TheoFantastique

CFP – Divine Horror: The Cinematic Battle Between the Sacred and the Supernatural

0 | March 2nd, 2016 | Posted in call for papers, horror, sacred, supernatural

PROPOSAL DEADLINE EXTENDED: 3/15/16

Call for Contributors (Abstracts 3/15/16; Essays 8/15/16)

Divine Horror: The Cinematic Battle Between the Sacred and the Supernatural (under contract)

The struggle between good and evil is classic and as old as time; this struggle becomes iconic when one or both of the combatants is associated with the divine. From Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to Deliver Us From Evil (2014), horror films continually use religion to both inspire and combat fear, and to call into question or affirm the moral order. Churches provide sanctuary, clergy cast out evil, religious icons become weapons, holy ground serves as battleground, and angels war against demons. But all of these may be violated or perverted, and turned from their original purpose. When the sacred is corrupted, evil’s grip on the world is tightened—trust is betrayed, faith is perverted, hope is lost, and the boundaries between the living and the dead are violated—jeopardizing not only human existence, but the fate of the immortal soul.

This collection focuses on genre horror films in which religious entities —whether sacred or profane — play an active, material role in the story. The volume will explore the collision of the sacred and the supernatural, asking new, incisive questions about our constructions and manifestations of the war between the ultimate good and evil on screen, and the ways in which those portrayals trouble our ever-changing understandings of that opposition and its archetypes.

Divided into four thematic sections— Holy Terrors, Saints and Sacrilege, Hallowed Ground, and Warriors of the Cloth—the volume’s organization will highlight the diversity of ways in which horror and religion interact onscreen, as each challenges and reinforces the tenets of the other. While Catholicism is prominent in a number of these films, analyses of films dealing with other religious traditions are welcome and encouraged (Sam Raimi’s film The Possession, for example, features a Jewish dybbuk, while Daniel Stamm’s The Last Exorcism showcases evangelical Protestantism.)

We seek proposals for intelligent, accessible chapters that examine and critically analyze the intersection of the sacred (religion, clergy, angels, etc.) and the horror genre across a range of films and eras. Proposals for both topical essays and close readings of a single text are welcome. Previously unpublished work only, please.

Possible topics might include:

* Exorcism and demonic possession (The Exorcist, Deliver Us From Evil)
* Religious Visions of the Apocalypse (End of Days, Legion)
* The Anti-Christ (The Omen series, Devil’s Due)
* The Church as Monster (Witchfinder General, The Pit and the Pendulum)
* Warriors of God (Priest, Van Helsing)
* Flawed Heroes, Sacred Mission (John Carpenter’s Vampires, Constantine)
* Angels on Earth (the Prophecy series, Gabriel)
* Deals with the Devil (Angel Heart, Rosemary’s Baby, Needful Things)

Work on topics such as films about religious violence (Kingdom of Heaven, Joan of Arc) with no supernatural dimension; films about fallen angels (Dogma), Satan (The Devil and Daniel Webster), or the Apocalypse (Left Behind) outside the horror genre; and films in which the religious/supernatural elements are not “real” (or do not manifest themselves) in the context of the films are, unfortunately, outside the scope of this project.

Please send your 500-word abstract to both co-editors, Cindy Miller (cynthia_miller@emerson.edu) and Bow Van Riper (abvanriper@gmail.com).

Publication timetable:

March 15, 2016 – Deadline for Abstracts
March 20, 2016 – Notification of Acceptance Decisions
August 15, 2016 – Chapter Drafts Due
November 31, 2016 – Chapter Revisions Due
January 15, 2017 –Delivery to Publisher

Acceptance will be contingent upon the contributors’ ability to meet these deadlines, and to deliver professional-quality work. Contributors who do not submit their initial draft by the deadline without prior arrangement will, regrettably, be dropped from the project.

