a sense of joy and then a panic

Reading this obituary of Fred Phelps Sr., founder of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church --

Fred Waldron Phelps was born in Meridian, Miss., on Nov. 13, 1929. After his mother died of cancer, he was mostly raised by an aunt. His father, a detective for the Southern Railway, was often away on business. He was ordained as a Baptist minister at 17 and bounced around as a street-corner preacher while taking classes at various colleges.

-- made me think that maybe this guy is the all-grown-up version of Francis Tarwater, from Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away.

Truly, would explain a lot.  Don't let the door hit you on your way out, mister.

One of the most common conversations I get into with friends who discover that I really like horror movies is this: "Why are the ghosts/demons always women?"  It's an age-old question, one that I've probably talked about already, but once you point it out to someone you can't stop noticing it.  I've even noticed it in my own writing: I'm way more likely to write a female ghost than a male one, even though when you watch those shitty ghost re-enactment shows, the ratio seems to be about 50-50.  If these little testimonials are any indication, you're just as likely to be haunted by Great-Uncle Bob as Great-Aunt Millie.*

I have a few theories that I offer when asked the aforementioned question:

• Women are more likely to be disenfranchised with limited options in real life, so their only recourse for the plethora of wrongs done to them is supernatural vengeance (c.f. the rape-and-revenge ghost movies like Shutter and Rose Red, or even that old samurai ghost story retold in Kwaidan, as well as the occasional slow-burner like Lake Mungo or Ghost Story)


• Women are considered closer to wilderness, savagery, evil, insanity, magic, so they are either explicitly more susceptible to the supernatural or just the quicker, lazier, easier option for the creator (c.f. a whole bunch of stuff, from Evil Dead and Infection to The Ring and Noroi and The Haunting of Hill House)


• Women are more likely to die a violent death - this goes with #1 (c.f. Ju-On, Silent Hill, What Lies Beneath, Retribution, all them Korean Whispering Corridors movies)

Demon possession movies are an extreme version of Theory #2, because demon possession in real life tends to be colored by the perception that young women are: 1) walking potential demon vessels, because they are the weaker/fairer sex, or further from God, or natural followers, or something - I really don't know, but something about Eve?; 2) really tasty demon food, sometimes because they can potentially bear the anti-Christ; 3) more likely to give in to temptation?; 4) so sweet and innocent and virginal and protected that it's more tragic and horrifying all-around (the same reason some Christians say believers are more likely to be attacked by demons: they're a more impressive conquest); 5) NO ONE EXPECTS THE LITTLE GIRL.

If you look at movies like Emily Rose, The Exorcist, and The Last Exorcism, wherein you've got a pretty teenaged girl writhing around in her nightgown and talking dirty to stiff, straight-backed male priests - and of course, the implication that the Devil has literally invaded this girl's body - you've got to conclude that there's some psycho-sexual shit going on, like the Devil is mocking and showing off our society's sexualization of young women who are, nonetheless, still absolutely required to be good girls (a lady in the street but a freak in the bed, and all that).  Like we are so used to ogling and objectifying young women, well look at her now.  Like the most grotesque and disturbing thing we can think of, as a culture, is a wicked, furious, enraged sixteen-year-old girl - precisely because they are supposed to be pliant, happy, vulnerable, something for Liam Neeson to rescue.  The irony is that she's still all those things, of course, because as the Paranormal Activity trilogy sadly reminds us, it's the demonic spirit acting through her body.

The Conjuring is all about all this stuff, but also highlights a couple less common, but still pervasive themes:

• Ghosts and demons and poltergeists alike attack families when the father is out of town.  Strangely, this actually does correspond to those ghost re-enactment shows.  I always assume it's because the malevolent entity thinks the father is the alpha.**  The father also tends to be the disbeliever/skeptic, compared to the histrionic mother.


• The truly most horrifying thing we can think of is an evil mother: a mother who kills her own children.  I'm torn on whether this is seen as worse than or equally as bad as an evil father, because there are fathers-gone-rotten: Amityville, The Shining, Insidious.  I think if you look at the news media, you get the sense that child-killing mothers are worse, because maternal instinct is assumed to be stronger, and men are assumed to be violent anyway.  "Mother is God in the eyes of a child," as they say in Silent Hill, so naturally the topsy-turvy version of that Good Mother is going to be pure evil.

