loop around her neck. The children are the future, and that future is one in which the confident, smug olds are harvested with a scythe of blood and documentary photography. 

Damien is not just evil because he’s young, though. He’s evil because he’s upwardly mobile. Damien has no birth and no breeding; he’s a presumptuous upstart who murders Robert’s infant heir and seizes the perks of power to which he has no right. It’s significant in this regard that Damien’s chief allies are servants. You’d think that, given a choice, the devil would subvert the wealthy and powerful to his cause. But those most drawn to him aren’t capitalists and kings, but service workers. The obsequious priest in the hospital in the opening scene is eager to bend the rules to get the American ambassador the child he wants. It is Damien’s first nanny (Holly Palance) who delivers to him the most enthusiastic paean he receives in the film, shouting “Damien! Damien! I love you!” as she hangs herself to make way for her equally devoted replacement, the malevolent Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw). The horror of The Omen is in large part a terror that all the people you pay to scrape and stoop are plotting your downfall from down there on their knees. 

In addition to the hired help, the devil’s other devoted acolytes are dogs; he is attended by a number of bristling Rottweilers. Damien’s association with animality is cemented in one of the film’s most striking images: in a barren cemetery, Robert opens the tomb of Damien’s mother as the camera, panning down, reveals the skeleton of a jackal. Damien was not born of a human woman; he’s of a different, fouler womb. The eugenic implications are that the elite are actually of a different species than the less fortunate. Damien is passing as rich, as white, and as human, all categories that are conflated with each other in a film that, not coincidentally, barely has a single person of color on screen during its entire run time.

Damien represents the young, the poor, and the non-white—all those in the outer darkness staring in at Robert’s immaculate top hat and Kathy’s blond coiffure. When Robert realizes the uncouth hordes have breached the gates, and the stray dog is actually in the living room, his eyebrows flex, his jaw clenches, and he turns to rabid homicidal conspiracy theories and Christian apocalypticism. Driven by the paranoid ramblings of priests and millenarian, vaguely anti-Semitic prophecy, he drags his four-year-old to the altar and prepares a ritual sacrifice. Faced with a challenge to its purity, power, and lines of succession, the humane, rational representative of cosmopolitan American power reaches immediately for the prop of religious zealotry, bending his upright angles to the bloody work of reaction and child murder.

Robert’s bid to murder his son for the greater glory of God and country is foiled by the authorities, who shoot him dead, little knowing they are contributing to their own doom. The last, now famous shot of The Omen is of Damien holding the hand of his new adoptive father, the U.S. president; the child turns towards the screen with an unsettling grin. The revolution has come, and all will change utterly. The American way of nice homes, genetic purity, and obedient servants will fall like the blade of a guillotine, or the pane of glass that Damien arranges to have slice through the neck of a meddlesome reporter. Change is apocalypse, and the defenders of the status quo must do all they can to resist it, even unto murdering their own children. 

Damien’s smile, though, was perhaps premature. The forces of reaction and Christian nationalism are not so easily overthrown. In retrospect, The Omen warned not of the devil’s child, but of those who hunted him—all those blank-eyed patriarchs and their long knives.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

Reviews / October 29, 2020

Invitation to Hell
Directed by Wes Craven
ABC (1984)

Last year, my esteemed editor-in-chief delivered me a Halloween treat for our Tubular Terrors series in the form of The Night Stalker. My overall lack of familiarity with the made-for-TV horrors of yesteryear led to another recommendation this year, and it was just as enjoyable as skulking around 1970s Las Vegas with Carl Kolchak. But the sunlit suburbs of Wes Craven’s 1984 Invitation to Hell hide just as many demonic horrors—and conspiracies among the ruling class—as the shadowy, vampire-stalked alleyways of Las Vegas’s sleazy eternal night.

Invitation to Hell (Wes Craven’s previous made-for-TV horror was the 1978 Linda Blair vehicle Stranger in Our House) definitely follows on well-trod thematic ground, examining the American nuclear family’s impulse to conform and keep up with the Joneses in suburbia. But it’s on the execution, in the casting, and in a few of the left-field plot developments that the film really shines. Robert Urich and Joanna Cassidy play Matt and Pat Winslow, a married couple with the requisite pair of kids, Robbie and Chrissy (Barret Oliver of D.A.R.Y.L., Cocoon, and The NeverEnding Story and Soleil Moon Frye of Punky Brewster), and the obligatory dog moving into a brand new planned community as Matt takes a new job at the believably-ludicrously-named firm Micro-DigiTech. Matt is working on a new spacesuit for NASA’s exploration of Venus (not only is it temperature resistant to the thousands of degrees, but it can also identify non-human life; unsurprisingly, these details will become very important later in a unique case of Chekhov’s Spacesuit).

The Winslows’ beat-up station wagon literally runs into the town car of the woman who seems to really run this community: head of the local Steaming Springs Country Club, Jessica Jones (played by All My Children star Susan Lucci). The Winslows are soon drawn into the inevitable peer pressure to “join the club,” which, yes, ends up being a Satanic coven where the wealthy members of the club are replaced by doppelgängers from Hell. Matt ends up becoming the de facto resistance to this infernal conspiracy as his work colleagues get “promotions,” loyal secretaries are killed in mysterious accidents, and eventually the members of his own family are replaced by their evil demonic duplicates.

Again, this is all pretty bog-standard stuff that’s been explored since the very beginnings of American postwar suburbia: we’ve seen it from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to The Twilight Zone and back again by this point. If the Reagan 1980s jostle alongside Eisenhower’s 1950s as the collective psychological emblems of our Cold War material bounty (and the neuroses that come along with it), then it’s no surprise that we’d see a reflection of the same social-parable B movies just as “morning in America” is dawning. But this is the ’80s, and times have changed. From the very outset of Invitation to Hell, the creeping presence of technology is as much a sinister undertone as the impulses towards conformity and upward mobility. From the very first minutes, we see Robbie staying up late playing a hand-held video game (later smashed up by one of the neighborhood’s bratty demonic kids) and Matt’s habit of bringing his work home, impelling Pat to complain, “I want this house to be a home. Not a lab.” Later on, as Matt’s paranoia ramps up, he finds a seemingly hypnotized neighbor kid over at the house for a sleepover smiling in front of the television—not in front of static as in 1982’s Poltergeist but in front of violent riot footage. Matt’s first secretary at work suspects something is wrong with all the people who’ve received promotions at Micro-DigiTech; she hands Matt the pertinent HR files on a giant computer tape. All around Invitation to Hell, the ways in which surveillance, automation, and computers are beginning to intrude upon family life in the 1980s abound.

The brand new home that the Winslows move into also becomes demonically-possessed in a way. Full of the family’s more old-fashioned furniture and decor at the beginning, Pat redecorates it in a severely dark and angular 1980s style, laden with all the modern amenities, once Pat and Robbie and Chrissy become “members of the club” without Matt’s knowledge. All around the country in the 1980s, the often homespun aesthetic embraced by Boomers in the 1970s as a post-hippie reaction to their plastic childhoods began to shift to something more aspirational, sophisticated, and urbane. This transformation is foreshadowed early in the film—before Pat’s demonic replacement!—with Pat stating that she wants to redecorate to make this house look like a home, not “a fraternity house.” “We’re grown up now,” she says. “You work for a big corporation.” Of course, Pat’s hope for a “pretty and bright” home is subverted when you see it looks like something out of an ’80s music video—or the films of David Lynch or Tim Burton.

Pat wants to keep up with the neighbors, which leads to her being seduced by Jessica into membership at Steaming Springs. The family (minus the suspicious Matt) undergoes a creepy “initiation” ceremony in the resort’s springs, which is actually a literal portal to Hell locked behind a giant steel door (with, of course, electronic keypad lock). The idea of locating the town’s demonic clique at a country club is a deeply resonant American trope by this time, but the prominent and conspicuous addition of a health club and spa to the country club’s social matrix shouldn’t be ignored. In the 1980s, physical fitness was peaking throughout America, and while jogging had been a fad since the 1970s, the next decade saw more and more Americans buying memberships to pricey private health clubs. Locating the sinister impulse to conformity within a palace of fitness and health might be one of Invitation to Hell‘s more subtle and successful horror metaphors, especially considering so many other ’80s horror films did so either exploitatively or gruesomely.