Tagged in: call for papers, horror, sacred, supernatural

Titles of Interest – “The Undead on the Battlefield: Horrors of War”

0 | February 28th, 2016 | Posted in Titles of Interest, zombie

The Undead on the Battlefield: Horrors of War, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and Bowdoin Van Riper (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015)

Battlefields have traditionally been considered places where the spirits of the dead linger, and popular culture brings those thoughts to life. Supernatural tales of war told in print, on screen, and in other media depict angels, demons, and legions of the undead fighting against—or alongside—human soldiers. Ghostly war ships and phantom aircraft carry on their never-to-be-completed missions, and the spirits—sometimes corpses—of dead soldiers return to confront the enemies who killed them, comrades who betrayed them, or leaders who sacrificed them.

In Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled essays that explore the meaning and significance of these tales. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: How do supernatural stories engage with cultural attitudes toward war? In what ways do these stories reflect or challenge the popular memories of particular wars? How do they ask us to think again about battlefield heroism, military ethics, and the politics of sacrifice? Divided into four sections, chapters examine undead war stories in film (Carol for Another Christmas, The Devil’s Backbone), television (The Twilight Zone), literature (The Bloody Red Baron, Devils of D-Day), comics (Weird War Tales, The Haunted Tank), graphic novels (The War of the Trenches), and gaming (Call of Duty: World at War).

Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, these essays address such themes as monstrous enemies and enemies made monstrous, legacies and memories of war, and the war dead who refuse to rest. Drawing together stories from across wars, branches of service, and generations of soldiers—and featuring more than fifty illustrations—Horrors of War will be of interest to scholars of film, popular culture, military history, and cultural history.

Available from the publisher, or Amazon.com.

Tagged in: Titles of Interest, zombie

Rev. Robert Kirk and the study of elves and faeries

0 | February 21st, 2016 | Posted in faeries, folklore

Given my own background and research interests I am always intrigued to learn of others similar to myself, whether past or present. I recently learned of the Rev. Robert Kirk, an Episcopalian minister in Scotland in the 17th century. He pursued research on faeries, published as The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Faun and Fairies, that makes him of interest to those involved in folklore studies. Ancient Origins has a piece that examines Kirk’s interesting work.

Dom Augustin Calmet: Biblical Scholar and Vampire Researcher

Tagged in: faeries, folklore

Why did satanists endorse “The Witch”?

0 | February 21st, 2016 | Posted in horror, occult, occulture, Paganism, Satan, Satanism, Wicca, Witchcraft

The new horror film The Witch is getting positive reviews, but prior to that it was the stuff of minor controversy as a Satanist group issued a public endorsement for the film, calling it a “satanic experience.” Such an endorsement would have caused a major controversy in the culture wars from Christians as happened in the past with the Harry Potter books ad films, but little attention was paid to this with The Witch. Vox posted an analysis of this in a piece titled “Why satanists have given new horror movie The Witch their endorsement.”

Tagged in: horror, occult, occulture, Paganism, Satan, Satanism, Wicca, Witchcraft

Change of paranormal and conspiracy in ‘The X-Files’ Reboot

0 | January 25th, 2016 | Posted in conspiracy theories, paranormal, The X Files

Jess Peacock, author of Such a Dark Thing, posted his Facebook criticism of last night’s premier of the new The X-Files series reboot. In his view the dramatic shift in scrapping the reality of the UFO and abduction phenomenon in favor of a new set of conspiracies is akin to the 1980s television series Dallas where Bobby Ewing appears in the shower and the prior episodes are merely dreams. Here’s my response:

I was interested to see how Carter was going to update the basic premise of the franchise given the changes in the paranormal and conspiracy theories since the nineties. This is of personal and research interest since I’m reading The Paranormal and the Paranoid by Aaron John Gulyas (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) for a review in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

The question remains as to what extent this was or wasn’t good storytelling, but I think more is going on here than the equivalent of the Dallas shower dream scenario. As I mentioned above, the different cultural context made it necessary for for Carter to update the basic premise of the program. So while the UFO phenomenon was a significant part of the paranormal in the 1990s, as well as conspiracy theories connected to it, this is not the case in the 21st century. Therefore, the general idea of UFOs and abductions is scrapped in favor of assuming the reality of the Roswell UFO crash and cover up, and connected to contemporary conspiracy theories and concerns about government control in things such as phone wiretaps, drone strikes, the War on Terror as public distraction, global warming caused by the government, etc.

