“Dracula and Philosophy” review

0 | November 4th, 2015 | Posted in Books, Dracula, philosophy, vampire

518Od6x8BALI have a brief review of Dracula and Philosophy: Dying to Know (Open Court, 2015), edited by Nicolas Michaud and Janelle Pötzsch at The Englewood Review of Books, currently as a feature review. It can be read here.

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RUE MORGUE and the Ouija Board

0 | October 25th, 2015 | Posted in Bill Ellis, occult, occulture, paranormal, Rue Morgue magazine

11909378_576432975830678_238907741_nEach year I look forward to the Halloween issue of RUE MORGUE magazine. This year’s was a real treat given its cover story “Spirits, Demons, Superstition: 125 Years of the Ouija Board.” There are several elements included in their coverage, including an overview, “Take Me to the Other Side” by April Snellings that also includes an interview with three folks with ouija board expertise, “Ghost Writers” also by April Snellings that involves a discussion with Brandon Hodge on the history of talking boards like the ouija, and “Cinema Ouija” by Ronni Thomas that looks at the portrayal of talking boards in film.

I appreciate that RUE MORGUE covered this topic, and the various aspects of their coverage. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the religious dimension of ouija boards, however. While the magazine did mention it in connection with Spiritism, there is much more they could have mentioned. This would have included things like Jane Roberts, a medium who used the ouija board early on in her communication on behalf of an entity named Seth who would go on to reveal a whole body of teachings called the Seth Material, and which helped usher in the New Age Movement.  Then there is the importance of the ouija board to various forms of American folk magic and teen rights of passage, which has been discussed by Bill Ellis in his books Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (University of Kentucky Press, 2000), and Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture (University of Kentucky Press, 2004).

Regardless of the perspective in which the ouija board and other talking boards are discussed, they represent an important part of understanding American religion and the paranormal.

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“I ain’t afraid of no ghosts”

0 | October 25th, 2015 | Posted in animation, cartoon, Disney, ghost, ghost-hunter

tumblr_mviqk8f7ud1qhcrb0o1_1280The other day I watched Disney’s animated cartoon, Lonesome Ghosts (1937). I caught a line in it I hadn’t noticed before. Each of the main characters has their encounter with a ghost, from Mickey to Donald to Goofy. In connection with Goofy’s spectral encounter he says, “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.” In light of Ray Parker Jr.’s past legal troubles in connection with his “Ghostbusters” song in the film of the same name, I wonder whether Parker lifted this line out of a cartoon from his childhood. The line of dialogue is word for word as it appears in the song, and this seems too much for coincidence.

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Titles of Interest: The Art of Horror

0 | October 25th, 2015 | Posted in art, horror, Titles of Interest

art_of_horrorThe Art of Horror: An Illustrated History (Applause Theatre & Cinema Books; Ill edition, 2015)

Stephen Jones, editor

Amazingly, there has never been a book quite like The Art of Horror a celebration of frightful images, compiled and presented by some of the genre’s most respected names. While acknowledging the beginnings of horror-related art in legends and folk tales, the focus of the book is on how the genre has presented itself to the world since the creations of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley first became part of the public consciousness in the 19th century. It’s all here: from early engravings via dust jackets, book illustrations, pulp magazines, movie posters, comic books, and paintings to today’s artists working entirely in the digital realm. Editor Stephen Jones and his stellar team of contributors have sourced visuals from archives and private collections (including their own) worldwide, ensuring an unprecedented selection that is accessible to those discovering the genre, while also including many images that will be rare and unfamiliar to even the most committed fan. From the shockingly lurid to the hauntingly beautiful including images of vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, demons, serial killers, alien invaders, and more every aspect of the genre is represented in ten themed chapters. Quotes from artists/illustrators, and a selection from writers and filmmakers, are featured throughout.

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Extraordinary Tales animation coming to a theater near you

0 | October 21st, 2015 | Posted in animation, Edgar Allan Poe, horror

Extraordinary Tales, a new animated horror piece of animation is coming to theaters and On Demand on October 23, right in time for Halloween. As reported by Blumhouse.com:

Directed by former Disney animator Raul Garcia, TALES adapts Poe’s classics “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of Red Death” and “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar,” each rendered in its own unique style of animation inspired by everything from Universal monster classics to EC-style horror comics.

Narration for the tales will be provided by a ghoul’s gallery of horror legends – including filmmakers Guillermo Del Toro (CRIMSON PEAK) and Roger Corman (THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER), actor Julian Sands (WARLOCK), and immortal horror icons Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi.

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Call for Papers: Characters of ‘The Walking Dead’

0 | October 19th, 2015 | Posted in call for papers, The Walking Dead, zombie

In 2014 the Characters of The Walking Dead book project began. The co-editors received several submissions, but the project encountered difficulties. A new co-editor has joined the project, and we are now issuing a new call for papers in the hopes of receiving additional submissions to fill in the blanks in character treatment. Of particular interest are Lori, Glenn, Maggie, Sasha, Beth, Tara, Abraham, Eugene, and Rosita. We will also consider other possible character treatments. As the title indicates, we are seeking chapter submissions that focus on the characters of The Walking Dead television series and uses the characters as springboards into discussions of larger themes developed within the character, the television series, and connected to the broader culture. Abstracts of 200 words or further inquiries on this volume should be sent to John Morehead (johnwmorehead@msn.com) and Arnold Blumberg (the14th doctor@yahoo.com) by November 15, 2015.

