BLOOD AND WOODSMOKE

I've been thinking of Dark Shadows a lot. I miss it. Like Pro Keds commercials, Jonny Quest, and Space Ghost (the original, not the talk show).

I was disappointed in the recent Johnny Depp version. If you were going to do a Dean Martin Roast of Dark Shadows, you would do the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp wackiness. They obviously didn't take the show seriously. 

I suppose you could look at the old shows and all the mishaps on set and the forgetting of lines and deduce this was Keystone Cop Vampires but I didn't end up going there. I think the way the show was set-up filming half-live with a very serious deadline to meet fit perfectly with what its artistic goal was. 

I'm assuming that goal was terror and the evocation of half-alive creatures stuck in a fate worse than death. The actors were all placed in a tangential vortex and were permanently deprived of a comfort zone. Imagine the terror of having millions witness you having no idea where you were in the script, in the story, in the blocking, anywhere. Like trying to terminate your cell phone account.

I'm not saying I'm a method actor. Or that I believe in "preparation" other than memorizing your lines and knowing your blocking. But the theatrical situation of Dark Shadows was method acting done to perfection. 

The actors daily were going to be placed in an impossible situation and told "see what you can do with that." They used their fears as fuel and you can see the fires they lit with it on screen as the dramatic trap set for them screamed across their faces. Faithfully, they went to their executions. 

Some of those "traps" were real. How many times did they threaten to burn the set down? Did you laugh or go Oh My God when the crew got caught on film? What a bizarre situation it was when the camera caught another camera following characters into a room. It was like another perversion of time travel only on this occasion the Collins family was haunted by the coming of automation, mechanical monsters from the future like Depp and Burton baptizing them as cute little puppets from a lost era. 

I think we should bring Dark Shadows back. I'm of a mind that there should be a Southern Branch of the Collins brood and a dark mansion that is the hub of a plantation. A Southern Gothic version but embued with very serious gut-wrenching explorations of the "situational" horrors of slavery as lived out in exploitational vampirism, the human struggle with inner monstrosity, taming it or vomiting it out in bloodsucking and broody revenge upon one's fellow "man" with heaping helpings of the zombification of the "labor force".

The history of American "Magic" would play out, especially its Voodoo/Hoodoo incarnations and African liberation theology witches doing by "any means necessary" spells. The native sorcerers in the woods. Werewolf soldiers and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Frederick Douglass. Vampire slayer.

Well, it is a David Selby/Lara Parker remembrance. The slight hint of the southern accent and the scenarios it builds in your mind of the kind of gothic horror Faulkner or McCarthy might forge. 

A Couple of Shady Places

Terror at Collinwood

Dark Shadows Fans Unite

Cornwell's Ripper

I first read Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed in the first decade of this century. I thought she nailed it. As far as I was concerned, she had apprehended Jack the Ripper!

I’m not as sure today after reading her new edition of that book. Don’t get me wrong. Her case is still strong. If she hasn’t exactly collared the killer, she is at least in proximity to him. Her research has created tools which will aid in the eventual resolution of the case. A resolution which may not comport with her findings but that I predict will validate her efforts. I hope that validation will be enough compensation for the genuine suffering she endured tackling the case.

This is in spite of all the moronic barriers the UK has set up to prevent any thorough examination of the evidence. Jack the Ripper is apparently a protected copyright of the United Kingdom. The forensic value of studying human darkness is apparently lost on Britain. The case is at once an opportunity to decode the autonomic compulsions that animate killers like the Ripper and bring them to light where things like early intervention and prevention become possible. It lends credence to the Class Theory approach to the Ripper that if he wasn’t in league with the Royals he was at least doing the upper class the service of dispatching female vermin. The suffering of the poor in Britain persists because it is of social utility to the ruling class. That is a point hard to argue with, phony calls for unity to the contrary.

Cornwell is not a class theorist. And I don’t want to misrepresent her position. Read her books. The first and the rewrite. But I went there when I read her. I went to “class warfare”. I went to Freud and Jung. I went to Oscar Wilde. And The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Freud because there seems a clear case of castration anxiety if not performance anxiety in Cornwell’s Killer. The blade becomes the substitute penis compensating for any anatomical inadequacies or deformities. With it the Ripper achieves the ultimate penetration. In psychoanalytic circles, old and new, the ability to penetrate a female was analogous to social success for the healthy Freudian Male. It was a symbol of making one’s way in the world. Reich took that further. Sexual satisfaction was the key to mental health if not bodily health for all humans, male, female, and in between or outside. Cornwell’s Ripper is a man who has been deeply humiliated in the sexual arena. Fear of being sexually laughed at, rage over the humiliation. He literally dissected his anxieties.