Put in this perspective, The Conjuring isn't really especially right-wing.  It falls right into place in a very old-fashioned, very Christian rendering of the supernatural genre.  "God brought us together for a reason," Lorraine Warren says to her husband, who admonishes the besieged family for not baptizing their daughters.  Note that it's also a very American Christianity here: the Catholic Church is no help because it's tied up in red tape, so if you want an exorcism done right you gotta do it yourself, Signs & Wonders style.  It occurred to me last night that it's really quite incredible how much American demon possession movies align with the world view of a very fringe faction of Protestantism along with other people who take exorcism and "spiritual warfare" into their own hands and are thus most likely to accidentally kill somebody in an exorcism.  The most disturbing part of the movie for me comes near the end, when the demon is breaking the possessee's bones and Lorraine says, "We are now fighting for her soul!"  This is in other exorcism movies too and I gotta say, few sentiments in horror movies seem as likely to lead to the deaths of actual people.

But I guess I've grown weary of movies like this - The Conjuring even comes complete with a creepy haunted (girl) doll that needs to be kept in a glass case, how much more retrograde can you get? - especially when even Hollywood seemed for a while to be churning out new, different types of supernatural horror movies, like Insidious, Sinister, Cabin in the Woods, Mama - not to mention the indies, like the extremely creepy and highly-recommended Lovely Molly, problematic V/H/S, Absentia, The Moth Diaries, Hollow.  I like to think that we can be more interesting.

* Speaking of Bob, David Lynch deserves credit for making one of the most frightening supernatural men ever, and one that clearly hates women, at that.
** Yeah, "malevolent entity thinks"... I know.  Can never be too careful!

1. Money first.  Dreams later.  The Dark God of Capitalism, etc., The Unnameable Slithering Horror, is actually not the worst fate for Southeast Asia after all.
2.  I am exactly like my father, temperament-wise, hence my impatience with incompetence.  Uh-oh.
3.  Cities need effective mass public transportation.  Especially poor ones.
4.  Moderate Islam is in the fight of its life.  I don't want to sound hysterical but the situation is much more dire than I think outsiders know - not in terms of the effects on the amorphous "war on terror" but in terms of the survival of the affected nations/states. 
5.  I need to grow up.  I need to settle down.  I need to stop comparing myself to others and be honest with myself about what I need, not what others think I need. 
6.  Everybody wants to be Korean.
7.  I am actually pretty good at killing mosquitoes.
8.  Typing without an a key is hard.

Okay, laughing a bit at all the people vigorously claiming that AMC's The Killing isn't a Twin Peaks rip-off.  Granted, it's a remake of a Danish show that I haven't seen, so either the Danish show is ripping off Twin Peaks and the American show is ripping off a rip off, or the American show is ripping off Twin Peaks all by itself.  Yes, there's the ridiculously ripped-off tagline, but the point of no return for me was the scene where the dead girl's father finds out that his daughter is dead while he's on the phone with his wife, who's at home in the kitchen.  It is sad and dramatic (the dad does the whole Mystic River thing, the mother is screaming at home).  But it felt so very "done before" to me because, look:


That scene (with Grace Zabriskie as the mother) was sort of the defining moment in Twin Peaks' pilot, and I could not believe that The Killing did something so similar.

So when I read reviews like "What really stands out for me, in this age of cookie-cutter procedurals, is how The Killing dramatizes the devastation a violent death has on a family, a community, on the people involved in the investigation" and "not as much about a young girl's murder as it is a psychological study of what happens afterward, how a tight-knit community tries to recover and how a dead child's mother, father and siblings learn to deal with their pain in their own private ways" my reaction is, have you seen Twin Peaks?  I get that two shows can be aiming to do something similar but not only is the approach the same, it's practically the same dead water-logged high school girl, secret life and flings with the town's most powerful grown men and BFF and inconstant boyfriend and all.  But no demon.  Which is a shame.