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Titles of Interest – Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney

0 | October 17th, 2015 | Posted in fantasy, Titles of Interest

9780415709309Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney
International Perspectives
Edited by Jack Zipes, Pauline Greenhill, Kendra Magnus-Johnston (Routledge, 2016)

The fairy tale has become one of the dominant cultural forms and genres internationally, thanks in large part to its many manifestations on screen. Yet the history and relevance of the fairy-tale film have largely been neglected. In this follow-up to Jack Zipes’s award-winning book The Enchanted Screen (2011), Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers the first book-length multinational, multidisciplinary exploration of fairy-tale cinema. Bringing together twenty-three of the world’s top fairy-tale scholars to analyze the enormous scope of these films, Zipes and colleagues Pauline Greenhill and Kendra Magnus-Johnston present perspectives on film from every part of the globe, from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, to Jan Švankmajer’s Alice, to the transnational adaptations of 1001 Nights and Hans Christian Andersen.

Contributors explore filmic traditions in each area not only from their different cultural backgrounds, but from a range of academic fields, including criminal justice studies, education, film studies, folkloristics, gender studies, and literary studies. Fairy-Tale Films Beyond Disney offers readers an opportunity to explore the intersections, disparities, historical and national contexts of its subject, and to further appreciate what has become an undeniably global phenomenon.

Table of Contents

Foreword and Acknowledgements Jack Zipes Preface: Traveling Beyond Disney Kendra Magnus-Johnston, Pauline Greenhill, and Lauren Bosc 1. The Great Cultural Tsunami of Fairy-Tale Films Jack Zipes 2. “My Life as a Fairy Tale”: The Fairy Tale Author in Popular Cinema Kendra Magnus-Johnston 3. Spectacle of the Other: Recreating A Thousand and One Nights in Film Sofia Samatar 4. British Animation and the Fairy-Tale Tradition: Housetraining the Id Paul Wells 5. The Fairy-Tale Film in France: Postwar Reimaginings Anne Duggan 6. The Checkered Reception of Fairy-Tale Films in the Germany of the Brothers Grimm Jack Zipes 7. Fairy-Tale Films in Italy Cristina Bacchilega 8. The Fairy-Tale Film in Scandinavia Elisabeth Oxfeldt 9. “To Catch Up and Overtake Disney?” Soviet and Post-Soviet Fairy-Tale Films, Marina Balina and Birgit Beumers 10. The Czech and Slovak Fairy-Tale Film Peter Hames 11. Polish Fairy-Tale Film: 130 Years of Innovation and Counting Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marek Oziewicz 12. Not Always Happily Ever After: Japanese Fairy Tales in Cinema and Animation, Susan Napier 13. The Love Story, Female Images, and Gender Politics: Folktale Films in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Jing Li 14. “It’s all a Fairy Tale”: A Folklorist’s Reflection on Storytelling in Popular Hindi Cinema, Sadhana Naithani 15. The Fairy-Tale Film in Korea, Sung-Ae Lee 16. Stick Becoming Crocodile: African Fairy-Tale Film Jessica Tiffin 17. Australian Fairy Tale Films Elizabeth Bullen and Naarah Sawers 18. Fairy-Tale Films in Canada/Canadian Fairy-Tale Films Pauline Greenhill and Steven Kohm 19. The Fairy-Tale Film in Latin America Laura Hubner 20. Beyond Disney in the Twenty-First Century: Changing Aspects of Fairy-Tale Films in the American Film Industry Jack Zipes

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New essay on the crystal skulls

0 | October 7th, 2015 | Posted in Joseph Laycock, paranormal

Quartz-Rock-Crystal-Mitchell-Hedges-Crystal-Skull-Replica-11I first heard the story of the mysterious crystal skulls when I was a kid in the 1970s through the television program In Search Of… Joseph Laycock has written an essay on them for Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, Volume 11, Issue 2 (2015) titled “The controversial history of the crystal skulls: a case study in interpretive drift”. The abstract:

In the nineteenth century, several skulls carved from rock crystal appeared in the holdings of European collectors. The provenance of the skulls was unknown and experts regarded them as pre-Columbian artifacts. In the twentieth century, two very different histories formed about these objects. Through testing and archival research, forensic experts and curators concluded that the skulls were created in the nineteenth century using European technology. Conversely, a community of skull enthusiasts believes the skulls are thousands of years old and function as a sort of esoteric computer. They believe that by communing with crystal skulls, it is possible to access records of ancient civilizations. The skull enthusiasts have strongly resisted the findings of experts. This article applies Tanya Luhrmann’s theory of “interpretive drift” to examine how the skull enthusiasts were able to construct and invest in a mythology surrounding these objects in only a few decades. This case study suggests that material objects can serve an important role in forming the types of magical worldviews outlined by Luhrmann.

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Emory University’s Zombethics

0 | October 7th, 2015 | Posted in ethics, zombie

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Midnight Syndicate releases new album “Christmas: A Ghostly Gathering”

0 | September 27th, 2015 | Posted in Midnight Syndicate, music

Midnight Syndicate's "Christmas: A Ghostly Gathering" album coverI am pleased to announce the release of a new album by Midnight Syndicate. It is titled “Christmas: A Ghostly Gathering.” From their press release:

“The new album features the band’s unique twist on classic holiday carols blended with new and original material. ‘Our goal was to treat each song in a way that would merge familiarity with originality,’ said Gavin Goszka. ‘There are definitely recognizable elements, but plenty of additional original material as well. It also incorporates the wildest instrument palette we’ve used to date and represents what we consider to be the most varied collection of songs we’ve ever released.”

You can order the new album here.

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