Jung because we’re talking about an almost completely disembodied society in Victorian England. Nothing as earthy and disgusting as sex was allowed by the stiff uppers. Freud’s return of the repressed morphs into Jung’s Shadow. The sexual impulse killed off by Judeo-Christian animal abuse is resurrected in the autonomic nervous system where it becomes an autonomous being. Blended with any unprocessed emotions endemic to anatomical deformity, it can become quite the monster. Think of Morbius’s Id in Forbidden Planet.

It doesn’t mean disfigurement necessarily leads to homicidal behavior. The Elephant Man was not a mass murderer. And I’m not sure physical disfigurement was the Ripper’s problem as much as the social disfigurement brought about by Victorian sexual mores which were crimes against humanity.

This is the reason we should study the Ripper (as opposed to exploiting him). We ourselves are in danger of complete disembodiment due to moral inquisition in the form of “wokeness”. The dark is being repressed on a scale not seen since Victoria. The monstrous is manifested by repression. The idea I have no monster in me begs the unconscious mind to make one. Why do the woke find sex so disturbing? Why is it, along with race, the weapon of choice in murder by cancellation? Why do they so readily confess the sins of others, so classically projecting the shadow that one imagines Carl Jung turning in his grave? What monster will emerge from wokeness? The completely disembodied hologram? The zombie? The Cyborg? All of them, cyborg, hologram, zombie inquisitors flogging disgusting flesh like abusive dog fighting trainers?

I would side with the Class Theorists in that Cornwell’s Ripper seems the very incarnation of “class warfare”, a monster of Upstairs, Downstairs proportions. A protector of the chastity of the wife and a deep penetrator of foul lower class genetically inferior female sexuality. Not ok to rip the wife. But you can do anything to a whore. This was a direct result of the horrific sex hatred of the period.

But Cornwell’s Ripper was a painter. If she hasn’t done so already, Cornwell might want to write an analysis of his artwork where the art is the only evidence. That would be a good book. It causes me to wonder. Oscar Wilde knew Cornwell's Ripper. Could Dorian Gray have been Wilde’s Ripper Thesis?

Of course, that would mean the painter wasn’t the Ripper. The model was. Cornwell’s Ripper painted the actual Ripper! He was the original Rippersploitationist. Maybe even his publicist.

This line of "thought" is why some believe the “Ripper” to have been an ordinary “sex killer” without any special genius to him. His work was co-opted by publicity hounds out to make a quick buck. This view certainly causes one to turn to Aaron Kosminski as a person of interest whatever the status of DNA evidence against him. Kosminski’s effeminacy fits the profile of the inadequate sexual milquetoast out to achieve penetration any way he can a la the bantam rooster syndrome.

If that seems too colorful by half, let’s check our shaming mechanisms. Sex should be a considerably lighter subject than the heavy water experiment Victorians made it out to be. As such, the true “Jack the Ripper” was toxic Victorian sexual shame. It blanketed the UK during the Ripper Era.

And that means anyone could have been the “Ripper”.

Any sex. Any class. Any one.

 

The Flight That Wasn't Cancelled

 Halloween is here.

  

OTR Halloween Holidaze is a great place to spend your Halloween.

Casting the Runes for a Night With A Demon

 This story has a link to a motion picture that may surprise you.

That's right. The film was Night of the Demon. It is truly a spooky film with even spookier production troubles.

The fantastical demon, the title character, is a critter cum Baphometian type devil. They did a great job photographing him. He, of course, WAS REAL.

He later had a championship bout with Hulk Hogan whom he "toasted" with his fire-breathing skills.

Some popcorn for you:

M.R. James

Jacques Tourneur

Another Baphometian Critter Demon is featured in The Devil Rides Out. 

Here's a sample of the gut-tearing horror of Night of the Demon:

That thing was real. Did you see that?

What is the Pass Phrase?

Some say there are passwords that get you through certain doors. That guarantee your doors are not busted in by the Secret Police. Some say there are whole phrases. Signs and countersigns. What is the pass phrase for you and your family? Here is one answer:

When they break your door down and accuse you of being a mind criminal, try this pass phrase: "I LOVE BIG BROTHER!"

Who was Kilroy?

 A channel well worth your intellectual time and effort is Faces of the Forgotten. Here is a sample in the which FOTF reveals the identity of . . . "Kilroy."

A friend and I from College were thinking about doing a Rock Opera together. The Story was going to be a horror story. The ending was going to feature "Mr. Roboto" and a revelation as to who Kilroy was. But obviously we had no idea. 

Kilroy was going to be our villain. It was going to be an anti-technology jam session. But as you can see the real Kilroy was an inspiration.

Here is Styx creating a Sci-Fi Horror Legend of the same name:

How He Left the Hotel

This was the first post I ever saw at Weird World. It was quite memorable. Something strange happens at the Empire Hotel.

Get nice and chilly at Weird World.