THE WEEK HE ANNOUNCES HIS REFERENDUM VICTORY
Braid: Kenney hit with hostile federal minister one day, an office scandal the next

Two more bad days for Kenney just when Albertans desperately need a respected, popular and effective leader of a united government

Author of the article: Don Braid • Calgary Herald
Publishing date:Oct 27, 2021 • 

Premier Jason Kenney provided an update on COVID-19 and the ongoing work to protect public health at the McDougall Centre in Calgary on Tuesday, September 28, 2021. PHOTO BY DARREN MAKOWICHUK/POSTMEDIA


Tuesday: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau names an environment minister with a long record of hostility to Alberta’s main industry.

Wednesday: News breaks of a lawsuit by a woman who says she was fired for reporting alleged sexual harassment and drunkenness among some of Premier Jason Kenney’s ministers and officials.

Two more bad days for Kenney just when Albertans desperately need a respected, popular and effective leader of a united government.

Unity is a shaky thing. One of Kenney’s own MLAs, demoted minister Leela Aheer , said on Twitter: “Ariella Kimmel is an incredible and courageous women. Premier Kenney – you knew! Step down!”

She added in an interview: “She is a rock star. She was our connection to the premier’s office. We couldn’t get anything done without her.”

Now, Kimmel is going to court. That news broke Wednesday on the CBC.

Kimmel’s lawyer, Kathryn Marshall, says: “Every political office should have a clear sexual-harassment policy and no political staffer should ever be fired from his or her job for blowing the whistle on sexual harassment, as was done in this case.”

Kenney said there will be a review of government policy on harassment and reporting.

Kimmel’s suit alleges that some ministers boozed to the point of stupor in their offices. Sexist comments were made and she was fired for continuing to press for solutions, she claims.

Aheer was furious to learn of the lawsuit.

When one person urged her on Twitter to cross the legislature floor, she said: “It’s always interesting to me that people always tell women that THEY should leave. No, actually. I earned my position. PREMIER KENNY needs to leave. Not me.”



This is an expulsion offence for a government caucus member anywhere in Canada.

But Kenney is on a tightrope — two more firings and he’ll face four angry Independent MLAs who could form their own official caucus with full legislature funding.

Then-Minister of Culture, Multiculturalism and Status of Women Leela Sharon Aheer leaves the legislature chamber following the delivery of the 2021 Alberta provincial budget at the Alberta Legislature, in Edmonton on Feb. 25, 2021

. PHOTO BY DAVID BLOOM/POSTMEDIA

Then we come to the federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault.

He is a walking insult to Kenney, the Alberta government and the thousands who work in the energy business.

He has been a constant foe with his public pranks — such as the assault on Ralph Klein’s roof — but also through decades of fierce opposition to every oil and gas project or pipeline.

Guilbeault has played a big hand in Quebec’s almost universal hostility to pipelines and Alberta oil and gas.

Coincidentally, Leela Aheer has been one of the Alberta government’s few connections to Guilbeault.

When she was minister of heritage, he was the federal minister in the same post.

She said he was willing to compromise on policy — somewhat. “He became a good friend and he’s a good human being.”

But Alberta “really needs to do a lot of work” to make him understand how hard the industry is trying to reduce emissions and meet targets.

Is Guilbeault capable of any compromise at all?

In his first interview after the appointment, he said: “I will be happy to work with Alberta, with Premier Kenney, and all the other provinces and territories, and municipalities and the business sector and civil society to ensure that we do this wisely in a way that makes sense for people, for communities, for the sake of our children, for the sake of our environment.”

Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault speaks during a press conference in Ottawa, on October 26, 2021.

 PHOTO BY LARS HAGBERG/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

But he doesn’t accept that federal measures will threaten jobs, he said in a later interview on CBC’s Power and Politics.

The most conversion to renewables “is in Alberta, this is the place in Canada where there is the most renewable development . . . the idea of jobs disappearing is not supported by facts in Alberta.”

Then he went on to say Ottawa will “cap emissions from the oil and gas sector.”

And then — proudly — “we’re not doing that with any other sectors — not steel, not the auto sector, forestry, cement. We’re doing it for oil and gas because it represents 45 per cent of emissions in Canada.”

He was also asked if he supports Ottawa’s drive to keep Line 5 through Michigan open .

Yes, he said. “Line 5 is a very different subject. It’s an existing pipeline that provides all kinds of services to Eastern Canada.”

Guilbeault explained how the transition away from oil and gas will be very gradual — in Quebec. There will, however, will be a steady decline in consumption.

Kenney looked shocked when he first spoke of Guilbeault’s appointment. He should be. It marks the end of federal compromise.

And shows, perhaps, the disdain Ottawa will bring to Kenney’s equalization demands stemming from the referendum.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald

Twitter: @DonBraid

Facebook: Don Braid Politics

Researcher: American industrial revolution helped shape gothic literature

UMass Lowell scholar explores how factory life, urbanization gave rise to real-life horrors and exploitation of workers

Book Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL

 

IMAGE: UMASS LOWELL ENGLISH ASSOCIATE PROF. BRIDGET MARSHALL HAS PUBLISHED A NEW BOOK THAT EXPLORES HOW THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION CONTRIBUTED TO GOTHIC LITERATURE, (PHOTO CREDIT: KATHARINE WEBSTER) view more 

CREDIT: KATHARINE WEBSTER

Growing up in Pennsylvania as the daughter of a casket salesman, UMass Lowell’s Bridget Marshall, associate professor of English, became more familiar with death than most children.

As a teenager, she loved Stephen King novels. Then in college, she took a course on early Gothic novels. It cemented her fascination with stories of heroines trapped in creepy homes and troubled by ancestral curses. 

She ultimately became an expert in the genre, earning a Ph.D. in English and American Literature with a focus on Gothic literature.

A year after graduating, she was hired by the English Department at UMass Lowell, where shares her enthusiasm in popular courses including The Horror Story, The Gothic Tradition in Literature and a new honors seminar, Factory Gothic: Horror and Industrialization.

“There’s a general obsession with the Gothic because we don’t talk about the ‘bad stuff’ in polite company. The Gothic lets us delve into the darkness from the safety of our reading nook,” said Marshall, who has won several teaching awards at UMass Lowell.

Marshall has written extensively on Gothic literature, including the book “The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790 – 1860,” and “Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century,” which she co-edited.

Now, after two decades in Lowell, the first planned industrial city in the U.S., Marshall has come out with a new book: “Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature.” 

Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature (Gothic Literary Studies) eBook : Marshall, Bridget M.: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store

In it, she becomes the first scholar to argue that the Industrial Revolution contributed to the development of the Gothic genre by “recasting the ‘maiden-in-peril in a castle’ plot as the ‘factory-girl-in-peril in a mill.’”

Gothic novels originated in England in the late 1700s, and many scholars have argued that the genre was fueled by “explosive” historical events, including the American, French and Haitian revolutions. Marshall makes the case that the Industrial Revolution, although slower, was equally disruptive and contributed to the later development of Gothic literature on both sides of the Atlantic.

As single girls and young women left their family farms to work in the textile mills of Lowell and other New England cities in the early 1800s, a parallel industry grew up alongside the factories: sensational stories about the murders of “mill girls,” she said.

Newspapers and printing businesses fed a bottomless public appetite for articles, books, plays and broadsheets about young women under siege by dangerous men: mill owners, overseers, ministers, married men and doctors who drew them into intimate relationships, and in several real-life cases killed them to cover up pregnancies or botched abortions, Marshall said.

Marshall demonstrates how the authors of popular “factory fiction” and true crime books of the period used many of the same lurid literary devices, plot elements and images as the earliest Gothic novels from England, such as “The Castle of Otranto” (1764) and “The Mysteries of Udolpho” (1794), including innocent heroines, depraved villains, gloomy settings, demonic imagery and portents of doom.