It’s really only in the final act that Invitation to Hell somewhat falls apart. As Matt discovers his family are seemingly forever replaced with their evil duplicates, he takes the fight right to Steaming Springs and Jessica. Filching his experimental space suit from the lab at work, Matt gate-crashes the club’s Halloween party (where the guests favor costumes as conspicuously evil as honest-to-God SS uniforms!) and makes his way down to the steel doorway leading to “the springs.” There he actually physically enters Hell. I was still under the impression that there might be a twist, and Jessica and her doubles might be aliens from Venus themselves, or robots—but the shadowy Gustave Doré-like caverns and the cries of the damned (including Matt’s coworkers and family) convey neatly that Matt is about to follow Orpheus, Aeneas, and Dante into the depths. And at the very bottom of this TV-movie Hell? Well, it turns out that it looks an awful lot like suburbia (the suburban street grid that Matt falls into, shot in negative film, actually looks a bit like a circuit board). In a mist-cloaked replica of the Winslow family home (empty of all furniture except a piano that Pat must play eternally), Pat, Robbie, and Chrissy are trapped in laser-lit circles, which Matt can only break through by reasserting his familial  love for (and patriarchal control of) his family. They escape, of course, and Jessica—who tries and fails to seduce Matt into abandoning his family—is defeated. The Winslows teleport home to find the country club in flames after the Halloween party.

Whatever mawkishness the ending might possess, and despite the overall simplicity of the film’s message, there’s a lot to love about Invitation to Hell. Susan Lucci manages to convey real menace without chewing the scenery, portraying a sort of 1980s glad-handing, professional-class noblesse oblige that hides an iron fist underneath. It’s only when she’s forced to become a run-of-the-mill succubus that her character becomes uninteresting. In a pre-credit sequence at the very beginning of the film, she mercilessly combusts a limo driver who accidentally runs her over; in the aftermath of the explosion, her perfectly-poised big hair, makeup, and wardrobe say more in a few seconds than any clumsy exposition: Jessica is a confident, powerful, shoulder-padded coven leader for the Eighties. After getting used to Robert Urich in hardboiled TV series like Vega$ and Spencer: For Hire (as well as his turn as a world-weary cop investigating cattle mutilations in Endangered Species), it’s hard to buy this tough guy as a middle-management, Lacoste-wearing tech nerd. His transition to third-act quasi-badass seems almost like a fait accompli. But the scene where Soleil Moon Frye portrays a possessed Chrissie sitting in the middle of the dark and severely redecorated Winslow living room disemboweling her beloved stuffed bunny with a crowbar (!!!) throbs with real eerie energy. The synth soundtrack also gives the film a potent underscore of the technological paranoia telegraphed but never quite delivered upon by the film’s final act. Unsurprisingly, it’s mostly swapped out for an orchestral score during the scenes in Hell.

Wes Craven, for the most part, delivers the goods in Invitation to Hell, a funny little parable from a year of paranoia that occasionally punches above its B-movie lineage to deliver some real thrills and thought-provoking themes.

—Michael Grasso

 Here is the great big map of Ornria.  

The campaigns of the Fabulouth Armee of the  Second Polyester Freestate, and it's nemesis the Blackguard Hordes of Oppressorbad, all take place on this lovely diskworld full of dinosaurs, interwar tanks, pre-dreadnaughts, and biplanes, Chocolotl, paper, lead, and plaster are the great trade items that make the world go round...and cans of coffeecola...

Reviews / October 28, 2020

Cruise Into Terror
Directed by Bruce Kessler
ABC (1978)

World-weary Captain Andy Andrews (Hugh O’Brian) never smiles, but he is especially not smiling today. The company’s luxury liner was overbooked, you see, and he’s been ordered to take eight passengers 800 miles to Mexico on a busted up “battle wagon” (in fact a midsized pleasure boat decorated with ferns) with a broken port engine. Andrews refuses, and is hit with an ultimatum by the line’s director (Marshall Thompson): “Are you gonna take the Obeah to Mexico? Or are you gonna look for a job in the Bolivian Navy?” Andrews, as you’ve probably guessed, chooses poorly. Then again, Obeah refers to an alleged (by white people) type of evil Caribbean sorcery, so he kind of asked for it.

The director, from his office that is for some reason smack in the middle of a warehouse chock-full of giant cardboard boxes (spoiler alert), quickly places a call, telling the other line that the deed is done before hanging up and asking God to save his soul. Enter menacing tribal chanting over a Jaws-like theme (it will occur throughout the movie, and it is a joy) as a runaway forklift rams a stack of giant cardboard boxes (told you) that squash the director.

Briskly, our unlucky passengers are introduced: the ship’s black cat Carina (real name unknown), who is scooped off the dock by recently divorced and looking-to-party Ms. Marilyn Magnesun (Stella Stevens, well acquainted with cursed ships); deck hand Nathan (Magnum, P.I.’s Roger Mosley, here employing a very unfortunate Jamaican accent); archeologist Dr. Isiah Bakkun (Ray Milland, bless him); too-busy-for-love husband and fed up, horny wife Neal and Sandra Barry (played by real life husband and wife Christopher George and Lynda Day George); gal pals Judy “the looker” (Jo Ann Harris) and Debbie “the great personality” (Hilarie Thompson), the former immediately inviting First Officer Simon McLane (pre-Battlestar Galactica Dirk Benedict) to make a house call; too-holy-for-love Reverend Mather (John Forsythe) and fed up, horny wife Lil (Lee Meriwether); and the straggling, bumbling physicist Matt Lazarus (Frank Converse).

Mr. Lazarus is familiar with Dr. Bakkun’s work on “Mayan-Egyptian cross-culturization,” obviously, as we find out during happy hour on the first night. “Ancient Egyptians sailed to Mexico 2000 years ago and founded the Mayan civilization,” the good doctor explains to the skeptical passengers. His evidence? A piece of papyrus revealing that Cleopatra ordered a tomb built “where the sun hits the sea.” I’m not sure how that narrows anything down, but apparently his “calculations” prove that the tomb is on the island of Cozumel, directly off the Eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula—the destination of the Obeah. 

Strange occurrences begin: Debbie nearly falls overboard when malevolent red eyes encroach in the darkness. But Debbie, because she’s somewhat intellectual (i.e. she wears glasses and reads books), is just “high-strung” and “hysterical.” What she saw were the lights of the channel police, says the Captain. Meanwhile, looker Judy is getting it on with Simon, who is only fulfilling his obligations as the “entertainment director.” Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Mather are not so lucky: their husbands both spurn their sexual advances, Mr. Barry because he’s a bigshot finance director and a giant asshole, Reverend Mather because he’s trying to impress God by doing “penance for the years I spent worshiping the bottle.”

The physicist “whiz kid” has done some independent research and concluded that Dr. Bakkun’s “calculations” are for shit: the tomb is actually 41 miles north of Cozumel. And sure enough, that’s exactly where something called the the injector pump breaks. Everyone wants to raid the tomb except for the good Reverend, who thinks “the dead should be allowed to rest in peace,” but Bakkun has “waited for this moment my whole life” and will not be swayed by “Biblical fantasies.”

Ms. Magnesun uses this opportunity to hit on the Captain, sensing he’s “spooked”: “Oh, I pick up on things,” she coyly brags. “Sometimes I know what people are thinking before they know.” Is she “some kind of a witch,” the Captain wants to know. “Well, some people might pronounce it a bit differently,” she says, “but like I said, I do read minds, and yours looks like some pretty heavy reading.” Is that a smile lurching across the Captain’s stony face?

The passengers take a dive and dig up an Egyptian tomb plate, to the orgasmic delight of Bakkun. The Reverend, who can apparently read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, explains that the plate specifically warns against desecration. Also, according to Bakkun’s own papyrus, the tomb (despite all the big brains in the room, no one seems to understand that the tomb has already been desecrated) is to be opened every thousand years for inspection. The last time that happened, the entire Mayan civilization disappeared without a trace. “Something evil” resides inside, the buzzkill Reverend declares, “something waiting for the next millennium.”

The passengers haul up the sarcophagus in short order. It is… much smaller than we were led to believe, but big enough to make dollar signs dance in Neal’s head. Nathan, left in the water like so much chum, is soon “buried under a thousand pounds of rock.” But there’s no time to mourn! The passengers want to take the sarcophagus back to the States and cash in, but the Captain gives them a quick class on maritime law: the salvage belongs to the ship. The Reverend wants to destroy the cursed thing “before the seal is broken on the lid,” because “the son of the evil one is inside, the son of Satan.” Evidence? He reads from a book called the Key of Solomon (a real Renaissance grimoire that has nothing to do with the Bible): “where 12 souls gather, the child of Satan shall be lifted from his bindings,” and so on. One of the 12 is his “guardian”—“One by one, he’s going to take us all.”