Cuz it's the tone of The Killing that really sets it apart from Twin Peaks.  It's basically Twin Peaks minus the humor and minus the supernatural.  It's all grim, all the time, with no moments of insanity or absurdity.  I do like the lead actress and the subversive undercover cop (the closest thing this show has to a break from the mundane, grim norm), and it's certainly not bad in any technical way, but it's nothing special.  Twin Peaks is special, and it's actually its particular supernatural trappings that make it so.  Randomly inserting people that happen to be vampires and werewolves clearly does nothing for a show; what I mean by supernatural trappings is Twin Peaks' embrace of the truly not-natural and not-normal and not-scientifically-objective, the "half light" in between spaces and times and states of consciousness/rationality, if you will.  And that stuff is not uniformly anything.  It's definitely not uniformly gloomy.  Like the dreams and the death omens and love and unusual ways of grieving and people who talk to inanimate objects and fish-coffee and secret government projects and inhabiting spirits all that "other" crap that's a part of human experience and human understanding.  Watching Twin Peaks was like finding a kindred spirit, for me.

On the other hand, I was watching Luther the other day - a BBC show with only six episodes in its first season - and while it doesn't have the same sort of prestige touch as The Killing and has been received poorly by the British press, it's the more interesting crime show IMO.  For one, it has Idris Elba as the lead (and yes, this is the main reason I started watching).  For two, it has a serial killer named Alice Morgan who's the self-described matter-destroying black hole to Elba's bright sun.  She kills her parents in the first episode but because there's no proof she's free to go, and she's like this recurring narcissistic ghoul that sort of tries to help Idris Elba's character resolve his personal problems but goes about everything very badly - Alice is great.  My favorite episode was the fourth, and actually it wasn't either of them that made that episode - it was Nicola Walker, who played the wife of a man she thinks is a recovering small-time crook but is actually a serial killer.  The scene where she finds out what her husband's done in a police investigation room is great in a way that Grace Zabriskie's Twin Peaks scene is great, though of course with very different emotions on display.  And Nicola Walker's ending... well, you can see what she does in this fanvid, although it doesn't do her justice.  She was a great emotional pivot.

The happy news is that I am definitely in a reading mood, for the first true time since like... I don't know when.  A very long time ago.  Middle school or something.  My first Amazon batch of this new euphoric period - Pym and Volt - arrived a couple weeks ago, and I haven't gotten the chance to read them because I've been finishing up Hostage to the Devil, by Malachi Martin.  [ETA: I got this book on handful_ofdust's recommendation - thank you!]  It's a book about exorcism.  Martin was a theologian and Catholic priest, and the bulk of the book consists of 5 case studies of Americans in the 1960s-1970s who underwent the rite of exorcism - each time with a bonafide Catholic priest, not somebody called in by Lorraine Warren.  It's non-fiction. 

Each case study spends a lot of time developing a nuanced, multi-decade view of the exorcist and the victim of possession, because in this book, that's how long it takes.  It's not exactly playing with ouija boards one day and levitating the next week.  Evil has to be allowed in, and weaves its way into an authoritative position of a person's life - to the point that it provides ready-made answers and decisions for the person to accept that are designed to separate the person from humanness - over many years.  It's a complicated, invisible downward spiral.

My favorite case of the 5 was the last (very long) one, The Rooster and The Tortoise.  It's about a scholar of parapsychology, Carl, who the book readily admits has psychic capacities of some kind and eventually was convinced that he was the reincarnation of an ancient Roman and had to go to ancient Aquileia to worship some thing called The Tortoise.  The priest, Father Hearty, also has psychic capacities of some kind, and had taken classes from Carl at a university.  The whole interaction between psychic phenomena and academia and spirituality was pretty interesting, but what made the story for me was this part where Carl is talking to his mentor, a Tibetan guy named Olde who practices Tibetan Buddhism.  Carl had already been in contact with the evil spirit at this point, but was essentially ignoring that it was evil - anyway.  He's trying to learn higher planes of consciousness.  I was really afraid that Olde was going to turn out to be evil, but not so:

Finally one day Olde seemed to have no more answers.  Every soul, he said, which turns to the perfection of Allness is like a closed-petaled lotus flower in the beginning of its search.  Under the direction of a master or guide, it opens its eight petals slowly.  The master merely assists at this opening.  When the petals are open, the tiny silver urn of true knowledge is placed in the center of the lotus flower.  And when the petals close in again, the whole flower has become a vehicle of that true knowledge.