And just as those earlier books helped people deal with the fears inspired by social and political revolutions, “factory Gothic” helped later generations cope with the fears and disruption of technological change.

“It’s a reminder that scary things aren’t just supernatural monsters and the deep, dark past,” she said. “The Industrial Revolution also has its deep, dark parts.”

Terrifying dungeons and isolated castles find parallels in terrifying factory collapses and fires, as well as a new kind of isolation – young women leaving family farms in the countryside to live alone and unprotected in big cities, where they are prey not only to human villains, but to disease, death and dismemberment by factory machinery, she said. 

One example Marshall cites is the 1832 death of pregnant “mill girl” Sarah Cornell. Although first believed to be a suicide, further investigation revealed she had been murdered. Her death and the murder trial of the Rev. Ephraim Avery, a married Methodist minister, spawned a host of books, broadsides, trial transcripts and plays, she said.

While Gothic novels are often viewed as essentially conservative, harking back with nostalgia to simpler times, some authors used their melodramatic plots and descriptions to expose social ills, according to Marshall. 

Those works engaged the sympathies of readers who otherwise might not have cared about the plight of factory workers, enslaved people, orphaned children and debtors, she said, and they may have helped stimulate popular support for better wages and working conditions in factories, the abolition of slavery and reforms to orphanages and workhouses.

Gothic literature continues to develop and flourish, while the 19th century “mill girls” remain a perennial topic for popular novels because, Marshall said, many of the themes of “violence, destruction and dislocation” feel so contemporary.

“Factory girls were often hopeless victims, not just of men, but of systems of men,” Marshall said. “Their stories were ‘ripped from the headlines’ and then retold and reframed in very Gothic ways.”

###

The Sacred and the Profane: Religious Themes in Vampire Fiction

Almost from the beginning, vampire fiction has been a battleground between the powers of heaven and hell.

Bela Lugosi portrays Count Dracula in the classic 1931 film from Universal Pictures. (photo: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

Deacon Steven D. Greydanus Arts & Entertainment

October 29, 2021
NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER

Nearly 80 years before Bram Stoker introduced the world to Count Dracula, a strikingly similar figure debuted in a pioneering 1819 short story: William Polidori’s The Vampyre. His name was Lord Ruthven, and in many respects, he was a clear forerunner to his better-known literary heir: aristocratic, immortal, pale-skinned, suavely seductive, preying at night when his powers were greatest.

Polidori’s influence on Stoker was substantial, but Ruthven lacked one element crucial to Dracula’s identity: Ruthven was a creature of privileged social status and sexual allure as well as paranormal evil, but there was little if anything about him specifically demonic, and no explicit religious implications of his existence.

Rosaries, the Eucharist and other tokens of the sacred that would figure significantly in Stoker’s novel play no role in the earlier work. Lord Ruthven slew his victims’ bodies, but there was no indication that the fate of their souls was at stake. The story ends with the grisly discovery of Ruthven’s latest victim, but death here is the crowning misfortune.

In Dracula, mere natural death was a mercy compared to the diabolical mockery of life that resulted from the Count’s predations. “The devil’s un-Dead” is what the learned Abraham Van Helsing called Lucy Westenra while she was in the vampiric state, but, after her fiancé Arthur drove a stake through her heart, her soul was freed and she was accounted “God’s true dead, whose soul is with him!”

This is not to say that the earlier Lord Ruthven was a mere serial killer. A creature of decadence who seduced women before glutting himself on their blood, he was also a quasi-Satanic figure who perversely manipulated the lives of all around him like a cat “dallying with a half-dead mouse,” working for their moral or material ruin. The story ends not only with the murder of the protagonist’s sister, but also with the protagonist himself, a young man named Aubrey, dying in an asylum after a bout of madness.

The malice of Ruthven’s actions was an eye-opening revelation to Aubrey, a naive, romantic man with a complacently inflated view of human goodness and of his own talents and merits. Polidori wrote that Aubrey believed “that dreams of poets were the realities of life.” Part of the theme of the story, then, is that the world is a darker, more perilous place than the comfortable imagine, and that predatory evil is a terrifying reality.

Literary Vampires of Le Fanu and Stoker

Another vampire story that influenced Dracula, the 1872 novella Carmilla by Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, further developed the mythology. Like Dracula, the vampire Carmilla slept in a coffin and drained her victims progressively over a period of time, until in death they became vampires themselves. Anticipating Van Helsing, Le Fanu introduced a vampire expert, Baron Vordenburg, by whose hand Carmilla was dispatched in a strikingly thorough concatenation of what would become classic means of destroying vampires: staked through the heart, decapitated, and burned to ashes. (The ashes were thrown into a river, possibly evoking a fourth vulnerability of vampires and other evil creatures, to whom running water, symbolically linked to baptism, is often a deterrent.)

Notably, Le Fanu infused his tale with religious elements absent in Polidori’s short story. Carmilla manifests an aversion for the sacred when a funeral procession for her latest victim passes by. Laura, the teenaged protagonist and narrator, joins in the hymn being sung by the procession, at which Carmilla, angrily protesting and making a futile effort to plug her ears, is left trembling violently and crying out in duress. Later, as Laura herself begins to succumb to Carmilla, a priest is enlisted to offer “certain solemn rites” on Laura’s behalf (possibly anointing of the sick, exorcism, or a fictional ritual specifically for vampirism) and to help protect her while she sleeps. Laura is ultimately spared becoming a vampire, though the vampire’s memory continues to haunt her imagination.

Although Le Fanu’s family was Huguenot and his father was a Church of Ireland clergyman, Le Fanu’s writings show a level of imaginative interest in Catholicism. For example, one of his recurring characters, an 18th-century Irish Catholic priest named Father Francis Purcell, narrates a dozen short stories (The Purcell Papers), giving Le Fanu room to engage topics like purgatory in the context of ghost stories.

Like Le Fanu, Stoker was an Irish Protestant, but his wife, Florence, was attracted to Catholicism and converted in 1904, just a few years after Dracula was published. Among the many elements borrowed from Le Fanu’s story, Stoker greatly expanded the religious themes, making overt the Catholicism implicit in Le Fanu’s treatment. There is an almost evangelistic dynamic to the way that icons of Catholicism like rosaries and the Eucharist are initially presented as alien and shadowed by suspicions of idolatry or superstition by respectable Anglicans like Jonathan Harker, only to be vindicated in their power over evil, triumphing over all skeptical resistance.

For all that, Dracula is not a work of Catholic imagination — a reality nowhere more apparent than in Stoker’s sacrilegious treatment of the Blessed Sacrament. Van Helsing carries consecrated Hosts around with him in his bag and uses them for vampire deterrence, at times placing fragments of them in coffins or even crushing them into tiny particles and sprinkling them on the ground or pressing them into putty to make a barrier uncrossable by the undead. “I have an Indulgence,” Van Helsing says by way of purported explanation for these actions. Whether the reader is meant to understand an indulgence as forgiveness in advance for sins yet to be committed, or as a kind of dispensation to commit otherwise sinful actions, is unclear, but it’s incoherent either way.

Vampires on Screen

The 1931 Universal adaptation of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, streamlined Stoker’s religious themes, eliding the novel’s Catholicism with more ecumenical imagery: Dracula and the vampirized Mina flinch from crosses and crucifixes, but rosaries and the Eucharist are omitted. Hammer Films’ 1958 Dracula (also known in the U.S. as Horror of Dracula), directed by Terence Fisher, a High Church Anglican, continued the ecumenical trend — with a highly influential twist. Fisher weaponized the cross, giving the world vampires so vulnerable to the cross that their undead flesh would burn at its touch. Even a pair of candlesticks held at right angles was so powerful that Van Helsing could use them to drive Christopher Lee’s Dracula into the full rays of the sun, where he slowly disintegrated into dust (a vulnerability pioneered by the 1922 silent film Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau).