Ms. Magnesun uses this opportunity to bed the Captain. During the post-coital cigarette, Cap reveals that it’s his last trip; he’s making all the wrong decisions (he sure is) and feels guilty about Nathan’s death (as he should). Ms. Magnesun tells him something her father used to tell her: “That there is a devil, there is no doubt. But is he trying to get in us, or trying to get out?” She wants the Captain to “let [his] devil out.” Now, unless this is her roundabout way of asking for seconds, I believe she has completely misunderstood the point of her dad’s creepy rhyme.

Thunder and lightning. Lustful Lil has had enough: she must have sex. After making eyes at the heaving sarcophagus, she visits Lazarus’s room unannounced, breathes heavily, and drops her nightgown. Minutes later, disheveled and stumbling down the hall, she meets the Reverend, starts speaking in tongues, and tries to choke him to death. Meanwhile, Neal has become increasingly obsessed with cashing in on the sarcophagus, even while Sandra reasons that it’s clearly evil and should be thrown overboard. “We came on this cruise to be happy again,” she pleads. His response is the best line of the movie:

Happy? And how do you plan to work that miracle? We’re a little old to find happiness on a beach in some sleeping bags like a couple of hippies. Happiness has a price tag, Sandra. It costs money.

Dr. Bakkun comes to his senses, grabs an axe, and tells the baby devil that he’s going to chop him up. Bad move: devil baby shakes the ship, toppling Bakkun, and the sarcophagus launches itself off the table into Bakkun’s face. Neal threatens the physicist into teaming up with him and removes the sarcophagus to his cabin for caressing and safekeeping. They need to get it to the launch before the Obeah docks in Mexico and the treasure is confiscated. But the Obeah is dead in the water, and Simon has to take the launch to get help. The guardian reveals himself, but the Captain still believes there’s a logical explanation. The Reverend strongly disagrees, chucking a couple of gas lanterns at the sarcophagus (and poor Carina, who has snuggled up to it)—“to the flames you shall return”—and wrestles with the guardian. Lil, her trance broken, sticks with her man to expire, along with the guardian and the devil baby, in the flames. The survivors escape in the launch before the ship explodes (an explosion lifted from a production with an actual budget and clumsily overlaid onto the Obeah), and the Captain concludes with a morose voiceover log entry. He will never smile again.

I have spent much too long describing the plot of a 1978 TV movie called Cruise Into Terror that is very obviously a rip of the greatest telefilm of all time, The Horror at 37,000 Feet, but I couldn’t help myself. There is magic here. Good magic. Hugh O’Brian utters every word with the gravitas of a Rod Serling-narrated Twilight Zone epilogue, and at one point the Captain, Bowie knife in hand, quite literally stares down a shark. Christopher George is spectacularly over-the-top, as was usual during this stage of his career. Milland is a treasure, and I won’t hear otherwise (he too would go on to star in Battlestar Galactica as the debauched Sire Uri). And the sarcophagus! It really breathes, with accompanying heartbeat sound effect! Ultimately, that’s what seals the deal for me. The ’70s were a golden age of paranormal media and pseudoscience and urban legend, and the idiotic and recycled occult theme feels like home. Also, I’ve got a thing for boats (see below).

An Aaron Spelling production, Cruise Into Terror was obviously banking on the success of Spelling’s The Love Boat, then in its first season. And yet it was probably an earlier Spelling TV movie, the murder-mystery Death Cruise (1974), that set the template (minus the foul play) for The Love Boat. Anyway, every single member of the Cruise Into Terror cast would go on to star one or more times on The Love Boat. Yes, I checked.

—K.E. Roberts

 

 So, I have a lot of models backed up that I intend to make lead castings of to fill out my various wargame armies.  So have been spending time with silicone and cornstarch working up the casting molds.  Tanks, infantry, comic book flats, a fuel truck and officer staff car...  a gulash cannon, heavy guns, and armored cars to fight the wars of Ornria...  so. many. molds.

Reviews / October 27, 2020

 

The House That Bled to Death
Directed by Tom Clegg 
Hammer Films (1980)

Apologies in advance to any fellow child of the UK who might be reading this, because for a Brit of my generation, choosing The House That Bled to Death as exemplar of British TV horror is a bit like announcing that your favorite novel is Moby Dick or your favorite food is pizza: so totally obvious that it looks like either laziness or ignorance. But the rest of the world needs to know about semis. No, not those semis.

Semi-detached houses—the two-family domestic Rorschach tests that made up almost half of all properties built in the United Kingdom from the end of the war until the mid-1960s—occupy an important if strangely unacknowledged place in the country’s collective psyche. I say strangely unacknowledged because the place is rotten with them. Semis can be working-class, like the majority of British council housing, or very posh, generally tending towards a square, cozy middle class (British middle-class, mostly with much less disposable income than their US counterparts) averageness that’s very much of its time and place. In 2018, 60% of the UK’s population lived in one. The British haunted house is usually represented in popular culture by some crumbling mansion or middle-class pile with a turret, but from a statistical standpoint, the sheer number of semis makes them far more likely sites for supernatural manifestation, and a series of poltergeists and serial killers of the post-war period did eventually give the semi claim to the paranormal and unpleasant. There’s something implicitly strange about the structure’s floorplan, something that echoes the organic symmetries of lungs or lobes and evokes doubles and distorted mirror-image versions. Perhaps it’s because it hints at something deep in the British—or more properly in this case, English—psyche, some feeling of only half-inhabiting reality, of only being half of a life. Yet despite all this, it remains something of a marginal presence in British popular culture, so ubiquitous that it’s invisible. The House that Bled to Death is an exception, a fact that confers upon it an odd power.

The House that Bled to Death was the fifth of the 13 episodes that made up Hammer House of Horror, a television anthology series produced by Hammer Films in association with Cinema Arts International and ITC Entertainment in the hope of breaking into the TV market. Houses were very much on the country’s mind on Saturday the 11th of October 1980, when The House that Bled to Death was broadcast, because the previous week the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher had introduced the Housing Act. Around a third of the country’s population lived in public housing, and the Housing Act allowed five million of them to buy those houses at discounted prices, but at the same time eliminated vast swathes of the stock of (often poor quality) public housing. It was a hugely divisive move that, while undoubtedly giving a lot of families a financial leg-up, kicked off the Conservative Party’s dismantling of social cohesion and, by placing vast numbers of cheap homes in the hands of private landlords, also helped kindle the vicious housing market the UK enjoys today. In 1980, the average annual salary in the UK was probably somewhere between £5,000 and £7,000, and the average price of a house £20,000, meaning three or four years’ wages. As things stand today, the average price is almost £240,000 and the average salary around £30,000. Consequently, owning a home is nowadays at least twice as hard—and impossible for a lot of people. And in the meantime, private landlords have become ever more greedy and unscrupulous. But anyway.

Perhaps taking its lead from the previous year’s The Amityville Horror, The House that Bled to Death tells the story of young couple William and Emma Peters who, in their desperation to get onto the property ladder, move with their daughter Sophie into the semi-detached house where an awful crime was committed involving a pair of incongruous machetes (weirdly referred to repeatedly as “swords”) that the former tenant kept mounted over the fire, only to find themselves under paranormal attack. A pervasively ominous mood of doom envelops the proceedings, but The House That Bled to Death is mainly remembered for containing the shabby British suburbs’ riposte to the crew’s celebratory meal in Alien–-a scene where a pipe detaches itself from the ceiling and starts belching out blood, drenching a group of children assembled around the dining table to celebrate little Sophie’s birthday.

As is often the case with this kind of thing, it’s the echoes of childhood impressions that trigger unease as much as the “horror”: the perennially overcast weather, the pebbledash, “liver for supper,” nobody wearing seatbelts, the constant rumble of traffic, people carrying plastic bags, how empty rooms were back in the days before full materialism, the mercurial pervery of the great Brian Croucher (even more uncomfortable here than he was as Travis in Blake’s 7) as the Peters’ neighbor. And in this age of spectacularized everything, it’s incredible how much more strange and alien the unaffected voices of the child actors here sound compared to the supposedly unnerving music box melody that plays every time something nasty’s about to happen to poor little Sophie—one of The House That Bled to Death‘s more witless and hackneyed attempts at putting the frighteners on.