Looking away from Carl, Olde said gratingly, almost inimically: "The silver urn can never be placed at the center of your flower.  The center is already taken by a self-multiplying negation."  A pause.  "Filth.  Materiality.  Slime.  Death."

Carl was stunned, literally struck dumb for an instant.  Olde walked away from him, still without looking at him.  He was about five paces away when Carl broke down.  He could only manage a choking exclamation: "Olde!  My friend!  Olde!"

Olde stopped, his back to Carl.  He was utterly calm, motionless, wordless.  Then Carl heard him say in a low voice and not particularly to him: "Friend is holy."  Carl did not understand what he meant. [...] Olde said only this to Carl, words Carl could never forget: "You have Yama without Yamantaka.  Black without white.  Nothingness without something." 

As Olde turned away again, Carl had a sudden reversal.  He seemed for a few instants to be absorbed in "higher prayer."  His surge of frustration and anger gave away to contempt and disgust for Olde.  Then as he looked at Olde's retreating back, he was filled with a warning fear of Olde and what Olde stood for.  Somehow Olde was the enemy.  Somehow he, Carl, made up a "we" and "us" with someone else, and Olde could not belong to it.

"Enemy!" he suddenly heard himself shouting after Olde.

Olde stopped, half-turned, and peered over his shoulder at Carl.  His face was back to its usual repose.  His forehead, cheeks, and mouth were unruffled and smooth.  His eyes were calm, wide open, just gentle deeps of impenetrable light, as they usually were.  The compassion in them hit Carl like a whip.  He did not want anybody's compassion.  He took a step back, wanted to speak, but could not get any word out of his throat.  He backed away another step, half-turning away, then another step and another half-turn, until he literally found himself moving away.  He told himself he had walked away, but deep in himself he knew he had been repelled, had been turned around and propelled away. 

Apparently Olde too had his own protectors.

I've been thinking more about morality lately, and turning against relativism.  I think this is actually due to a combination of reading about the use of torture and reading that whole "bankrupt nihilism" epic fantasy smackdown a while back.  The idea of a divine goodness and an evil that transcends particular religions really appeals to me, but is probably hopeless naive.  But I am a religious naif.  All I know is few things bother me more within this subject than listening to Christian exorcists say that Hindus worship Satan because Kali is in their pantheon.  I like to believe that people of multiple religions can touch/experience the same basic "Allness" in their worship.  But anyway.  I'm sure I sound like a moron, so I'll just move on.

This book taught me a lot about Christianity.  Before reading this book, my knowledge of the subject was restricted to my experience living among and being close friends with Christians (for some reason I get along better with the orthodox/LDS variety than the moderate kind), basic pop/mainstream culture exposure, the American religious right in politics, the Unitarian Universalist church (but only marginal exposure to that one), college courses on colonial and U.S. history (not flattering depictions), and Jesus Christ Superstar.  And none of those things gave me the same impression of Christianity as Hostage to the Devil does.  As strange as it may sound, I never "got" that Christianity was about love before this book.  I mean, I'd heard that, certainly seen the church signs saying "Jesus Loves You" and so on, but mostly my impression of Christianity was this and Jesus Camp.  I know a lot about - and disagree to the extreme with - what the dominionist religious right does politically and the tactics that they use, and I'm still allergic to Left Behind, but this book was like a small revelation to me.  It's kind of funny that a book about exorcism and dealing with evil is what gave me this compassionate, loving view of Christianity, but in the end that's really what it seemed to be about.  The emphasis really wasn't on horror, although there were unsettling passages.  But then the depiction of evil also wasn't something I expected - I think I was expecting pain or cruelty or hatred, and that's in there, but more than anything else, evil in this book is about meaninglessness and nothingness. 