Fisher’s weaponization of the sacred became a mainstay in vampire fiction, from Francis Ford Coppola’s wildly revisionist, Catholicism-haunted 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the agnostic, mythologically dense world of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Other vampire stories have reduced or even eliminated the religious dimension of the mythos, returning to Polidori’s non-religious conception (or something like it). The original silent Nosferatu, an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula, offered vestigial references to religious concepts like sin, the devil and magic. Werner Herzog’s 1979 art-house remake Nosferatu the Vampyre went only slightly further, with a shot or two of Dracula flinching from crosses. Holy artifacts have reduced power at best in John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998) and the Hugh Jackman action movie Van Helsing (2004). Even so, Catholicism is very much present in both films and opposed to the forces of darkness, including vampires — even if the Vatican relies in this regard on professional vampire hunters rather than priests.

Still other takes are wholly secular, or effectively so. Religion plays no role in Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire neo-Western Near Dark (1987) or in the acclaimed Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (2008).

Among the knottiest treatments of vampirism and Catholicism are films with vampire priests, like Father Paul in the recent Netflix series Midnight Mass by Mike Flanagan and Father Sang-hyun in the 2009 South Korean film Thirst by Park Chan-wook. Both priests experience dramatic physical healings in connection with their vampirization, and both come to be venerated by others for their association with the apparently miraculous. The difference is that Father Sang-hyun recognizes from the outset that he has become a monster and is disgusted when a blind religious superior expresses a wish to become a vampire so that he can see again. Father Paul, on the other hand, regards the hideous bat-winged predator who turned him as an “angel” bestowing divine “miracles” and is only too eager to share the “blessings” of vampirism with his flock.

Eventually, amid a downward spiral of increasing depravity, including adultery and serial murder, Father Sang-hyun comes to recognize that, despite his efforts to control his evil passions, there is no way to live morally as a vampire, and he commits suicide by sunlight. In Father Paul’s case, the scales fall from his eyes only after his actions lead to a horrific bloodbath, and he eventually accepts his inevitable death, also by sunlight. Although both priests’ actions are depicted as antithetical to their religion, aversion to holy things is no part of the vampiric condition.

For a recent example of the traditional power of the sacred over vampires, see Netflix’s 2020 horror-comedy Vampires vs. the Bronx, which pits Afro-Latino teenagers against affluent, gentrifying vampires. Highlighting the role of the local Catholic parish and its stern but caring priest (Cliff “Method Man” Smith) in the life of the community, the movie also depicts its young heroes absconding with (unnecessarily) pilfered holy water and a (sacrilegiously) pocketed Host.

Crosses and crucifixes repel the vampires; holy-water balloons do damage; and, when Father Jackson smacks one with a large processional crucifix, it leaves a burn mark. The high and low point in the depiction of the sacred is when one of the boys tosses the Host into a vampire’s mouth with the words “Body of Christ”: St. Paul’s warnings in 1 Corinthians 11 about the potentially fatal consequences of unworthy reception of Holy Communion couldn’t be more dramatically realized.

Sacrilegious, yes — but this is a movie that knows the Host is no mere symbol.

More than 200 years after their horror-fiction debut, vampires are still going strong. In 2022 the Marvel vampire antihero Morbius will get his big-screen debut, while on the small screen AMC will launch a series based on Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire. Don’t look for religious iconography to play a power role in either of those; neither Morbius nor Rice’s vampires are affected by crucifixes and the like.

On the other hand, considering the provocative theological themes that Robert Eggers brought to The Witch (2015), if he succeeds in getting his too-long-delayed remake of Nosferatu out of development hell, I’m intrigued to see what he might do with Dracula’s religious milieu.

Deacon Steven D. Greydanus Deacon Steven D. Greydanus is film critic for the National Catholic Register, creator of Decent Films, a permanent deacon in the Archdiocese of Newark, and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. For 10 years he co-hosted the Gabriel Award–winning cable TV show “Reel Faith” for New Evangelization Television. Steven has degrees in media arts and religious studies, and has contributed several entries to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, including “The Church and Film” and a number of filmmaker biographies. He has also written about film for the Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy. He has a BFA in Media Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York, an MA in Religious Studies from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Overbrook, PA, and an MA in Theology from Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ. Steven’s writing for the Register has been recognized many times by the Catholic Press Association Awards, with first-place wins in 2017 and 2016 and second-place wins in 2019 and 2015. Steven and his wife Suzanne have seven children.

Count Dracula and the Holy Cross

“Enter freely, and leave some of the happiness you bring”

Bela Lugosi as Dracula, anonymous photograph from 1931, Universal Studios 

(photo: Public Domain)
K.V. Turley Blogs

NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER

September 14, 2021

Ninety years ago, Count Dracula came to haunt America.

Released in 1931, Dracula, the film adaptation of the celebrated 1897 novel, starred Bela Lugosi.

On account of the film’s success, its eponymous lead actor became an international movie star overnight. A respected stage performer, Lugosi’s life thereafter was transformed, not least because the role of Dracula and the actor who played it now became synonymous.

What Lugosi did not know then was that as a name shines brighter in lights above the movie theater so, inevitably, the shadows must lengthen below. In what was to follow, the actor’s life took on the appearance of a never-ending struggle to escape the confines of the vampire cape that slowly began to envelope him.

According to Universal Studio’s publicity machine, the star of its latest box office smash was born of noble stock in the land beyond the mountains, in the realm of the vampire itself, namely, Transylvania. The truth was more mundane. Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskówas was born in 1882 in the industrial town of Lugos, hundreds of miles from Transylvania. His family was middle class and Catholic.

That said, his life prior to his most famous role was eventful, even more so than any studio could invent. Lugosi had “played” many roles: a child runaway, a decorated World War One veteran, an intellectual, Shakespearean actor, husband, revolutionary, movie star in Berlin with the renowned UFA studios, lover, husband again, husband once more, and much else besides. These were just some of Lugosi’s roles before in the winter of 1920 he bluffed his way onto a merchant ship bound for New Orleans.

After he landed in America, he was to become identified with only one role; the role that would slowly drain the creative lifeblood from his veins.

It began on Broadway. Lugosi played the part of the vampire count in the stage adaptation of the novel. The play was a hit. But for him success on the New York stage with Dracula was welcome, if hardly unexpected. Remember Lugosi was a serious actor. He looked forward to many more nights of standing ovations and rave reviews for his performance. He also looked forward to other parts, more demanding roles. In fact, he wished to explore the full repertoire of classical theatre. Soon he would move on, he thought, when, like any actor, he grew tired of the role.

For Lugosi, however, Dracula proved to be something else.

“Enter freely, and leave some of the happiness you bring.” So says Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker, the innocent who, at the start of Bram Stoker’s novel, travels to the vampire’s lair. Perhaps these fictional words might also apply to Lugosi. In an interview he had this to say: “The role seemed to demand that I keep myself worked up to fever pitch, so I took on the actual attributes of the horrible vampire, Dracula.”

Ominous signs appeared of this even while he played the role on Broadway. Take a look at this curious newspaper report (“‘Dracula’ Star: Same at Home”) from the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 10, 1929:

“Bela Lugosi, star of “Dracula,” a play which has had long runs where it has been shown, carried his temperament into the home and was unable to cast aside his irascible part of the role when he entered his home, his wife, Beatrice W. Lugosi, testified in the divorce court here to substantiate her plea for divorce…”

Ultimately all roles are masks that actors put on and remove at will. But what if the mask cannot be dislodged? What if after the lights have faded and the crowds long since departed for home the mask remains? The success on Broadway would be nothing in comparison to that which subsequently Hollywood would gift. After the release of the film version of Dracula, there was to be no way out for Lugosi, no way to remove the mask he had created — and no matter how hard he tried.