Again, we can argue about whether this scrapping of the explanatory premise of the original series is good storytelling, but it makes sense given changes in culture.

Tagged in: conspiracy theories, paranormal, The X Files

New research on ancient origins of fairy tales

0 | January 20th, 2016 | Posted in fairy tales

The BBC.com has an interesting story on the ancient origins of fairy tales titled “Fairy tale origins thousands of years old, researchers say.” The story tells of the research at the Universities of Durham and Lisbon that reveals that some basic fairy tale ideas go back quite some time:

Using techniques normally employed by biologists, academics studied links between stories from around the world and found some had prehistoric roots.
They found some tales were older than the earliest literary records, with one dating back to the Bronze Age.

The stories had been thought to date back to the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani, said Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure, and could be traced back to when Eastern and Western Indo-European languages split more than 5,000 years ago.

Analysis showed Beauty And The Beast and Rumpelstiltskin to be about 4,000 years old.

And a folk tale called The Smith And The Devil, about a blacksmith selling his soul in a pact with the Devil in order to gain supernatural abilities, was estimated to go back 6,000 years to the Bronze Age.

These findings are significant in helping connect the stories to the early history of human civilization. Fairy tales are not only found in ancient childrens’ stories, but also find their way into contemporary fantasy, horror and science fiction. For an exploration of fairy tale connections to horror see my past interview with Walter Rankin on his book Grimm Pictures: Fairy Tale Archetypes in Eight Horror and Suspense Films. Read the BBC.com story here.

Tagged in: fairy tales

Call for Papers – Supernatural Cities: Exploring the Urban Mindscape

0 | January 4th, 2016 | Posted in call for papers, supernatural

Supernatural Cities: Exploring the Urban Mindscape

Saturday 30th April 2016

University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

Keynote Speaker: Professor Steve Pile, Open University

Call for Papers:

Where do urban supernatural stories and beliefs come from and why do they survive in our modern cities? What is it about the nature of the urban environment that encourages our imaginations to respond in this way? How do supernatural accounts and legends alter urban geographies? What cultural roles have ghosts and other supernatural beliefs and practices played in historical and contemporary cities? How has and does the supernatural articulate the experience of urban living, unequal power relations, and fluid urban identities?
The urban environment, dense, sprawling, and perpetually haunted by multiple histories, has long played upon the mind of its inhabitants. Both the city’s known and unknown spaces and places have been prone to prompting fantasising, storytelling, and a search for influence in or over a powerful environment that is as much psychological as material.

This one-day conference aims to explore the haunted and haunting nature of the urban environment by bringing together scholars, discourses and theoretical approaches from a diverse range of academic disciplines. It also seeks to reflect on the way urban supernatural tropes such as ghosts, zombies and other urban bogeymen have been creatively represented in various media. This fusion of approaches and representations will be used to broaden our analytical scope, encouraging us to explore how we engage with both the mundanity and strangeness of urban spaces and places on intellectual, imaginative and emotional levels.
The conference’s overall purpose is to draw diverse disciplinary approaches to the urban and the imaginary into conversation with one another, enabling us to advance interdisciplinary discussion and reflection upon the supernatural and the uncanny as means of articulating urban otherness, estrangement and enchantment.