It took a little getting used to - I had particular trouble with the attack on evolution in the chapter Father Bones and Mister Natch, but by the end I felt like I understood, somewhat, what Martin and the exorcists were getting at.  Not that I can put it in words right now.  I'm planning to reread the book.  But I do feel like this was an eye-opening experience for me.  It made me think a great deal about evil and humanness and goodness and Earth, and I was quoting passages of the book to my mother, who really didn't want to hear it, I don't think.  My mother is an atheist who gave me a horrified "are you becoming Christian? do you believe this guy?" line several times.

And no, I'm not saying Hostage to the Devil made me a Christian.  That would be too easy and thoughtless a conversion.  And as to whether I "believe" Malachi Martin, I guess I'd say that "I don't think he's lying," to paraphrase Scully.  In any case, I'm glad I read it.

And now I get to go write my book about non-evil "demons."  Heh, as Lindsey says.  At least the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church doesn't seem to believe in the gag-inducing deliverance movement (it's probably connected to the Alaskans that believe there's a demon queen on Mt. Everest), so that's something I can leave to my charismatic church.  Going off that tangent:

I caught an episode of the new Animal Planet show "Demon Exorcist" last week.  I like some paranormal-reality TV, for the same reason I like horror, and I like AP's "The Haunted" quite a bit, but "Demon Exorcist" was hysterically horrible.  A lot like "Extreme Paranormal."  Suffice it to say that if you catch that show, about a ghost hunter who has some run-in with an evil spirit and then becomes a wannabe John Constantine (I wouldn't be surprised if he somehow got licensed to practice "demonology" over the internet, and no, I do not take "demonology" seriously), the rigorous, devoted exorcists in Hostage to the Devil are the polar opposite of that guy.  For one, this guy totally violates the spirit of working under the banner of the power of God instead of making it about the exorcist himself, cuz the exorcist ain't strong enough (has he not seen The Exorcist?  "The power of Christ compels you!"), because he wants to be a hero.  For two, this is the kind of person who sees anything vaguely malicious and says "demon."  No question about mental or physical health.  Just straight to "demon," every time.  He's a lot like the Warrens.  Maybe it's a demonology thing.

Re: The recent controversy over the Smithsonian Institute's installation "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." 

I actually really, really like the "video in question:" "Fire In My Belly," created by David Wojnarowicz in 1987.  Brutal and sad and frightening for sure (it almost reminds me of Begotten, but better).  But powerful, I think, and evocative.  You can hardly accuse it of having nothing to say or being "merely competent."  And look, people: I have mummy-phobia, and I have it pretty bad.  I don't find it pleasant either.  But judging by the way people were talking about it, and the way it was described in news articles, you would have thought it was a 4-minute video of ants crawling on a crucifix (or as the Washington Post puts it "Ant-covered Jesus video").  That segment is 11 seconds.  11 seconds!  And not even a memorable part.  That's like calling Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing a "book about abandoning dogs."

But, the video was removed after people like the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (hahaha), House Minority Leader John Boehner, and Republican Whip Eric Cantor complained about it.  Catholic League guy is just grossed out: "The material is vile... This is hate speech... It is designed to insult (Christians)."  Eric Cantor is pitching to the Putting the Christ Back in Xmas demographic: "an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season."  Just want to remind: 11 seconds.  Also, not everything is about you.  Boehner threatened the Smithsonian with... something, when the Republicans take control of the House in January, if they didn't fix the problem.  But another Republican, Jack Kingston, wants to launch a Congressional investigation, because he is very angry about tax dollars - no, no, public space - being used to fund this "really perverted sick stuff" (he also thinks "Male nudity, Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her own breast" are sick and perverted and kinky and questionable; presumably female nudity can still qualify as art): "They claim that this is not paid for by tax dollars, yet this is a public building with a publicly paid staff, public heat and air-conditioning, if you will, public security. So there’s no question the taxpayers are subsidizing this."

Contrast this with this snippet from the Publishers Weekly review of a book about Wojnarowicz, David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side: "informed by his outrage against America's treatment of outsiders, in particular those suffering with AIDS." 