Those last years were filled with bathos. Success, at best a mercurial element, had vanished for the actor almost as quickly as it had unexpectedly swamped his life. Lugosi had known the heights of worldly success if for a shorter time than one might imagine; by the close, he had come to know the depths of despair more. Only a few years after his stunning entrée into the collective consciousness of the world, he was acting in, or perhaps more aptly toiling in, the “factory” of what was termed Poverty Row films. The name given to this genre speaks for itself. Artistically, he had become “undead.”

“I look in the mirror and say to myself: Can it be you once played Romeo?”

Broken film contracts, broken relationships, five marriages and myriad drug problems were in time to exacerbate Lugosi’s sorrows. Yet even as the end draws near, he is still working. But the part, if no longer called that, is still Dracula.

The B-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) was to be his concluding film. Today, it is regularly voted one of the worst movies ever made. Lugosi died four days into its shooting — his part was later filled by the director’s wife’s chiropractor, as a favor. Yet, in the final edit of the film, the last footage of this most mysterious of movie stars we see Lugosi, still dressed in the vampire cape, standing beside an open grave.

In the small hours of Aug. 16, 1956, Bela Lugosi died.

Subsequently he was buried in his Dracula cape at Holy Cross, Hollywood’s Catholic cemetery. Upon the grave stone are written the words:

BELA LUGOSI
BELOVED FATHER
1882 – 1956
Alongside the inscription is a cross. On it are carved the letters: IHS.
In hoc signo vinces.

One can only pray that, as in the best horror tales, the Cross did indeed prevail.

BEST POST MODERN VAMPIRE FILM
The Vampires of The Hunger Haunt Eternity in Endlessly Considered Glamour

A little hydrogen peroxide will get that right out.

Photo: MGM/UA Entertainment Company

By Rina Nkulu
Vampire Week

Tony Scott’s The Hunger, his 1983 adaptation of Whitley Strieber’s 1981 book of the same name, opens in the most perfect way a vampire movie can: Catherine Deneuve’s Miriam Blaylock and her husband, John (David Bowie), are cruising for snacks in a goth nightclub, Bauhaus is performing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” everything is glowing blue and cloaked in shadows. Miriam’s smoking a cigarette in a pillbox hat and cat-eye frames, John’s in a tailored black shirt with a stand collar and teashades. Strobe lights shrink into the reflections of their sunglasses. The pair spots a couple dancing together and all they have to do is wave. Soon, the woman’s leather jacket has been pried open to expose more neck and more collarbone; the man’s T-shirt collar has been cut off to reveal the same. They look a little less polished, and a lot more vulnerable. After slashing their victims’ throats with blades hidden in matching golden ankh pendants, John and Miriam drink them up and immediately burn the remains in a basement incinerator. Clean eating.

The Hunger was Tony Scott’s feature film debut after 15 years of making commercials for his brother Ridley Scott’s production outfit. Reviewers decried its slickness, but never failed to make note of its incredible sense of style. Scott enlisted master costumer Milena Canonero, of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, who imbued the Blaylocks with a relentless cool. The word “vampire” is never once uttered in the film; every little thing hinges on knowing it when you see it. Thus, the Blaylocks check a multitude of boxes that one would expect from immortals of a certain class position: They have an enormous Manhattan townhouse filled to the brim with antiquities once-contemporary to them, they give private classical music lessons, they spend their days “mostly idle” in head-to-toe couture. (Deneuve was outfitted by friend and collaborator Yves Saint Laurent.) They wear what looks good and do what feels good, and once a week, in order to sustain their lifestyles and lifespans, they feed on human blood. Everything feels apparent in the film’s supernatural, slightly knowing sense of chic.

At the beginning of the movie, John is beginning to find that Miriam’s promise of eternal life is true, but the guarantee of eternal youth holds only for her. Catching a glimpse of himself in a Polaroid, he notices some new wrinkles, not in his crisp beige suit but in his face. In just one day, John ages 170 years — courtesy of the excellent special-effects makeup done by Dick Smith, of The Exorcist and The Godfather — unknowingly doomed to the same fate as Miriam’s previous lovers: mind intact and body rotting, locked away in a coffin in the attic. In a last-ditch effort to find something resembling a cure, he pursues Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a researcher studying rapid aging in chimpanzees.

Bowie does a lot with his limited screen time, and John’s decay is wonderfully grotesque. As his age catches up with him, his movements grow clumsier, everything once-instinctual becomes torturously labored. He hesitates to draw his blade in a men’s restroom. He tries to kill a roller-skater in Central Park but only manages to cut him. When he does claim one last victim — one of the couple’s classical music students (and Miriam’s intended replacement for him) — he makes a big, sloppy mess of her. As his youth slips away, so does his power. And you can see it: The sleek, strong lines of his double-breasted jacket, one of inscrutable age that he wore as a young man just the day before, seem to rumple and collapse under the weight of his circumstances. So quickly does he become a withered old man in a withered old suit, pathetically begging his partner of 200 years for one last kiss.

Though Sarah initially dismisses John as an old crank, she takes him seriously after witnessing him age multiple decades in two hours. But it’s too late. After John is laid to eternal restlessness in the attic, Sarah shows up feeling guilty at the Blaylocks’ front door, where Miriam casts a glamour spell. The next time that Sarah shows up on that doorstep, she doesn’t really know why she’s there, but Miriam invites her in anyway. Sarah peers around and lingers in front of a sculpture. “This is real, isn’t it?” she asks, to which Miriam responds, yes, it is 2,000 years old. “You’ve got so many beautiful things,” Sarah goes on to say, and Miriam’s response doesn’t warrant any questioning: “Most of it comes from my family.” After living through centuries of trend cycles, it’s easy for one’s tastes to become frighteningly refined.

The two women talk over glasses of sherry. Miriam’s in a structured black dress with shoulder-pads and a plunging neckline, hair sculpted into a perfect chignon; Sarah is in a blazer and a plain white T-shirt. At some point, Sarah takes the blazer off. She seems a little overwhelmed, though not unnerved, by this beautiful woman and all her beautiful things, by the ankh pendant resting between her breasts. Miriam sits at the piano and plays the Flower Duet from Léo Delibes’s Lakmé, bluish, diffuse light comes through the sheer curtains and bounces off her jewelry. It gives her a cold, glimmering aura — everything about Miriam and her surroundings is a reflection of 2,000 years of practice, an opulence only attainable with an excess of time.

When Sarah asks Miriam what she does in her leisure and Miriam says, “My time is my own,” Sarah fantasizes out loud for a moment: “That’s great,” she says. “Plenty of time for your friends, lots of lunches and dinners, cocktail parties at the Museum of Modern Art …” She lounges in a chair behind the piano and listens. The sleeves of her T-shirt are rolled up, she isn’t wearing a bra, you see the smallest glimpses of some nondescript post earrings and a smart-looking watch. Her look is emblematic of the increasingly-casual ’80s, her fantasies are those of the proto-yuppie who’s not quite there yet but definitely on her way.

Sarah asks if Miriam is lonely, now that her husband is away, then spills sherry on herself. Miriam helps Sarah take her T-shirt off, and the two have sex, Miriam giving Sarah the gift-curse of everlasting life in the process. At dinner that evening with her boyfriend, Tom Haver (Cliff DeYoung), Sarah is unfocused and shaky, barely able to look at him. She stares at women swimming in the adjacent building’s pool. She orders a rare steak and can’t eat a single bite. And she’s wearing an ankh pendant of her own. Tom is immediately suspicious: “You just met her and she gives you a present?” he asks, and Sarah is immediately defensive. “She’s that kind of a woman. She’s European.”