We welcome papers from all disciplines. Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

• Urban supernatural folklore and urban legends
• Ghost stories and urban temporalities
• Magic and occult beliefs in the urban context
• Uncanny architecture and urban heterotopias
• Hauntology, capitalism, and urban power relations
• Urban fantasy and urban gothic fictions (literature, art, film, TV, video games, music)
• Supernatural storytelling as intangible urban heritage
• Functions of the urban supernatural (communal identity and memory; socio-political and environmental critique)
• Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin and the phantasmagoric urban experience
• Psychogeography and urban space/place as palimpsest
• Monstrous urbanisation, urban monstrosity, and environmentalism
• Affective theory and the emotional urban environment
• Archaeology, concealed objects and domestic magical thought
• Urban supernatural, enchantment, and the de-familiarisation of the mundane
• Re-reading / re-writing the urban – supernatural cartographies; imagination as agency

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper, together with a brief bio, by 1st February 2016 to supernaturalcities@port.ac.uk . If you have any queries please contact Dr Karl Bell at karl.bell@port.ac.uk

The registration fee for the conference will be £30 (waged) / £20 (students and unwaged). Speakers will not have to pay a registration fee, although they will still be required to register. Registration will be conducted via the University of Portsmouth’s online store.

It is intended that selective conference papers will subsequently form the basis of an edited essay collection that will further advance multidisciplinary reflection upon the urban imaginary.

The Supernatural Cities project is on Twitter @imaginetheurban

Tagged in: call for papers, supernatural

Ethics and Videogames in “Star Wars: The Old Republic”

0 | December 16th, 2015 | Posted in ethics, video games

Robert Geraci’s work has been featured here previously (just one example here. He has a very interesting essay in Religion Dispatches titled “A STAR WARS VIDEOGAME INVITES PLAYERS TO THE DARK SIDE.” The essay provides a scientific analysis of the ethical choices players make when involved in the Star Wars: The Old Republic videogame. Some excerpts:

But before the newest trilogy of films could offer a hero’s quest and a chance of redemption to a new generation, the Star Wars franchise hit a snag in its moral status. Recently, the videogame Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) prompted a debate over torture, the killing of innocents, and the role-playing of evil.

When video games invite players to the Dark Side, does this affect their thoughts or behavior in reality?

A little later he writes:

The article suggested that players behaved badly within SWTOR, and that this bad behavior might have effects outside the game. Gamers, on the other hand, criticized the article for giving too much weight to the consequences of what is, essentially, a fantasy.

Whether violent videogames influence behavior is an important, and hotly debated, question. But in this case it seemed premature: no one on either side asked what players actually do in the game, or what they really believe. So we did.

Check out the essay for some interesting scientific analysis of videogames and ethical decision making.

For past related posts at TheoFantastique visit these links:

http://www.theofantastique.com/2010/09/15/i-am-the-god-of-everything-esotericism-youth-culture-and-violent-video-games/

http://www.theofantastique.com/2009/04/23/resident-evil-5-homicide-with-impunity-and-racism/

http://www.theofantastique.com/2014/07/13/titles-of-interest-virtually-sacred-myth-and-meaning-in-world-of-warcraft-and-second-life/

Tagged in: ethics, video games

Historian’s commentary misses the mark on “Mad Monster Party”

0 | November 29th, 2015 | Posted in Rankin/Bass, Ray Harryhausen, stop-motion animation

Back in October I picked up a copy of Mad Monster Party produced by Rankin/Bass on Blu-ray to add to my Halloween movie collection. I finally got around to watching it, and the Special Features, which included some commentary by Rick Goldschmidt, credited as a Rankin/Bass historian. Some of his trivia and insights were interesting, but some were way off base. Paraphrasing two of his comments in the video, he said that the stop-motion animation work of Rankin Bass was amazing for the 1960s, and that their holiday stop-motion films were special given that previously nobody had put such character into the animated figures.I couldn’t believe it when he said these things. As a historian he should cast his specific subject matter against the backdrop of other expressions of the art. If this is done his statements are shown to be inaccurate. In the 1930s and 1940s George Pal produced his Puppetoons shorts, which included some of the first commercial work by Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen would go on to do stop-motion in feature films, and whether the Puppetoons or feature length films, he invested his animated characters with personality in ways that often rivaled human actors. While I appreciate Mr. Goldschmidt’s fondness for the stop-motion animation work of Rankin/Bass, an appreciation I share, his commentary on this Blu-ray release is historically inaccurate when considered against the broader backdrop of the history of stop-motion animation.