So on the one hand, video informed by outrage against America's treatment of outsiders.  American politician condemns video as, essentially, not representative enough of the public experience to justify public dollars being spent on it.  Yes, you ARE an outsider, says Jack Kingston.  You are not one of the public.  Your pain and your experience are not ours.  Sit down and shut up. 

Which is fucking bullshit, in case I needed to add that.

See also, a great article by John Coulthart (he makes the same point I do - "Among other things Wojnarowicz’s film depicts the artist having his lips sewn together. By shutting out Wojnarowicz from their exhibition the gallery and the Smithsonian Institute re-affirm the point he was making in the 1980s about the voices of the afflicted being silenced" - and adds a ton more, including a bonus riff on The Passion of the Christ, re: who is "allowed" to depict violation of Christ's body): "Ecce homo redux."

First up, we've got the "no duh" revelation by some guy at the New York Times that American Vietnam War fiction is not, in fact, popular in Vietnam!  Steinglass writes: "It shouldn’t have been so hard to find Vietnamese who could talk about O’Brien. He is, after all, a seminal Ameri­can novelist of the Vietnam War."  Man, Steinglass cracks me up.  Then again, my transformative moment came watching a documentary where this old woman in Vietnam were like, "Why would we hate you (Americans)?  We won the war."  I actually do like quite a few Vietnam stories (my favorite movie is Apocalypse Now), but I'm aware that my American-ness colors that opinion.

Moon Rat, aka Editorial Ass, gets asked about the gender of the main characters of the books she acquires for edits.  Do girls write books with female MCs?  (I don't).  Do girls read books with female MCs?  (I don't).  Kind of interesting to read the comments.  We've got things like "If [the book category is] adult and it's witty, MC's tend to be female" and "don't feel bad about acquiring all female MC's. You're balancing things out--helping readers get over their sexism one protag at a time! ;-)"  and "do you think there is a prejudice regarding women writers writing male protags?"  If so, FUCK.

Speaking of fuck, I really enjoyed this post about obscenities in writing.  In the narrative voice?  In dialogue?  Certain words off-limits?  Loss of "fire power"?  There are a few classist calamities in the comments over yonder ("it's a real turn-off for me, particularly since she seems a well educated and well-brought-up girl", Charles Dickens never swore, etc.).  I've definitely noticed that the profanity in my writing has increased as I've started swearing more.  I was so happy when I relocated the novel to a setting where people would still use my kind of curse words.  Related: winterfox's review of Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains.  Related Related: Torque Control's interview with Richard Morgan, where the comments get into a weird tangent about whether "frak" means Battlestar Galactica doesn't have balls or basic realism (I guess Richard Morgan doesn't watch non-premium cable...).

On the other end of the spectrum (maybe), I really wanted this article wondering where all the Christian writers went to be good.  It's kind of... melodramatic in a dull way and doesn't seem to know where it's going.  I wanted an article about Christian themes and Christian representations in books being published today, not which dead writer was exiled by which church and why.  But eh.  I offer it.

And finally, a post from last year by Jim Hines about rape in fiction.  The comments are really, really interesting - and all over the place.  On the one hand we've got "I can't think of an example where rape was handled well," and "I... put the book down, because I read for fun and escapism, and as soon as somebody gets raped, I'm not having fun anymore" [that comment made me :( in real life].  On the other hand we've got "I've read far too many posts on LJ, writer's mailing lists and articles aimed at writers that flat out state there is never a place for sexual assault in a book or story... Many people don't think rape should be part of fiction at all. I worry about that as well. Hiding from an issue and not addressing it as writers or readers isn't going to make it go away."  Guess which one I agree with???  Anyways, if these comments are any indication, I will probably make a lot of enemies halfway through book 2.  And it makes me wonder if I should back off, but I already know I won't.

Title from the opening of "Aisha" by Death In Vegas.  I always think I should introduce myself to my characters that way: "I have a portrait on my wall.  He's a serial killer.  I thought he wouldn't escape - Aisha, he got out."