At night, Sarah is restlessly, ravenously hungry, vomiting nonstop. Tom forces her to get a blood test, and they find two different strains of blood fighting for dominance in her veins. One is nonhuman and “stronger than ours,” and when Sarah asks who’s winning, there is no response. A furious Sarah storms over to Miriam’s building, clammy-skinned and slightly delirious in a weakly billowing trench coat. Miriam is honest about her “gift,” the fact that the second strain of blood is hers. “You belong to me. We belong to each other,” Miriam says, as she has repeatedly done for centuries. (There’s an older interview with the vampiric designer Rick Owens that I think about a lot, published in DM Magazine in March 2002. He’s asked about “the persistent allure of vampires” and responds: “Well, we know it’s about sex. Most everything is. The idea of devouring, consuming, possessing someone we desire.”)

Sarah flees, but, experiencing a supernatural withdrawal, soon returns sweating through her clothing. Miriam then initiates her into the ranks of the immortal aristocracy, her baptismal drink coming from Tom when he shows up at the townhouse looking for her. Sarah must get used to the role of Miriam’s lover. “Soon you will forget what you were,” Miriam says. As the two kiss, Sarah rejects Miriam’s “gift,” reaching for the ankh pendant and stabbing herself in the throat, her blood spurting into Miriam’s mouth. Miriam begins another mournful march into the attic, but as she lays Sarah down, wood creaks, doves fly, and the rest of her legion of undead lovers climb out of their coffins to confront her. She screams in horror as they descend upon her in a flurry of rotting limbs and tattered fabric, tulle veils and lace skirts falling apart as they grab at her.

Fashion loves vampires and vampires love fashion. Like Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness and Jean Rollin’s Fascination before it, The Hunger depicts both a designer’s ideal subjects and ideal clients: undying, inhumanly beautiful beings who possess endless time and money. (Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1996 collection, best-known for featuring a clear bodice full of live worms, was named after it.) The Hunger stands apart in how immediately seductive its modern-day vampires were — the look and feel of the film directly influenced the aesthetic of Propaganda, Fred H. Berger’s foundational goth zine. It’s fun to imagine how these supernatural elites adapt to each era; if your body remains forever young and your mind contains an endless number of referents, the distinction between contemporary and retro and vintage and even antique ceases to matter when you’re sustained by an infinite supply of new blood.

From 'Dracula's Daughter' to 'Carmilla,' lesbian vampire depictions prove immortal

Beginning with early film adaptations of 19th-century novels to a present-day small-screen resurgence, the subgenre has proved to have serious staying power.

Kate O'Mara, Kirsten Betts, Pippa Steel, Madeline Smith and Ingrid Pitt Valo in "The Vampire Lovers."Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo


Oct. 30, 2021, 
By Elaina Patton

Sexual fluidity has been one of the hallmarks of vampiric portrayals throughout history. But lesbian vampires, in particular, have enjoyed a certain popularity. Beginning with early film adaptations of 19th-century novels to a present-day small-screen resurgence, the subgenre has proved to have serious staying power.

"I think part of it is just the appeal of vampires in general," said lesbian romance novelist Evelyn Dar, who runs a popular YouTube channel dedicated to lesbian entertainment. "They’re mysterious and dark. It’s taboo and sexy."


That appeal, however, was a double-edged sword for lesbian representation. For decades, and particularly during the subgenre’s heyday of the 1960s and ‘70s, vampire narratives were a dominant means of getting lesbianism on-screen. And the associations between sapphic love and bloodthirsty villains stuck.

“They were evil. They were sexually deviant. They almost always had to die,” Dar said of those popular depictions.

A movie poster for "Vampyres." Everett Collection

“It had to do with the status anxiety that straight men must have felt during those years, between the rise of the second wave of the women’s movement and after Stonewall. There was a kind of fear about lesbians that could be articulated in the vampire film,” said Andrea Weiss, a film professor at the City College of New York and author of “Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film.” “And also quell that anxiety by having the vampire be destroyed or become heterosexual at the end.”

The association between gay love and monstrosity proved to be pervasive in film and television, and this — in addition to the genre’s undeniable “camp” factor — has contributed to the reason horror has such a unique place in gay culture. On one hand, horror is unrivaled when it comes to queer visibility. On the other, it’s notoriously demonized and has perpetuated damaging stereotypes about gay people.

Early Hollywood loved its horror, but it wasn’t too keen on lesbians — or unorthodox women, for that matter. Hence, most of the big horror hits of the era were about monstrous men, like “Frankenstein,” “The Wolf Man” and, of course, “Dracula.” Hays Code restrictions, which attempted to police the morality of film productions, dictated that women were portrayed as borderline asexual innocents. That meant any discussion of sexuality, much less homosexuality, had to be done via subtext.

“Every time you turn on a TV show now, it’s almost mandatory that there’s a lesbian in it. It used to be the exact opposite: It was mandatory that there couldn’t be a lesbian in it,” Weiss said. “A large part of the appeal for lesbians was looking for these moments in overwhelmingly heterosexual cinema and repurposing them, reconditioning them for their own use.”

The first, most famous and perhaps only example of an early Hollywood lesbian vampire film is 1936's “Dracula’s Daughter,” Universal Pictures’ follow-up to its massive 1931 hit “Dracula.” In it, Dracula’s progeny, Countess Marya Zaleska, played by a stone-faced Gloria Holden, tries to free herself from her father’s curse but ultimately gives in to temptation, kidnapping a young woman and holding her hostage in Transylvania.

The film’s subtext is not about romance but rather an early on-screen example of the predatory homosexual. Much of that had to do with the studio’s bending to the will of censorship requirements, revising the script and making publicity efforts to demonize the relationship. But despite the watchful eye of censorship officials, Universal couldn’t control the monster it created, and the film became a reigning example of early cinema’s fascination with gay desire.
The golden era

“Dracula’s Daughter” and other coded takes on lesbianism lit a cultural fire that exploded in the ‘60s and ‘70s. As censorship and restrictions on nudity waned, lesbian vampires morphed from closeted predators to full-blown bloodthirsty seductresses.

The portrayal of their victims changed, as well. Men were either slavish henchmen or oafish prey. Women, however, were eyed as potential companions — more than just food, if not equals.

“One of the reasons people might like the lesbian vampire trope is it has a built-in good girl-bad girl trope. You see it a lot in lesfic, as well.” Dar said, referring to lesbian fiction. “It plays with that sense of danger that a lot of us like.”

“Who else are you going to be cool with climbing through a window at night while you’re sleeping? I’ll leave my window unlocked, but only for the vampire,” Dar, who recently produced a video about lesbian vampire films, said with a laugh.

Early films from this sapphic vampire golden era flirted with the good girl-bad girl eroticism that would come to dominate — and plague — the genre. One of the most famous is French director Roger Vadim’s “Blood and Roses” (1960). It’s a lavish portrayal of a woman who is driven mad by jealousy and her resulting obsession with a vampiric legend. It was one of the first adaptations of what would become the most popular source material for the genre: Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella “Carmilla.”

In the ‘70s, the industry’s enthusiasm for sex and violence reached a fever pitch. Exploitation films like 1974's “Vampyres” and 1973's “The Devil’s Plaything,” which had more in common with soft-core pornography than cinema, proliferated.

“You could get away with a certain kind of borderline pornography in a horror film that you couldn’t get away with in other films,” Weiss noted.