I’m not going to try and spin some revisionary interpretation that The House that Bled to Death‘s twist ending is actually a veiled comment on the effects of Thatcher’s housing policy, though to be honest, it would sort of fit. That writer David Lloyd was the same ex-tennis professional David Lloyd who founded that other symbol of those hedonistic times—a chain of private sports facilities—in the early ’80s seems unlikely, which is a shame, as it would provide a gratifyingly neat Hammer-esque twist in the tail. Watching it today, with the country in the final throes of pretending that it knew what it was doing when it took out a high-interest mortgage on the damp-ridden haunted semi that is Brexit Towers, it does seem oddly timely, what with the Peters’ refusal to look reality in the face and their hysterically taking against their neighbors for trying to point out that self-eviscerating cats and severed hands in the fridge might mean there are issues that need dealing with.

Brexit was never really about leaving the EU; it was about leaving behind concepts like equal opportunities and social care and moving the country to the right. And in fact, as we learn at the end of The House that Bled to Death, the terrifying events the Peters have been subjected to were never real—they were just a way of using other people’s credulity and fears to whip up a payday. The House that Bled to Death concludes with them living off their ill-gotten gains in a bungalow with swimming pool that’s nominally in California, despite being so clearly outside High Wycombe that all that’s missing is a sign for Bekonscot Model Village.

Who knows if Britain’s children will one day revenge themselves upon their self-obsessed parents for the trauma they’ve been put through the way little Sophia revenges herself on hers. 

Snowbeast
Directed by Herb Wallerstein 
NBC (1977)

The reason I was allowed to hurtle through the 9:00 bedtime threshold and watch The House that Bled to Death in the first place was because when it was shown I was staying in Wales with my mum’s auntie, who in broken English insisted on my parents letting me traumatize myself because I was “on holiday.” In fact, until I was able to access a VCR (we never got one), my exposure to horror was pretty much exclusively thanks to elderly relatives either nodding off in front of the telly or brushing away parental concerns. And the beautiful traumatizing of that long evening of Saturday the 11th of October 1980 hadn’t even started at 9:15, when The House that Bled to Death was broadcast—it had started an hour and three quarters earlier when another of the Caravaggios in the Uffizi of TV terror had begun. Yes, I’m talking about Snowbeast with Bo Svenson.

Snowbeast—which, predictably, is Jaws with Bigfoot as the shark—has it all. The perennially underused Yvette Mimieux, the reassuringly enormous and idiotic visages of Bo Svenson and Clint Walker, The Wilderness Family‘s Robert Logan (who can barely keep a straight face), the great Sylvia Sidney as the avaricious ski resort owner who refuses to close things down, and a monster design almost as alarming-looking as the sasquatch from the previous year’s Six Million Dollar Man story The Secret of Bigfoot, which was presumably at least partly the movie’s inspiration. No rationale is given for the Snowbeast’s frenzied hatred of humankind, though it does genuinely seem to detest skis and skiing—which makes at least some sense in the end, as the instrument of its death isn’t a rifle or a revolver but a Bo Svenson-wielded ski pole. 

Both The House that Bled to Death and Snowbeast are great, but I’m going to risk opprobrium in my homeland by admitting that though the first doesn’t frighten me anymore, for some reason, Snowbeast, which in many ways is far more ludicrous, still does. The sheer surreal irrationality of the whole thing, its risibly shoddy monster, its obsessive revisiting of the same locales, the terrifying snowbeast POV shots and freeze-frame fade-to-red snowbeast attacks (though as I approach 50, the most frightening scene in the film might be the one where a fleeing Sylvia Sidney is knocked to the ground and bangs her hip), the endless boring scenes of skiing: they all combine into something nightmarish, and watching it I’m immediately transported back to a little Welsh house with only wild countryside thrashing away in the wind outside the window and the awareness gradually sinking in that, as bedtime inevitably approaches, I’ve bitten off way more terror than I can realistically chew.

—Richard McKenna

Michael Grasso / October 26, 2020

The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography
By Andy Sharp
Repeater Books, 2020

Disclosure: The editors of We Are the Mutants are currently writing a book for Repeater Books. Featured image courtesy Andy Sharp.

At this time two years ago I was in the thick of writing my capstone project for my Master’s degree in Museum Studies. As I researched how fragmentary memories of childhood museum visits could be used in their later promotion and preservation, I also delved deeply into the larger cultural uses (and misuses) of remembrance, commemoration, and “heritage” in the US and UK. In the schema of nostalgia theorist Svetlana Boym, top-down cultural commemoration often reaches for a “restorative” impulse of wanting to enshrine a golden era of the past, while personal memories and interpretations, playfully reassembled and remixed, offer a “reflective” method of accessing nostalgia.

I found myself thinking about my abortive career in museums when I read the foreword and preface to English author, musician, and artist Andy Sharp‘s catalog of the weird and lost in the English landscape, The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography. Using as its inspiration English Heritage, who preserve the very bones and sinews of English feudal hierarchy in the form of the nation’s stately homes and historical sites, Sharp’s English Heretic project seeks to détourne these edifices of authority, playfully bringing forth the dark and forgotten occult secrets in the English landscape. In his foreword, Dean Kenning cites Sharp’s mining of “mythology… generated not from on high, but from somewhere subterranean and demotic.” The connections that Sharp makes between places, persons, themes, and concepts in the mystical English imaginarium deliberately echo the “ludic” tendency of children’s constructivist play at historic sites: “Children,” Sharp says in his Preface, “see these locations as stages for some imaginary film—a natural tendency to play with the backdrops of history.” Sharp’s “black plaques” are a reminder that there is a moonstruck dark side to the English landscape, one that’s often ignored in favor of sunny evocations of the perceived doughtiness in the English character and the too-quaint yeoman ruralism of a romanticized countryside: “The comfort and nostalgia for rurality and animism is a weekend retreat from all the small shocks we endure in the maze,” Sharp says in his closing chapter. “But inevitably they become photo opportunities to report back our coordinates to the social laboratory.”

The English Heretic Collection consists of a series of essays that themselves meander across time and space, using individual people and places as launching points for apophenic explorations. Through the lenses of film directors, in the pages of novelists, and in the grimoires of ceremonial magicians, Sharp perceives and explains the occult patterns that echo down the ages in England’s green and pleasant land. Like his fellow seers Nigel Kneale and Alan Garner, he turns the leaves of the land to demonstrate that the past isn’t ever truly dead, and that its mysteries recur in attenuated, mutated forms throughout both English artists’ and occultists’ sense of the uncanny.

Speaking of those occultists, Aleister Crowley, that giant of early 20th century English occultism, haunts many of the chapters of the Collection, but so does somewhat lesser-known (at least on this side of the Atlantic) Thelemic magician Kenneth Grant, whose syncretic approach to magic integrates elements of the Lovecraft mythos, kabbalism, and Surrealism, among much else. Sharp reminds us that the three books in Grant’s first “Typhonian” trilogy were released between 1973 and 1975. At the same time, of course, mystics and magicians with similarly spiritually syncretic impulses were working those same fields in America. But Grant’s output continued to grow throughout the next three decades, absorbing new and further elements as it went. “Grant’s later works are grimoires,” Sharp notes. “By the time he reaches the final volume of his third ‘Typhonian’ trilogy, Grant’s universe is a self-replicating, self-referencing, semi-autonomous ouroboros.” Sharp takes Grant’s embrace of Salvador Dalí’s art—Grant calls Dalí the “foremost magician of the twentieth century”—seriously, and sees Grant’s obsession with the feral animal dreamscapes and visions of Dalí and Max Ernst as a link between Grant and J.G. Ballard’s surrealist visions of a late-20th century psychosphere scarred by war, suffering, and technology.

That mention of Dali evokes the next noteworthy theme in the Collection: for all the very English settings and personalities, Sharp is acutely aware that the gradual assemblage of a 20th-century English Weird aesthetic owes much to interlocutors in Europe and America. The archetypal English hamlet was not exempted from being swallowed up by McLuhan’s “global village” in the postwar era. What has come down to us in the 21st century as the aesthetic of “folk horror“—foundational films such as Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)— demonstrate how the motion picture camera lens fused the uniqueness of English myth, history, and landscape with the American hunger for on-screen sensation and blood. Every now and again the name of an American who seems to innately understand and plumb the Weird such as Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, even Charles Manson, floats through the Collection. Furthermore, Sharp is especially astute when analyzing the intrusions of the American metaphysic on the land- and psycho-scape of Britain. Whether it is the ghost of Joe Kennedy Jr. enshrined with a black plaque commemorating his efforts (and death) as part of a top-secret early remote drone program during World War II, or the UFO sightings at Rendlesham Forest in 1980 (which, Sharp reminds us, are believed by many to be a test of psychotronic mind control technology and not a UFO landing), the incongruous sight of a McDonald’s opposite a centuries-old gibbet, the broadcast intrusions that parrot the ufological/New Age consensus on both sides of the Atlantic, and of course the very American cultural phantasms conjured by J.G. Ballard’s works in the 1970s—Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, Ronald Reagan—are all signs of the havoc wreaked by a Cold War American empire reaching out with its tendrils to wrap its “allies” in its black embrace.