All I really have to say is... where the hell has FARGO been all my life?  

I watched this on the plane going to China.  This is the clip where I was like, "OMG, it's Nebraska."  Except of course it's not, and it's not our accent, but whatever.


The whole movie is on YouTube, so seriously, no one has an excuse not to watch this beauty.  It's already vaulted into my top ten.  If I'm not careful my entire top ten will compose of Coen Brothers movies and Apocalypse Now.

I've managed to recently watch quite a few movies that I should have seen long before.  Like, The Matrix.  There are some really neat ideas tucked in here, and great music that I already own.  But damn if Keanu Reeves is not a horrible actor.  I wasn't blown away.  Especially by the climactic events.  This was sort of - worldbuilding = A, plot = C.  I fell asleep watching The Matrix Reloaded, but not before getting creeped out by their future human city.  Another movie I fell asleep watching was The Informant.  Really I watched the first 1/3 and then woke up for the last fifteen minutes.  Which seemed interesting, really, and I want to try to watch it again, but the dialogue was so quiet and I couldn't hear it on the plane.  Don't ask why I could hear everything on Fargo. 

I also watched the entirety of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick) for the first time.  I'm a Nicholson fan, and a Shining fan, so it's not like this could really go wrong.  It's not as scary as the book, and I admit some changed details annoyed me, but uh, I had to look away during Room 217.  That was not good, and it went on way too long for comfort.  I hadn't known much about Insomnia, but I clicked on it because I saw Christopher Nolan and "land of the midnight sun."  It's one of those cops going crazy movies, and it's actually pretty good.  Mostly because Alaska makes for such an intense setting, and it's filmed with aplomb.  Get Carter - Stallone the financial adjuster goes home to the Seattle burbs to find out who killed his brother - is pretty entertaining for the first 2/3 of the movie, all this off-beat humorous violence and stuff.  Then it turns into a rape-secondary-revenge movie and gets all somber and icky.  Still, not bad for a let's-be-criminals movie. 

The Legend of Drunken Master/ Drunken Master II is some seriously good shit, better than the first.  I know some people aren't into kung fu attempts at comedy, but I was literally laughing like 80% of the movie (I mean, you know me).  Anita Mui is just fucking fantastic in it - she plays Jackie Chan's stepmother.  Oh yeah and Jackie Chan.  Basically I wanted to join their family.  And yes, I know - I watched the dubbed version.  My only other language choice was French!  Thanks, Netflix!  I can't recommend Bloodsport, though: '80s Van Damme movie about an underground world fighting tournament.  Yeah, you hear world fighting tournament and you're like, oh man, it's gonna be awesome!  Not really.  More like land o' cliches with no entertainment in sight.

I watched a few of Showtime's Masters of Horror pieces.  They're not very good, in general.  That Damned Thing is under an hour but probably the best, about a monster in a small town in Texas.  The acting is reasonable for a TV movie and the plot feels... I don't know, genuine in some way?  I don't want to totally recommend Dreams in the Witch House, a modern adaptation of the Lovecraft story, but for you horror junkies, it may be worth a view.  It's not only creepy in a fun way but it's highly amusing as well, kind of like a good Tales From The Crypt.  Nightmare Man, about an evil African fertility mask, is very very bad - laughably bad.  Valerie on the Stairs, about a haunted writer's colony, is even worse because you can't even laugh at it.

So many religious horror movies!  I lost interest in The Prophecy pretty much immediately.  Requiem, on the other hand, is a really interesting movie if you want to know the true story behind the "true story" behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  As in, this is what really happened to the girl - epilepsy and intense religious pressure, from within and without.  Depressing movie, but good, with a very retro/antique feel (set in the '70s in rural Germany).  On a similar note, we've got The Woods, a sort of B-movie-trying-to-be-A-movie-or-is-it-really-trying? about a girls' boarding school with a supposed history of witchcraft, and oh, the evil woods.  If you're into that sort of thing, it's not bad.  I can't say it's worth watching though.  Picnic on Hanging Rock is a far superior treatment of the Witchy Boarding School idea.  Hell House, the original Jesus Camp, is a less scathing, more personal documentary about fundamentalist Christians trying to save America - by building "haunted houses" to scare people out of being gay or having abortions.  It really gets in the heads/motives of the organizers, though, with interesting results.  Not a movie, but I also watched an episode of this BBC show Apparitions - about a Catholic priest who exorcises demons in modern London - and quite enjoyed it, particularly the emotional honesty of the characters portrayed.  Plus I'm a sucker for the whole ambiguously "good" versus "evil" fight over some guy's eternal soul thing.  Apparently British people didn't like it, because it got canceled.  C'est la vie.