A still from "The Vampire Lovers."Hammer Films

“The Vampire Lovers” (1970) stands out as one of the more “humanizing” and romantic films of the era. It’s the first in a trilogy based on Le Fanu’s “Carmilla,” made by legendary production company Hammer Films. Although considered daring at the time for its depiction of sapphic seduction, the so-called Karnstein Trilogy, named after Le Fanu’s Countess Karnstein, feels misogynistic by contemporary standards. But “The Vampire Lovers,” widely regarded as the best of the three, definitely has its temptations — not least of which is star Ingrid Pitt.

Sexploitation titles, a subgenre of exploitation films, were geared toward men rather than lesbian audiences. The characters “acted as lesbians, but they were very much coded as heterosexual women so that they appealed to straight male audiences,” Weiss said.

Some international directors during this period managed to make films that had one foot in the realm of exploitation and the other in art house — and held more appeal for women. Spanish director Jesús Franco’s “Vampyros Lesbos” (1971) is a stylish film with an entrancing psychedelic score. The director’s favorite leading lady, Soledad Miranda, is cast as Dracula’s heir, who haunts the dreams of Linda, an American lawyer working in Istanbul. Where its more mainstream contemporaries drifted into the ridiculous or tawdry, “Vampyros Lesbos” has a transcendent, sophisticated quality that has been attributed to Franco’s expert eye.

Other cult favorites of the era that took a more elevated approach are “Daughters of Darkness” (1971), “The Blood Spattered Bride” (1972) and “Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary” (1975).

Banished to the fringes

Things cooled off considerably in the decades following the lesbian vampire boom of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Big-franchise horror dominated the landscape, and lesbian vampires were largely banished to the fringes, most often appearing in adult films. But, occasionally, they grabbed the attention of a more artful eye.

Perhaps the most widely beloved lesbian vampire movie came at the beginning of this transition: “The Hunger” (1983). Though some debate its merit as a standalone film, it features one of cinema’s most stylish and talented love triangles: Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon and David Bowie. It introduced a new kind of vampiric decadence with its over-the-top fashions and exquisitely cool cast, the influence of which can be seen in later films like “Interview With the Vampire” and “Only Lovers Left Alive.” But it’s best known for the iconic sex scene between Deneuve and Sarandon.

Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in "The Hunger."©MGM / Courtesy Everett Collection

That sex scene became a coveted jewel for lesbian audiences during the repressive ‘80s. When Dar made a video about classic lesbian films that included “The Hunger,” she said she was reminded of the significance of the film, which also happens to be her favorite of the genre.

“I had a lot of people that were older than me saying, ‘I watched that movie so many times because that was all we really had,’” she said.

Weiss also recalled the fervor around “The Hunger,” like “Daughters of Darkness” before it: “In a way, those were spoofs on the lesbian vampire iconography, done in the art house tradition. They still played with the representation that appealed to men, but they also appealed to women. They were much more ambiguous about the message embodied in the lesbian vampire figure.”

A lesser-known but equally notable film is Michael Almereyda's “Nadja” (1994). It combines surreal, black-and-white visuals with plenty of existential angst. Its impressive cast includes Peter Fonda, Martin Donovan and Elina Löwensohn — as well as executive producer David Lynch, who makes a cameo as a hapless morgue attendant. Even without the lesbian vampires, “Nadja” would be essential ‘90s viewing.
A feminist makeover

In the past few decades, vampires have undergone a massive cultural makeover, becoming more inclusive and socially aware. The late aughts offered one of the more complex vampire films ever made: the Swedish genderqueer romantic horror “Let the Right One In.” And, in more mainstream entertainment, lesbian vampires got a feminist update.

Beginning in the late 2000s, Alan Ball’s wildly popular HBO series “True Blood” (2008-2014) acted as a kind of precursor to the progressive and campy mainstream content that’s now taken over.

Pam from "True Blood."HBO

“True Blood” has it all: vampires, fairies, witches, werepanthers and, of course, Pam. With biting one-liners and a withering stare, Pam mercilessly rules over small-town Louisiana and the vampire nightclub Fangtasia. Thanks to her character and a host of other queer storylines, the series received high marks for representation and won multiple awards from LGBTQ media advocacy organization GLAAD during its star-studded tenure. It was also one of the first productions to feature a Black lesbian vampire in a central role.

More recently, there’s been a slew of offerings characterized by progressive values and questionable quality. The woman-driven Canadian web series “Carmilla” (2014-2016) generated enough interest to be adapted into a feature-length film.

“It’s campy, it’s cheesy, but I love the fact that they reappropriated the lesbian vampire so that it stopped being about this evil predator for the titillation of men,” Dar said. “It’s still sexy, still titillating, but just in a different way.”

A still from "Bit."Nick Cafritz / Provocator

A growing selection of young adult content has also helped renew interest in the genre. In the feminist revenge thriller “Bit” (2019), the main character, played by transgender actress Nicole Maines (“Supergirl”), moves from Oregon to Los Angeles and connects with a group of queer feminist vampires who target predatory men. And Netflix’s upcoming teen vampire series “First Kill” is generating a fair amount of buzz among lesbian audiences.

While the messaging of the new crop of lesbian-inclusive vampire content is more progressive, many of the newer titles lack the rich cinematic history of the earlier fare — even if the classics did have problematic themes.

“Eventually, we have to stop being happy that things just exist. Things need to actually be good,” Dar said. “I don’t think the appetite has been satisfied. If I’m saying my favorite vampire film was made in the 1980s and it’s 2021, there’s still a lot of room there.”

Elaina Patton is a platforms editor for NBC News.

DEEP DIVE

The war on Halloween: Why the right's moral panic over '80s horror movies still matters

A Halloween fable: When the Christian right tried to suppress a slasher movie — and famous film critics helped

By MATTHEW ROZSA
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 31, 2021 6:00AM (EDT)

Film poster of "Silent Night, Deadly Night" 1984 movie. (Tristar Pictures)

Since Halloween is a holiday devoted to celebrating the scary, you might think that every type of fright would be welcome: Decomposing zombies and slimy aliens, ferocious werewolves and bloodthirsty vampires. Yet not so long ago in a galaxy a lot like this one, an outraged right-wing mob decided that a fictional killer in a Santa Claus costume was morally unacceptable. What happened after that might seem silly or completely irrelevant, but it's connected to real-world 21st-century problems that should frighten us all.

The selling of "Silent Night, Deadly Night": Accused of "blood money"

Our tale is set during the Halloween season, circa 1984. Millions of Americans were preparing their costumes, stocking up on candy and raking up fallen red and orange leaves. In Hollywood, TriStar Pictures was trying to figure out ways to get horror fans to see its new slasher film, "Silent Night, Deadly Night." Slated for release on Nov. 9, it followed the template used by many pictures in the genre after 1978, when John Carpenter's smash hit "Halloween" combined shocking and brutal kills with a plot centered around a major holiday.

Not surprisingly, studios recognized the box office potential in applying the "Halloween" formula to the most commercialized holiday of all — Christmas. Even before "Halloween" popularized this approach, there had already been Christmas-themed horror flicks like "Silent Night, Bloody Night" in 1972 and "Black Christmas" in 1974. (The latter is believed by some to have inspired "Halloween.") "Christmas Evil," released in 1980, actually beat "Silent Night, Deadly Night" to the punch in featuring a killer dressed as Santa; this somehow slipped under the radar that year, as did another Yuletide spine-tingler, "To All a Goodnight." Even "Silent Night, Deadly Night" was joined in 1984 by a Christmas slasher called "Don't Open 'Till Christmas," which was released a month later.

Unlike its predecessors and successors, however, "Silent Night, Deadly Night" encountered a perfect storm of random bad luck. It all started on a Saturday afternoon when a grisly commercial made its way to TV stations, depicting the film's main character, Billy Chapman (Robert Brian Wilson), menacing innocent victims with an axe and a gun — while clad in Santa garb. Parents claimed it upset their children; this captured public attention, and protesters in various cities began to oppose not just the marketing of the film, but the movie itself. Organizations were quickly formed to get advertising for "Silent Night, Deadly Night" pulled from TV and newspapers. Media outlets hyped stories in which angry citizens accused a movie that hadn't been released (and which they definitely hadn't seen) of ruining Christmas and making children terrified that Kris Kringle might be a psycho killer. Many theaters buckled to pressure and pulled their screenings.