Unsurprisingly, the spectre of war also hovers over the Collection. The psychic and physical scars of World War II and “phantom” invasions abound. Sharp’s linkage of a childhood fear of the closing credits to British sitcom institution Dad’s Army to the possibility that German soldiers actually did set foot on England at the “Battle of Shingle Street” is especially spooky. Even after the conclusion of WWII, the melding of black magick and the Cold War military-industrial complex cut England’s body and soul to the bone. In an exploration of the post-Cold War ruins of an abandoned defense installation, Bawdsey Missile Base, Sharp explores the psychogeographic ramifications of these colossal ruins:

These rockets were stored in what look like giant concrete squash courts, or more to the point, like the bloody ball courts of Mesoamerica. As one walks through these ominous precincts, devoid of their munitions, the vacated architecture appears to reveal its primal purpose, its ritual origin. This is a palace of solar worship, a site under a regime in the age of a thousand suns, embodying all the paranoid manipulations of protecting king and salvational psychopath.

Here, English Heretic most darkly echoes its daytime counterpart at English Heritage. The ancient castles gawked at by holidaymakers are centuries-old picturesque ruins now, but at the time of their building and use were no less potent displays of naked political and military prowess. (Sharp takes a smart detour in one of his essays to talk about “nuclear semiotics,” the practice of providing warnings for buried nuclear waste for human beings tens of thousands of years hence, and the idea of an eventual “atomic priesthood” that would warn people away from radioactive ruins.) The profane geometries left behind on the English landscape by both castle and missile base are a literal evocation of the kabbalistic concept of the qlippoth, the empty husks or shells left behind after the light of creation filled up the universe. “At last we have the ordnance map for [the qlippoth],” Sharp muses, “abandoned military bases, WWII bunkers, nuclear bunkers, melting power stations, the dead shells of all that technology ‘concentrated on the production of nothing,’ a black nirvana.” One of Sharp’s most intriguing essays concerns Winston Churchill’s outsized archetypal shadow which still haunts Britain; Sharp finds him a dark reflection of the mythic savior of the British Isles, Merlin, thanks to Churchill’s real-life membership in a druidical circle and his repeated mentions of the “black dog” of his depression, recalling English myths such as the Gabriel Hounds—let alone Churchill’s penchant for human sacrifice.

And that brings us to what I found the most interesting of all of Sharp’s explorations: his implicit location of blame for this landscape on the people who sold Cold War necromancy to the English (and Western public). Absolutely the makers and deployers of these bombs and jet fighter bases deserve to be counted among the poisonous cabal practicing black magick upon the physical landscape, but so does the late-modernist “expert class.” Sharp notes at the outset of his essay titled “Anti-Heroes” that he felt that an archetypal member of this class needed to be represented among his black plaques. Sharp sought to “commemorate a fictional psychopath. The perfect vehicle for such an exploration, I felt, would be Dr Robert Vaughan, the hoodlum scientist of J.G. Ballard’s visionary forensic Crash.” Vaughan is an avatar of modernism’s black underbelly, a fictional concatenation of the physical scars of World War II; the ancient blood in the leylines of England as exemplified by their modernist successor, the motorway cloverleaf; and the rise of a postwar expert class ineluctably linked to the military-industrial-entertainment complex: Ballard’s uber-technocrat, who is also a celebrity. Recall that before he was the leader of a de facto cult of car-crash fetishists, Vaughan from Crash was a “one-time computer specialist” as well as a television host: “one of the first of the new-style TV scientists,” Ballard tells us, “driving about from laboratory to television centre on a high-powered motorcycle.” Sharp notes that one of Ballard’s real-life inspirations for Vaughan, Dr. Christopher Evans, was the scientific consultant for thoroughly glam-hauntological 1970s children’s sci-fi series The Tomorrow People.

These echoes of science, media, and old hauntings reverberate throughout the varied weird television British series of the 1970s that married the countryside gothic with hypertechnology, from Doctor Who to Children of the Stones. Throughout Crash, “Ballard” the narrator’s obsession with Vaughan, his physical body and its scars and secretions, and Vaughan’s own hieratic dedication to the global spectacle of media, celebrity, and technology weaves its own black spell on narrator and reader both. That spell’s incantation is the technically-overspecific language of the automobile as machine, of car crash tests, and the mystery cults of celebrity that grow around the media spectacle of car crashes both anonymous and famed: Vaughan is Ballard’s “undead guardian angel,” in Sharp’s words, much like the American bombers and missiles perched on English soil.

The traumas that war, conspiracy, and black magick leave on the landscape tend to scab over and leave interesting scars. All the while, official history is told by organizations like English Heritage: sanitized tales from the parapets of the mighty redoubts of English castles, of derring-do during the World Wars, of Churchill’s fighting spirit. Sharp channels the dreaming subconscious of that much-invaded land, the rituals of the priest caste that controls the weapons of war, and the secret currents of folk magick that have always existed alongside. The folk horror aesthetic was never just about hobby horses, Morris dancers, and wicker men; nor was the hauntological aesthetic ever merely about library music-tracked public information films on warped, crackling celluloid, or high-tech radomes on hills overlooking ancient stone circles. They were more fundamentally about the very intrusion of modernism, of global industry and media, and of the waging of wars, both secret and overt, on a landscape itself cyclically scarred by conflict and a history of apocalyptic change. Despite this semiotic pollution and these alien temples to human sacrifice, England prevails, in all its horror and splendor.

Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a Bostonian, a museum professional, and a podcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @MutantsMichael.

 

Battletech rule variant: HAND HELD WEAPONS.

During the Star League period battlemechs were much more sophisticated, but the Succession Wars has seen a collapse of industry and technology. This is a given, of course, and can be seen in many areas of daily life as well as on the battlefield. One specific instance in the devolution of weapons technology is in the field of hand-held weapons. In the early years of mech design, one of the key features leading to the adoption and acceptance of the battlemech as a weapons platform was it's adaptability, and weapons were no exception. Early mech weapons were styled after the infantry fire arms of the period, being self contained, but with power and data couples built into the handles, individual weapons were easily used by a variety of mechs, and an individual mech could easily tailor itself to mission needs simply by picking out the appropriate laser, autocannon, or missile launcher exactly as it's infantryman counterpart did.

The Periphery wars however, showed up two key deficiencies of the concept, though they were little regarded at the time. The first was mechanical, hand held weapons were hardened with armor and built of durable materials, but final piece weight limited the amount of protective measures that could be packed into them leading to easy damage or jamming in true combat field conditions. Not critical during Star League days as repair and replacement was cheap and easy, in the centuries since the widespread destruction of production facilities and critical component manufactures has made “throw away” weapons impractically expensive. (Missile technology and munitions quality in the intervening centuries reflects this trend also...guidance that once made missile attacks deadly has been lost, and “missiles” today are more accurately compared to primitive ordnance rockets. This led manufacturers to “build in” weapons onto the frame of the 'mech itself where greater use could be made of armor and redundancy measures making for tougher, more durable battle weapons at the cost of flexibility.

This ties in with the second drawback of hand held weapons, what was once practical; the ability to let go of a mech's primary fighting guns. Even light damage or physical attacks on the arm or hand of a 'mech could lead to accidentally ejecting (dropping) the heavy hand carried weapon, making it available to be turned on it's owner just by picking it up. Dropping also became the cause of many weapon failures (jams). Worse still, Mechwarriors in a tight spot might choose to loose the weapon intentionally to increase speed, especially true when forces were experiencing reverses and 'Mech Units chose to flee the field. By the Second Succession War the great house militaries had passed orders requiring 'mechs to fix their weapons permanently, and the surviving manufacturers refitted and retooled production mechs to eliminate or permanently fasten hand held weaponry. Hand held weapons do still exist however, in limited numbers. Many come from ancient Star League caches, and a tiny number of copies come from minor factories throughout the inner sphere.

Rules;

The table below lists weapons that are available in Hand-Carried Format, as well as their important statistics.

To carry and use a hand-held weapon a mech must have a hand and all hand and arm actuators present. Damage to actuators heavily impacts weapon use; hand actuator damage give a -4 to hit and taking a hit on one requires a piloting skill roll at -2 to maintain hold of the weapon. Arm actuator damage gives a -3 to hit and taking a arm actuator hit requires a pilot skill roll at -1 to maintain hold of the weapon. Shoulder actuator damage adds a -2 to hit, and taking Shoulder Actuator damage requires a pilot skill roll to maintain hold of the weapon.