Oh yeah, and I watched Shutter Island.  I never felt like it was a real movie.  The acting made it seem more like a community theater production.  Like, way below the caliber I expect from all these guys involved, including Scorcese.  A couple unnerving shots, and I will admit the last 20% of the movie felt like a step up from all that came before - ironic given the plot - and of course, gratuitously scary asylum is gratuitously scary.  I'm not going to rec it though.  I have very mixed feelings.  Like disappointment matched with bewilderment.

Quite the Christian movie for Damn Liberal Hollywood, but not overbearing.  Actually fairly well-done, with sufficiently-drawn characters, and a satisfying story.  It was kind of fun/funny watching Mila Kunis become an action hero - she pulled that off with varying amounts of success, but it was nice that her character got the chance to do major damage.  Denzel Washington clearly playing himself as he sees himself.  A more upbeat version of The Road.  More religious than Christian anyway.  There were actually parts of this - tender quotes here and there, coupled with the apolitical bleakness of the surroundings - that might have converted me if I were, say, a teenager listening to Flyleaf trying to reconcile my interest in zombie apocalypses with my religious upbringing.  Now I do listen to Flyleaf, but that's beside the point.

Awesome score, regardless. 

"The Danger of Celebrating Halloween" by Kimberly Daniels for Charisma Magazine, via The Wild Hunt:

The word "holiday" means "holy day." But there is nothing holy about Halloween. The root word of Halloween is "hallow," which means "holy, consecrated and set apart for service." If this holiday is hallowed, whose service is it set apart for? The answer to that question is very easy—Lucifer's!

The key word in discussing Halloween is "dedicated." It is dedicated to darkness and is an accursed season. During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed. A time-released curse is a period that has been set aside to release demonic activity and to ensnare souls in great measure. (A/N: Is that something like a time-share?)

For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.  (A/N: Witches at the Hershey factory!)

Mother earth is highly celebrated during the fall demonic harvest. Witches praise mother earth by bringing her fruits, nuts and herbs. Demons are loosed during these acts of worship. When nice church folk lay out their pumpkins on the church lawn, fill their baskets with nuts and herbs, and fire up their bonfires, the demons get busy.

Gathering around bonfires is a common practice in pagan worship. As I remember, the bonfires that I attended during homecoming week when I was in high school were always in the fall. I am amazed at how we ignorantly participate in pagan, occult rituals. 

Halloween is much more than a holiday filled with fun and tricks or treats. It is a time for the gathering of evil that masquerades behind the fictitious characters of Dracula, werewolves, mummies and witches on brooms. The truth is that these demons that have been presented as scary cartoons actually exist. I have prayed for witches who are addicted to drinking blood and howling at the moon. (A/N: Sweet, thanks!)

While the lukewarm and ignorant think of these customs as "just harmless fun," the vortexes of hell are releasing new assignments against souls. Witches take pride in laughing at the ignorance of natural men (those who ignore the spirit realm).  (A/N: Cackle cackle cackle.)

The word "occult" means "secret." The danger of Halloween is not in the scary things we see but in the secret, wicked, cruel activities that go on behind the scenes. These activities include:

• Sex with demons
• Orgies between animals and humans
• Animal and human sacrifices
• Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood
• Rape and molestation of adults, children and babies
• Revel nights
• Conjuring of demons and casting of spells
• Release of "time-released" curses against the innocent and the ignorant.

There is no doubt in my heart that God is not calling us to replace fall festivals and Halloween activities; rather, He wants us to utterly destroy the deeds of this season.