Despite this adverse publicity, it appeared for a moment that the box office run of "Silent Night, Deadly Night" would end in triumph. The film earned $1.4 million on its opening weekend — a decent return, considering that it played in fewer than 400 theaters — and TriStar declared that all would be well.

That changed, however, when film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel weighed in on their popular TV show. Not content with merely saying they disliked it (neither was a fan of the slasher genre), the then-iconic pundits threw gasoline on the moral outrage fire. At one point Siskel accused everyone involved of trying to earn "blood money," scolding TriStar with the admonishment "Shame on you!" He went on to personally name the film's director, writer and producers, as well as the corporate owners of TriStar.

The gross for "Silent Night, Deadly Night" plummeted after that, and not long afterward it was pulled from theaters. Studio executives later implied that was due to its box office decline, but in fact the "Silent Night, Deadly Night" franchise was profitable enough in the long term to spawn four sequels and a remake. More likely than not, the studio simply felt that the controversy was causing them too much aggravation to be worth it.

All over a movie that the vast majority of protesters never saw.

The Power of ignorance: As goes rock 'n' roll, so goes horror...

This reactionary backlash did not occur in a vacuum, as writer Paul Corupe observes. He covers genre film and Canadian cinema for the niche publications Canuxploitation! and Rue Morgue magazine.

"There was a high-strung moral panic over horror films in the 1980s that came out of larger parental and religious concerns about popular youth culture," Corupe told Salon by email. "Slasher movies came under significant scrutiny, but heavy metal music, role playing games and even children's toys and cartoons were also targeted as having a supposed demonic or corrupting influence on children and teenagers of the era. Some believed that they had to protect their children from the devilish forces lurking in every LP record groove and VHS rental case."

Brad Jones, a culture commentator known to horror fans and film buffs for his popular online series The Cinema Snob, said he often heard moral objections to gory films while growing up around a religious community. "It was the same crowd, and would be doing the same thing, with heavy metal music or rock music," he recalled. But Siskel and Ebert weren't right-wing Christians. They had felt inundated with slasher films over the previous few years, Jones suggests, and picked this one to attack.
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"A lot of these movies were kind of new, at least to the mainstream," Jones said. "There had certainly been gory horror before, but after 'Halloween' and 'Friday the 13th' [released in 1980], you definitely saw a very mainstream upswing of a lot of these slasher movies."

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Stacie Ponder, a horror blogger and writer for sites like Rue Morgue Magazine and Kotaku, explained that when the trailer for "Silent Night, Deadly Night" was released amidst this cultural backlash, it supposedly "broke the brains of children."

"Parents fumed over having to explain that no, Santa wouldn't kill everyone when he came down the chimney on Christmas Eve," Ponder wrote by email. One prominent critics was legendary actor Mickey Rooney, who penned a "particularly virulent" letter calling for the filmmakers to be run out of Hollywood. (How's this for irony? Years later, Rooney would star in "Silent Night, Deadly Night 5.")

"In the long run, the notoriety only made the film more sought after," Ponder explained, adding that the lesson of all those successful sequels might be "that outrage is all well and good but it ultimately means little when there are dollars to be made."

Even if "Silent Night, Deadly Night" hadn't been the center of an absurd controversy, it might still have become a cult classic: It's actually pretty good.

"I love the movie," Jones said. "I'm a big slasher-movie guy anyway, but that one in particular does a lot of things that your typical slasher movie wouldn't have necessarily done." For one thing, because the killer is the main character, the narrative is shared through his point of view, which is rare in the slasher genre.

"The whole first half of the movie is actually this pretty interesting character piece about all the terrible things that happened in this person's life ... until at one point, halfway into the movie, he just snaps," Jones explained. "Then it definitely does a lot of slasher-movie tropes, but it had a good buildup and actually gave us this pretty interesting character. All of that was just ignored because people didn't see the movie and jumped on that outrage bandwagon." Buried beneath the blood-soaked Santa suit, "Silent Night, Deadly Night" has something a lot of slasher films lack — a unique identity, and thus cult film status.

No happy ending:

It all worked out OK for the creators of "Silent Night, Deadly Night," but the social forces that led to the film's initial suppression still lurk among us.

As culture has been increasingly politicized, it is difficult to separate the trends that influence how we view entertainment from those that determine our relationship with politics. "Silent Night, Deadly Night" was released when the president was a right-wing former movie star named Ronald; we recently got rid of a right-wing president who is a former reality TV star named Donald. This symbolic invasion of politics by the worst in our culture trickles down to political discourse. Just as reactionaries in 1984 felt confident that they could and should suppress a work of art despite total ignorance of its content, reactionaries today will support Trump's Big Lie and attack critical race theory, without understanding why the first claim is preposterous and the latter subject is not even being taught in public schools. That same brazen ignorance is present in the resistance to public health measures on masking and vaccines, where motivated reasoning and cultural bias outweigh medical and scientific data. It exists among the ever-persistent climate change deniers.

Arguably, the stakes were pretty low in a manufactured campaign of fake moral outrage about a slasher movie that almost no one had seen. But what we see in that 1980s controversy is an embryonic form of the battles we see around us today — when public health, our educational system, our democracy and the future of the planet itself are under attack.


Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

Guillermo del Toro fans will love his debut vampire feature Cronos

Immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be.

STREAMING
By Frederick Blichert

October Films

From the Vault: As the streaming space keeps growing, massive studio catalogs are becoming more and more available. These include lost and forgotten gems, so-bad-it’s-good duds, and just plain weird pieces of film history. And you probably won’t find them by waiting for streamers to put them in front of you. In From the Vault, Android Authority aims to rescue these titles from the algorithm graveyard and help you get more out of your streaming subscriptions.

Sometimes filmmakers have to cut their teeth on lesser work before hitting their stride and making a name for themselves. It’s the nature of most achievements that you have to fail a bit before you become great. Then again, some filmmakers come bursting through the gates with a sharp and unique vision on day one, already masters of their craft. Such was the case when Guillermo del Toro made his first feature, the dark and twisted Cronos, in 1993. And you can now watch Cronos on HBO Max.

Del Toro went on to direct some huge hits, from Blade 2 to Hellboy to Pan’s Labyrinth to his Oscar-winning The Shape of Water. But in Cronos, we see the writer-director starting to grapple with some of his favorite themes with a degree of sophistication that is frankly stunning.

Read on for what makes it such a special treat, and check out Cronos on HBO Max for yourself.

What is Cronos about?

In Cronos, an antiques dealer named Jesús Gris acquires a small statue that immediately attracts the attention of a dying businessman and his unsavory associates. Before selling the statue, though, Jesús removes a small artifact from its base.

More From the Vault: Watch the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple

Hidden inside the statue is a device that looks like a golden scarab. The Cronos device is ancient and was built by an alchemist in the 1500s. After living many lifetimes thanks to the Cronos device, the alchemist was killed in a building collapse. Jesús accidentally activates the device, which punctures his skin and exposes him to whatever kept the alchemist alive all those years.

Cronos is a vampire film with a twist

Jesús is in way over his head. He begins to grow younger, but also develops a taste for human blood, all while he avoids giving the device over to the businessman who grows impatient.

Guillermo del Toro fans will love his debut vampire feature Cronos
The gift of youth comes at a cost, after all.
An original vampire classic from a master

October Films

You can immediately hear the voice of an artist in Cronos. Speaking the language of schlocky genre film, Guillermo del Toro digs deep into the underlying themes of vampire lore to tell a moving story about a man losing himself to the obsessions of others.