All penalties for actuator damage are cumulative, so a mech whose hand and upper arm actuator are hit would have a -7 to hit, making most shots impossible.

Carrying a hand held weapon penalizes running speed and jumping by one.

Jumping while carrying a hand held weapon requires a pilot skill roll to avoid dropping it on landing. Failure means the weapon is dropped in the landing hex.

Hand Held weapons have a reliability rating. When a hand-held is dropped this number or lower must be rolled for the weapon to remain functional. Failure means the weapon was damaged/jammed and is subject to the same repair rules as normal weapons of it's type.

Most Hand held weapons have a limited number of shots, the table shows how many shots are carried in the weapons magazine. When these are exhausted the magazine must be replaced before the weapon can be fired again. Magazines (also called “clips”) can be loaded by techs in the same way as they reload normal Battletech weaponry. Clips can be carried externally on a battlemech hanging from exterior hard points. Clips may be changed by a mech only if it has two fully functioning hands.

The location of a clip must be noted, and a clip is potentially hit when that location takes a hit. When a clip location is hit roll a pilot skill roll, failure indicates the clip has exploded and the clip's worth of damage is applied to the location in question. Energy weapons do not have magazines and rely on power feeds built into the 'mechs hand, these feeds fail if the weapon fails it's saving throw, and the weapon can only be repaired as per a weapon critical hit, further having an energy weapon knocked out of the hand will lead to a “blowback”, automatically giving one critical hit to that arm and doing 2 points of internal structure damage.

 

* Treat as a bi-pod weapon, Mech must be prone to fire.

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The Coins of Aerovian Continent.

 

One of my biggest irritations with the D&D system is it’s hideous “gold point” system, that reflects nothing of actual monetary practice in Europe from 400-1600. This makes developing any kind of background economy very difficult, and disrupts and undermines what should be the main story telling features of quasi-medieval fantasy economies. In a game where treasure accumulation is an important measure of character success, having a rational background to the money system is important; after all what separates a serf, from a kulak, from a merchant, from a lord is the same thing that divides 1stlevel characters from 9th level characters; money.

More importantly, it defines the resources that money can command. In the actual middle ages there were a number long term trends; inflation, depreciation, and so on that can be overlooked, but only if you see the long term consistency; Land is wealth, the cost of armor and weapons makes those who have them rare and powerful, trade is dangerous because it requires large investments with huge amounts of risk.

The currencies of the middle ages descend from late Roman times, and they were already economic chaos, various reforms following reform as the Empire bled itself of metal to pay for the armies, bribe barbarians, build churches and fill them with treasures, bribe barbarians, build  monasteries and fill them with treasure, bribe barbarians, build city walls, bribe barbarians, and build ships to try and hold the economic and military Roman world together, all while dealing with a manpower drain to monasteries, disease, and war. Over the few final Roman centuries a whole smorgasbord of coins were minted and melted, and reminted, some by towns, some by emperors, some by desperate generals, and what began as a simple system of As and Denier bushed out into a bewildering fecund forest of metal.

D&D reduces this amazing variety to a decimal system and introduces coins in metals that were almost never seen. Platinum was unknown to the middle ages in Europe (when conquistadors first encountered it in South America they tossed it back into the rivers they were panning, hoping it would mature into silver). Copper was never coined, though some bronze coins were molded in the late Roman Empire, and in dark age England. By the year 1000, the usual start date for middle ages, they were effectively gone from European commerce. (except when they weren’t, China and Asia pumped some in from time to time).

Medieval Europe relied on three major kinds of coins descended from Roman models; a large denomination coin, the Shilling , the everyday silver coin that most people would be familiar with called the Penny, and an occasional Gold large denomination coin called an Ecu or Noble. A Few types of Shilling were minted in limited areas of Spain from Electrum..but that was a rarity. Later in the middle ages the richest cities would counter inflation with an even larger coin; The famous Florins and Ducats and Byzants based on imported coin type from the rich east, these coins were needed by spice and cloth merchants to pay for ship loads of goods, and by kings to hire the very large “state” armies of the many 15th century wars. .

All these coins were essentially bullion guaranteed by the issuing authority; often a king, sometimes a town, or a bishop, or a baron even...but effectively interchangeable pence to penny, shilling to sou. Florin to Mark.

That’s pretty much the scene; three kinds of coins ultimately amounting to no more than bouillon guaranteed with the King’s mark. Which was why kings liked them...they could cheat and debase the coin a tad, and it, like the dollar, would still spend as it’s face value since it be reckoned as if it were bouillon. To counter the kings and barons, bankers and merchants would use a touchstone; a bit of slate upon which a coin was rubbed, the lines being compared to the color of known quantities, detecting (hopefully) the cheats.

Real medieval coinage is based on the value of a pound of silver. One pound of Silver divided evenly into 20 portions (or sometimes 22 or 24, this isn’t an exact science here)- the Shilling/Sou/or Roman Soldus… itself divided into 12 silver pennies. The penny was the main coin of European transaction.

There were many other coins, but all based on multiples of one of these two; larger values minted in gold like the Noble (6 shillings), or smaller ones (usually in silver as well) like the haypenny. Notice the 12 and 20 relationship? That's because dividing coins this way is easier. A circle can be bisected easily by eye three times to produce 6 surprisingly precise equal parts, 5 is a much harder division to get right...and people get fussy when you give them “short change”.

D&D coinage is based on a decimal accounting, it’s easier book keeping, but it isn’t right. And it’s bugged me for years. I keeps the system locked into the computer like tyranny of sameness, reducing a perplexing, ambiguous, and colorful riot of names and values into mere “gold points” so bland and uninteresting and patterned that one may as well be playing a video game, and an old one at that.  

    my desire is to make regions distinct with their own coins so that a breath of wonder and suggestion of depth comes into the game.  Also age; hoards of coins that are very old being distinguished from what is current, and that from what was brought from far away...

So, what to do? I’ve tried developing conversion tables, to turn the D&D gold points into reasonable facsimiles of Deniers and Ecus and Solidos and whatnot. That totally failed. It would require rewriting every rule book and treasure table to be functional on the fly. I don’t have the oomph for that. So my new compromise is this; a simple name change table, allowing the complexity of unique coins from different regions without having to engage in crazy conversion tables.  Later I'll compose a similar one for the ancient past, and for places farther away...

Noah Berlatsky / October 8, 2020

John Fawcett’s 2000 Canadian werewolf film Ginger Snaps is usually discussed as a feminine and feminist allegory: “the most complete feminist horror film ever made,” as this site’s K.E. Roberts puts it. There’s no doubt that the linking of the werewolf cycle to menstrual blood, and thus to female adolescence and female stigmatization, demands a feminist reading. Hidden inside the story about women, though—like a dirty secret, never to be spoken—is a story about queerness. The tragedy of Ginger Snaps, in fact, is that patriarchy makes queerness unspeakable and unthinkable. As a result, the film can imagine no future for women in patriarchy other than death.

The movie starts, in fact, with imagining death. The Fitzgerald sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), live in a dreary, lower-middle-class, mostly white Ontario town, which they hate, and which hates them. Disgusted at the thought of being normal, they swear to each other to die together before they get old. To seal their love affair with death, they create a kind of slide-show horror movie as a school project, with images of Ginger impaled on suburban fences and run down by suburban lawn mowers. The bloody show is successful in nauseating their instructor. It’s also a winking ironic foreshadowing: the sisters are about to experience the horror movie story they long for, and it’s not going to be fun at all.

But beyond that, the film–within-a-film is a camp signal to the viewer that all is not as it appears. Or rather, it’s a signal that all is exactly as it appears. The movie shows the Fitzgerald sisters as they use fake blood and special effects to stage bloody scenes of death, just as the filmmakers of Ginger Snaps stage their dog disembowelments and nightmare janitor eviscerations. The truth of the movie, which you know going in, is that it’s fake. And the thing that is most obviously fake is not the blood and gore, but the pretense that the Fitzgerald sisters are sisters.

Obviously, the actors, Isabelle and Perkins, are not sisters. They look nothing alike. Isabelle as Ginger is a conventionally attractive movie lead, while Perkins as Brigitte is mousy, big-nosed, and human- rather than Hollywood-shaped. You’re supposed to suspend disbelief about their blood ties. And yet, the movie pushes at the edge of that suspension, as if it wants you to notice the artifice. The girls are not twins, but are in the same grade: Brigitte skipped a year, Ginger too casually explains. The boys in the film notice and comment on the fact that the two don’t resemble each other. And in a queasy scene towards the films end, Ginger, more than half-transformed into wolf, leans into Brigitte and husks, “We’re almost not even related any more.”

If sisterhood is a convention, rather than a truth, then the girl’s intense friendship, and indeed their shared room, takes on a different valence. So does their alienation from their peers. The narrative provides no real reason why the Fitzgeralds feel like outsiders, or why they’re hated by their classmates. But if you accept what you’re actually seeing, then the dynamic is obvious. Two girls who really are not sisters are engaged in a passionate, intense, open same-sex relationship. Their peers hate them for it.

In this context, Ginger’s transformation isn’t just a metaphor for female adolescence; it’s a metaphor for queer adolescence, in which increasing evidence of deviation in gender and sexuality must be pushed ever further into the closet. Ginger grows a tail—a penis metaphor, surely—and hair on her chest, even as she gets her period for the first time. She becomes more femme, wearing tight clothes, redoing her hair, flirting with boys. At the same time, she becomes more masculine. She just about sexually assaults Jason (Jesse Moss), a boy she’s making out with, after he asks her who the guy in their relationship is.

The chaotic confusion of gendered presentation and gendered desire could be a metaphor for trans experience, for lesbian experience, for male gay experience. The common through-line is social ostracism, shame, and a need for concealment. Most of the movie is devoted to Brigitte and Ginger’s efforts to keep Ginger’s condition closeted, so that she can pass.

Part of obscuring Ginger’s condition involves hiding it from the film’s viewers. It seems likely that Brigitte and Ginger were made sisters in the script specifically to defuse queer possibilities. The erotic tension between them is expressed through misdirection, and routed especially through relationships with guys. Ginger has unprotected sex with Jason, infecting him. Werewolf Jason later almost assaults Brigitte, who stabs him with a phallic needle to cure him. In a parallel triangle, Brigitte has a possibly more than platonic relationship with local drug dealer Sam (Kris Lemche), who Ginger then tries to sleep with. And most explicitly, Ginger viciously murders a school janitor who she believes has been staring at Brigitte. “I don’t like the way he looks at you!” she hisses. That could be read as the anger of an overprotective sister. But it could also be jealousy.

Brigitte and Ginger’s desires aren’t just hidden from onlookers, diagetic and otherwise. They’re  hidden from themselves. When Brigitte first approaches Sam for help with a werewolf cure, she tells him that she’s the one infected, rather than Ginger. That’s an admission as much as a lie; if the curse in the movie is queerness rather than lycanthropy, then it touches both (supposed) sisters. Brigitte, notably, still has not gotten her own period, even though she’s 15. Her femininity is queer too.

Ginger, for her part, says that she has a hunger inside her that she at first mistakes for a desire for (heterosexual) sex. But then she realizes that what she actually wants is “to tear everything to fucking pieces.” We learn what that means in practice when she claws two men to death, and then suggests to Brigitte that the two of them “swap fluids” and go away together. You have to wade through apocalypse, blood, death, and the destruction of all things to get to a place where you can love that girl who is not your sister.

There’s a moment when the movie seems to foresee a plausible happy ending for that love whose name it never speaks. The sisters’ mom, Pam (Mimi Rodgers), discovers that Ginger is killing her way through her classmates. She’s understandably upset, but she doesn’t turn them in. Instead, she reacts the way you’d hope a small town mom would on learning that her kid is queer. She offers to burn down her house and chuck her mediocre husband to support her child.

The filmmakers aren’t as supportive, alas. Brigitte does agree to swap blood with Ginger, making some feeble denials to Sam about how it’s the only way to lure Ginger out to cure her with the good heterosexual injection Sam’s whipped up. But, inevitably, the taste of Brigitte causes Ginger to rage ever more out of control. Brigitte, knife in one hand, injection in the other, tries to save her, but Ginger again chooses the wrong thing to impale herself upon, and expires in the arms of her sister, who can’t be her lover.

“I’m not dying in this room with you!” Brigitte shouts right before the end. It’s a rejection of the teen sisters’ suicide pact, and an embrace of adulthood and possibility. Or, alternately, it’s a stifling acceptance of heteronormativity. “To die” is a standard double entendre, especially when it’s used to refer to what you’re doing in a bedroom. Ginger is beckoning, with bared fangs, to a realm of monstrous difference, where the girls can admit they are unrelated, and still wrestle and thrust and experience release together. Brigitte says no and kills her rather than be consumed by queer desire.

Ginger Snaps is about how patriarchy destroys women. But, as its callous title indicates, the film itself is only ambivalently opposed to that process of destruction. The movie cares about Ginger and Brigitte, but it’s also invested in denying some of the possible ways they might care about each other. In Ginger Snaps, death is better than, and the natural result of, girls loving each other intensely, or too well. Ginger wants to tear down the whole world. Ginger Snaps tears down Ginger instead.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

Daniel Elkind / October 6, 2020

Mort Künstler illustration for a March 1960 True magazine story on “America’s Mystery Giant,” Bigfoot.

During Christmas 1879, the last known wild tarpan (Equus gmelini) was run off a cliff somewhere in Ukraine. Native to the forests of Poland, this undomesticated horse species had survived in Europe’s ancient woodlands since at least the time of Herodotus. Apart from a few individuals scattered among various zoos, its death left Przewalski’s horse the sole wild species. 

Apparently some wild horses remain in Poland’s managed old-growth Bialowieza Forest, but their population is the result of Nazi-era experiments in back-breeding extinct animals, the tarpan included, from captive specimens. Lutz Heck, a Nazi zoologist and head of the Berlin Zoo, was not alone in his enthusiasm for resurrecting the dead. He and his hunting buddy, Hermann Göring—who, in addition to being propaganda minister and chief of the Luftwaffe, was also Reich Hunt Master and Forest Master—intended to reinvent a host of ancient and endangered “native” animals like the auroch and wisent to populate their future game reserve. In the future Europe they imagined, they and other elite Nazis would retreat to lodges in forests like Bialowieza to hunt and kill these impossible animals.  

Impossible animals—animals that do not, should not, or cannot possibly exist—have been part of human iconography and myth from the art of cave paintings to medieval bestiaries. Their absurd anatomies have been used to symbolize and subjugate, to parody and portend. (Think of the details in The Garden of Earthly Delights.) Ironically, it was the discovery of very real fossils belonging to implausible behemoths in the earth beneath our feet that renewed a belief in fantastic creatures. Since the dinosaurs were extinct, however, living anachronisms would have to be found. And because science values “skulls and skins” above all, a whole menagerie of freakish and often fraudulent specimens have cropped up to support one claim after another of isolated species still stalking remote parts of the globe. 

With the introduction of photography, new opportunities for deception arose. Using nothing but their father’s camera and some painted specimens, two girls from Yorkshire managed to fool Sherlock Holmes inventor Arthur Conan Doyle into believing that fairies lived all around us. Obviously, Conan Doyle was less of a skeptic than his invention. In dispelling the shadows, he seemed to believe, science had also purged the world of mystery: “Victorian science would have left the world hard and clean and bare,” he wrote, “like a landscape in the moon.” 

First American edition, 1959

In the early days, these pretenders tended to come from the ranks of the learned—from disciplines such as evolutionary biology, zoology, and Egyptology. Their hoaxes appealed not to fear but to the equally compelling desire to confirm whatever pet theory one had already developed. George Montandon, for example, was happy to christen De Loys’ Ape (Ameranthropoides loysi) a new species based on nothing more than a single, staged photograph taken by a Swiss petroleum geologist named François De Loys. After much publicity and speculation, however, this new primate species turned out to be a dead white-bellied spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth). Erudition can entrap as effectively as ignorance—perhaps more so. Montandon apparently “endorsed and required the creation of a large, vaguely human-like South American primate because—as a supporter of the then seriously regarded ‘hologenesis’ hypothesis—he needed a primate that could serve as an ancestor of South American humans.” 

Sergei Isaakovich Freshkop (often Frechkop), a mummy expert from Moscow, was an early proponent of another theory, now likewise discredited: the initial theory of bipedalism, which suggested that all mammals started out upright. One of his most promising students at the Free University of Brussels was Bernard Heuvelmans, who coined the term cryptozoology, and dedicated his 1955 opus Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées (translated as On the Track of Unknown Animals in 1958) to his former mentor. 