One of the features of vampirism that del Toro focuses on is the more grotesque process of becoming an immortal creature. Throughout Cronos, we see bodily decay, as Jesús peels old screen from his flesh and scratches at sores left by the Cronos device. We get echoes of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, in which Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle slowly loses control of himself as he transforms into a human/fly hybrid.

Cronos blends fairytales, body horror, and Christian themes.

There’s something verging on sacrilegious going on here too. We see Jesús reduced to crawling on a bathroom floor to lick the remnants of a stranger’s nosebleed. But that’s set against the suggestion that this is God-like behavior. The businessman chastises Jesús for questioning the possibility that insects are God’s preferred children. The parallel naming of Jesús Gris (conspicuously close to Jesus Christ) offers a dark and warped second coming via alchemy. If Jesus died for our sins, Jesús is resurrected by a continued fascination with breaking the laws of nature and playing God.

Guillermo del Toro loves a good fairy tale, with familiar tropes and a moral rooted in classic parables. But he also loves to go a bit darker than we may be used to — his reference points veer closer to Grimm tales than sanitized Disney outings. It all makes for a beautifully contained little story with wide-reaching implications about human nature. And you can see echoes of it in all his films since.


Watch Cronos on HBO Max

October Films

One can hardly call Cronos underappreciated. The then-young del Toro took home nine Ariel awards (think Mexican Oscars) including best picture the year it came out. And it went on to win numerous awards at Cannes and other international festivals.

Despite less success in the US, it did earn itself a Criterion Collection release in 2010. That’s certainly a mark of confidence from the cinephile class, cementing the film’s status as a contemporary classic.

But still, Cronos certainly hasn’t achieved the kind of mainstream popularity that Guillermo del Toro has earned elsewhere. He wouldn’t become a mainstream auteur until more than a decade later with Pan’s Labyrinth. But he was always working at an elevated level. He was ready to make it big as soon as Hollywood would just notice him.

You can see his early themes and striking aesthetic in Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water, and everything else he touches, from the fairytale logic of the narrative to the grotesque transformation of its protagonist to the intricate design of the Cronos device itself.

If you’ve loved even a single Guillermo del Toro film, you’re likely to get something out of it. Don’t sleep on your chance to watch Cronos on HBO Max.

Senior WriterFrederick Blichert
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Gothic becomes Latin America’s go-to genre as writers turn to the dark side

A ghoulish shadow has been cast over Latin American literature.

 Illustration: Vivian Chen/The Guardian


The region used to be almost synonymous with magic realism but recent bestselling fiction draws on a legacy of dictatorship, poverty and sinister folklore


Mat Youkee in Bogotá
@matyoukee
Sun 31 Oct 2021 

A young man follows the bloody trail of his CIA father, through Paraguayan torture chambers and the sites of Andean massacres. An Ecuadorian artist fantasizes about running a scalpel through the tongue of her mute twin. In a Buenos Aires cemetery, teenage fans devour a rock star’s rotting remains.

These grisly scenes – and many more like them – populate the pages of Latin America’s recent bestselling fiction. From the Andes to the Amazon and to the urban sprawl of some of the world’s biggest cities, a ghoulish shadow has been cast over Latin American literature.

It’s a dark departure for a region often synonymous with magical realism. Since the 1967 publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude the region’s writers have often lived in the shadow of Macondo, the novel’s tropical and fantastical Colombian town, decrying the expectation – usually from western editors – that they deploy the “magical realist algorithm” in their work.

Now, a new generation of writers are striking a much darker tone. They take their inspiration from the dictatorships and terrorism of the late 20th century, the poverty and violence of the region’s modern cities and the most sinister elements of the region’s rich but neglected folklore. Macondo has turned macabre.

Mariana Enriquez. Photograph: Martina Bocchio/Awakening/Alamy

“When I read García Márquez he seems like a writer from another time,” said Mariana Enriquez, an Argentinian author whose short story collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker prize. “The continent had another mood. We were young countries and despite decades of poverty and conflict, there was hope, the future seemed bright. I wonder if that optimism’s gone now.”

Even before Latin America became the region hardest hit by the coronavirus, the continent was gripped by a deep malaise. A decade of stunted growth, ecological disasters, rising crime and a return of authoritarian governments of both left and right has fueled major protest movements across the region.

There are many echoes of the 1980s, a formative decade for many of the authors finding success today.

“I remember a sense of dread, a sense of fear,” said Enriquez, who grew up during Argentina’s dictatorship. “We kids knew that the adults weren’t telling us things.”


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The betrayal of children by their parents and the complex emotional response towards the families of the disappeared are common themes in her writing. Her latest prize-winning novel Our Part of the Night (due in its English translation in 2022) centers on the relationship of a father and son who are exploited as mediums by an occult sect which takes its victims under the cover provided by the junta’s disappearances.

With the return to democracy, the crimes of the period were laid bare in newspapers. “These were my first horror narratives. A generation of children were fed with this kind of narrative once the secret was out,” said Enriquez.

The current mood represents a resurgence – rather than an emergence – of horror fiction in a region long steeped in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft, said the Peruvian novelist Gustavo Faverón Patriau.

“Poe was incredibly influential in Latin America, but the renaissance of the gothic in Peru started with [leftist rebel group] the Shining Path in the 1990s. The guerrillas and the military response generated so many bloody and cruel stories that many writers felt they had to return to the language of the gothic to tell them.”
Relatives of victims killed in a 1980s army massacre in southern Peru carry their coffins during a burial ceremony at the village of Putis in the outskirts of Ayacucho in 2009. Photograph: Reuters/Alamy

His claustrophobic, gory novel Vivir Abajo is an often subterranean voyage across South America, taking in Maoist massacres, CIA torture squads, Nazi scientists and the maddening production of Werner Herzog’s 1982 Peruvian epic Fitzcarraldo.

“While the writers of the Boom often covered dark topics, there was always a utopian impulse behind them,” he said of the generation of Latin American writers who rose to prominence in the 1960s. “Today all that remains is a clear understanding of the idea of human rights. That’s a positive impulse, but – given Latin America’s recent history – it doesn’t help create optimistic novels.”

Samanta Schweblin. Photograph: Steffen Roth/The Observer

And terror has increasingly become the favored genre with which to allegorize the region’s myriad of seemingly intractable social problems. Fever Dream, a novella by the Argentinian author Samantha Schweblin, tackles the ecological hazards of monoculture soya plantations, but it does so with slow-acting poison and soul-swapping rituals.

Even García Márquez’s grandson is writing in the horror genre.

A more daily terror, that of modern city life, is evident in the writing of Monica Ojeda, who grew up in the Ecuadorian coastal city of Guayaquil. Her fiction touches topics such as domestic violence, body dysmorphia, incest and femicide.


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“The violence that affected me was the everyday violence of the city,” she said. “Of not being able to go out for fear of being raped or killed. Of having to accompany my friends to clandestine abortion clinics, of not getting taxis for fear of being kidnapped, of not drinking for fear of having something in my drink.” Her latest novel, Jawbone, features a teenage student at an Opus Dei college and a fan of “creepy pasta” internet memes held hostage by her literature teacher.

As with Enriquez, her work often fuses indigenous mythology with the terrors of the modern world, urban myths and the dark web. “I find it fascinating how the ancestral meets with the rabidly modern in our cities and in the Andean páramos [moorland],” she said.

“I was born in a wild city which floods every year bringing in crocodiles, frogs and serpents. A city which receives the ashes of active volcanoes. I’ve survived eruptions and earthquakes, and that’s why I like to say my writing [has a] cardiac [quality].”