Heuvelmans’ book is an exasperating, encyclopedic bestiary located at the “frontier of science and fantasy.” It’s also a beast of a book, a doorstop-sized chunk of zoological history with no less than 50 photographs, 120 illustrations—from the “monkey-eating eagle of the Philippines” to a “reconstruction of the abominable snowman”—and five hand-drawn maps. (To my eternal disappointment, neither my home state of New Jersey nor the Jersey Devil seems to merit any mentions.) If you’ve ever wondered about how we got from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and nineteenth century Forteana to the Weekly World News of the checkout aisle, you would do well to look him up.  

Heuvelmans, who died in 2001, lived through some radical transformations in the state of the art. On the one hand, he was a trained zoologist with a dissertation on aardvark teeth; on the other, he marshaled folklore as scientific evidence and wasn’t shy about slapping his name on sensational pulp. (Allegedly, the Yeti bits in Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet derive from his input.) For Heuvelmans, as for Conan Doyle, it was all about bringing back a sense of faded romance. Along with German mammalogist Ingo Krumbiegel and Ivan T. Sanderson, Heuvelmans is often considered one of the founders of the field of cryptozoology. Perhaps more important, he embodied the embattled crypto figure as a righteous scholar who stalks the unknown while reminding the “armchair naturalists” and stuffy old Pharisees in the academy of the great mysteries that still remain in the forests of Minnesota. 

Much of Unknown Animals is thus spent in attempting to “confound the skeptics”—i.e. agreeing that we cannot say we don’t know for sure—rather than in attempting to demonstrate that there is any evidence for his claims. Heuvelmans casts this power struggle as a kind of religious schism. In Searching for Sasquatch (2011), Brian Regal attributes the contest between “eggheads” and “crackpots” to the growing professionalization of natural science as a discipline. Folklore scholar and zombie expert Peter Dendle puts it even more diplomatically: 

Unconfirmed species served as an implicit ground of conflict and dialogue between untutored masses and educated elite, even prior to the rise of academic science as a unified body of expert consensus.

What’s particularly interesting about 1950s cryptozoology is the way it seemed to exploit this haunted zone of possibility between fiction and verifiable fact, using doubt to its advantage. After all, dinosaurs, too, were once considered the stuff of fantasy. It was only with Cuvier and the bones unearthed by American paleontologists Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh in the 19th century that the systematic study of fossils could take place, bringing dinosaurs closer to the realm of nonfiction, if not yet science. But Sanderson and Heuvelmans went even further. Leveraging their status as outsiders, they argued that dinosaurs not only existed, but likely still survived in some remote corner of the globe. Though they claimed to despise the academy, the cryptozoologists simultaneously aspired to remake it in their image. At the same time, they were right to call out the overreliance on fossil evidence and the role of colonialism. Too often native accounts were dismissed, while white administrators who rarely left the comforts of their coastal abodes were given the benefit of the doubt regarding matters in the interior. Then there was and still is the practice of naming a new species after the first western interloper to lay hands or eyes on it. 

Fawcett Publications, 1970. Cover art by Frank Frazetta

Take the gerenuk. Native to Somaliland, where it is known as garanuug, this beautiful giraffe-necked creature is often called the Waller’s gazelle because in 1879 a hunter-naturalist “discovered” and named it after the Waller who procured the specimen. Ditto Clarke’s gazelle, Père David’s deer, Burchell’s zebra, Hunter’s hartebeest, Meinertzhagen’s forest-hog, and so on. But in what sense can one claim to discover something well-known or to name something that already has a name?

It echoes an earlier struggle, during the 18th century, when European naturalists were skeptical about biological life in the New World. The Comte de Buffon was especially vocal in his doubts that any significant new species remained to be discovered there. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the founder of American paleontology, disagreed. Jefferson had a network of people supplying him with newly-discovered fossils, specimens that ultimately convinced him that mammoths or mastodons must still exist somewhere out in the American wild. “It may be asked, why I insert the mammoth, as if it still existed,” he wrote in 1785’s Notes on the State of Virginia. “I ask in return, why I should omit it, as if it did not exist? […] [the north and west] still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us, or by others for us. He may as well exist there now, as he did formerly where we find his bones.”

In sowing doubt and helping to bust down the door to amateurs, Heuvelmans and his descendants also opened up the flood gates to crowdsourced conspiracy, in which one begins with the desire to believe and then seeks corroborating evidence among the like-minded. The more corrupt our political and environmental reality seems to get, the more technocratic the solutions proposed, the more desperate the reaction from people with nothing left to lose. In a world of constant contact, ubiquitous information, and surreptitious surveillance, doubt has become a powerful weapon against orthodoxies of all kinds. For some self-styled freethinkers, it serves as a shield from truths too ugly and dangerous to perceive directly. It reminds me of the Toynbee Tiles, an anonymous graffiti phenomenon that started with tantalizing mosaics pressed into the asphalt of major cities in the US and abroad, promising some kind of utopian TOYNBEE IDEA/IN MOVIE ‘2001/RESURRECT DEAD/ON PLANET JUPITER, but ultimately spelling out a paranoid Protocols-like media conspiracy: MURDER EVERY JOURNALIST I BEG OF YOU.

We need monsters. Without them, the world is somehow more terrifyingly rational, shrunken, diminished. The imagination rebels against such austerity, casting shadows where they didn’t exist. “But then everyone thinks himself better than his neighbours and gives them beastly habits or animal appearance,” writes Heuvelmans. “Most of the ancient travellers gave tails to the savages they found, especially on islands. Marco Polo mentions men with tails in Sumatra. Gemelli-Careri finds them in Luzon, Jean Struys in Formosa, the Jesuit missionaries in Mindoro near Manila, Köping, a Swede, in the Nicobar Islands.” Then, as if looking in the mirror, he turns back to Europe and the West: “in Europe in the seventeenth century the Spaniards believed Jews had tails, in France the people of Bearn attributed them to the Cagots who lived at the foot of the Pyrenees, and in England the Devonians believed the same slander about their Cornish neighbours. . . . Every savage believes in someone more savage than himself.”

Daniel Elkind is a writer and translator living in San Francisco.

 

 Been a while since I made a good Battletech post.  I just finished Mr. Pardoe's recent novella "Divided We Fall".  It's a great BT yarn, exciting, fast moving, engaging, and a real page turner.  Also it has a special charm for me, as, in it,  I am one of the  fans Mr. Pardoe honors with an official alter ego in the Battletech Universe.

      I've loved the game since it was first shown to me in 1987...  Ah, High School, a terrible time in many respects, but my first friends were made over games of Battletech, and the universe has had my, sometimes near obsessive, attention ever since.  Lord knows how much mayhem my imaginary other world self has caused, though I take pride in knowing I've always done all I could to minimize casualties, avoid the Civvies, and uphold the Aries Conventions...  

  

 

     I couldn't be more jazzed that a  Character with my name is now a Cannonical part of the Universe; Brianne Elizabeth Lyons (Battletech Me) is a Colonel in Wolf's Dragoons!  the best of the best!  assigned to Logistics, which is exciting to me because I love thinking about Battletech logistics and strategic problems, and always imagined myself in that universe doing Operational Planning more than tactical field work.   And, to boot, the Character pilots one of my favorite of all Battlemechs; the Urbanmech.  I couldn't have asked for a more delightful and perfect representation, and it was all unasked, making it all the sweeter!  Thank you Mr. P!  You made one of my dreams a reality! 

  Anyhow, in the real world I've never quite felt comfortable with other super fans of the franchise, being a transwoman kinda has it's complications, even if they are usually inner ones, and I've shunned the community for the most part.  It certainly doesn't help that the one tournament I entered; Amigocon '89, was ruined for me when I had to abandon the game because my Dad showed up and made me leave as we entered the final heat.  I am sure I would have placed, but the cost to my familial relationships would have been severe...  You know when you are really "in the zone" on something?  you can see a few moves ahead, you know exactly what to do, and how to do it, and you can feel the victory in your fist?  yeah, it's a rare exhilaration, I've felt it a few times, some hard fought chess games, and a couple of really busy Battletech games...  And that day I totally had it.  my Lance of Mediums; my Griffin, my pals playing an Assassin, a Centurion, and a Hunchback, we'd bested Warhammers, Riflemen, Marauders, and were still in good shape, fighting on a neat underground terrain board, using first rate tactics; scooting and shooting with care...  it was a good free for all, and I would give my eyeteeth to see how it would have ended if I'd been allowed to stay and finish.  it's my third greatest regret in my life.  Well, that's all ancient history and water under the bridge as they say.

Times have changed since the late 80s... in the real world and in the game world.  The Dragoons have  a new logo...classic mech designs are re-imagined, and the clans have come, changing everything, everything except the one eternal truth; there will always be war so long as humanity remains...human.