Call for submissions: “The Paranormal and Popular Culture”

0 | January 23rd, 2015 | Posted in call for papers, paranormal

We are currently accepting proposals for essays for an edited volume entitled “The Paranormal and Popular Culture.” Academic writers and independent scholars are invited to submit proposals spanning the wide range of topics on pop culture and the paranormal, and their connection to religion, including reflections on the full panoply of extraordinary beings (e.g. vampires, zombies, demons, ghosts, mutants, cyborgs, cryptoids, etc.) and extraordinary phenomena (e.g. psychic abilities, channeling, spontaneous combustion, magic, necromancy, etc.), as well as theoretical and/or historical reflections on supernaturalism, pop culture, and theology.

Those interested in being considered as contributors should send an abstract to the co-editors, Darryl Caterine (cateridv@lemoyne.edu) and John Morehead (johnwmorehead@msn.com) by June 1. Our timeline is as follows: write up a proposal this summer and pitch it to various publishers. Assuming we receive a timely and positive response from one or more of them, the tentative deadline for the essays would be the summer of 2016.

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Rod Taylor passes away

2 | January 9th, 2015 | Posted in Obituary

Yesterday, Rod Taylor passed away. Fans of the fantastic will remember his fine performances in The Twilight Zone, The Time Machine, and The Birds. Taylor died of a heart attack in his Southern California home. He was 84.

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The Babadook

0 | December 15th, 2014 | Posted in horror

The Babadook has received a lot of praise since its appearance at Sundance in 2014.It comes out of Australia through director Jennifer Kent who also wrote the story. Appreciation for this film has gone so far as to laud this as the best horror film of the decade, and one that might help improve the quality of American horror cinema. The film is especially interesting and creepy in that the horror comes forma children’s book and has connections to dark fairytales.

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Marina Warner discusses “How Fairytales grew up”

0 | December 15th, 2014 | Posted in fairy tales

onceUponTime.jpgOver at TheGuardian.com Marina Warner has an interesting essay titled “How fairytales grew up.” An excerpt:

Fairytales are enjoying a huge rise in popularity and influence in symbiosis with the internet. The traditional functions of the bard and the griot in predominantly oral cultures included “keeping the memory of the tribe”, as Derek Walcott remarked in his Nobel speech, and the enchantments of technology have placed the power to do this in our hands. The entertainment industry increasingly harvests the common store of fairytale to develop one vastly expensive vehicle after another to reach the global market. Some are disastrous (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters), but at the same time, this new ocean of story provides film-makers and website builders of slender means with magnificent new opportunities.

Like a mother tongue, the stories are acquired, early, to become part of our mental furniture (think of the first books you absorbed as a child). The shared language is pictorial as well as verbal, and international, too. Such language – Jung called it archetypal – has been growing into a common vernacular since the romances of classical antiquity and the middle ages – Circe from the Odyssey and Vivienne from Morte d’Arthur are recognisable forerunners of fairy queens and witches, and the sleeping beauty herself first appears in a long medieval chivalric tale, Perceforest. A fairytale doesn’t exist in a fixed form; it’s something like a tune that can migrate from a symphony to a penny whistle.

Read the entire essay here.

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Interview with R. Andrew Chesnut on Santa Muerte, the Saint of Death

1 | November 25th, 2014 | Posted in Day of the Dead, death, Dia de los Muertos, Santa Muerte

51OFhFTMwQL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_R. Andrew Chesnut is Professor of Religious Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press, 2012), the first academic study of this topic in in English. He is currently working on the sequel. Chesnut discusses Santa Muerte in the interview below.

TheoFantastique: Thank you for coming here to discuss your research in this interesting topic. How did you come to develop a research interest in Santa Muerte?

Andrew Chesnut: I’m a specialist in the religions of Latin America and was working on my third book project, a study of the Virgin of Guadalupe, when in March, 2009 I saw that Mexican president Felipe Calderon sent the the army to demolish some forty Santa Muerte shrines on the border with Texas and California. I already knew of the Bony Lady from previous research and thirty years of living and traveling in Mexico but was intrigued that she had become spiritual enemy number one in the Mexican government’s war against the drug cartels.

TheoFantastique: What are the cultural and religious origins and influences in Santa Muerte?

Andrew Chesnut: She is a syncretic Mexican folk saint who integrates both Spanish Catholic and PreColumbian religious influences. The Spanish Church brought the figure of the Grim Reapress (la Parca) here to the Americas as a representation of death in their evangelzation efforts among the Indigenous. Many of the Indigenous religions had deities of death as part of their pantheon of gods. Thus it’s most likely the case that when Indigenous groups in Mexico, Guatemala, Paraguay, and Argentina were presented with the figure of the Grim Reapress they associated her with their own deities of death, such as the Aztec goddess of the Underworld, Mictecacihuatl. Santa Muerte is first mentioned in Mexico in the 1790s, in the annals of the Spanish Inquisition, when Inquisitors are sent out to investigate reports of “Indian idolatry” and discover different groups venerating a skeletal icon they called Santa Muerte. The Inquisitors, of course, destroyed the “heretical” image and shrine. Since Mexican nationalism exalts the Indigenous past and tends to denigrate Spanish heritage, many Mexican devotees who have reflected on her identity choose to view Saint Death as totally Indigenous, mostly Aztec and Mayan. During the past two years I’ve been seeing more representations of the White Girl (another popular nickname) in Aztec form, though she often looks more like an Apache from a Hollywood Western.

TheoFantastique: Santa Muerte has many different types of devoted followers and is perhaps best known for a connection to drug cartels and violence in Mexico. But she is not limited to this even though this has become something of a stereotypical association perhaps. What types of differing associations and devotees are connected to Santa Muerte?

santa-muerte-statue-white-capeAndrew Chesnut: She has followers from across the social stratum in both Mexico and the US, but has a special appeal to those who feel death might be imminent, such as narcos, sex workers, and others who work in the streets. Paradoxically, these devotee ask the Bony Lady for a few more grains of sand in her hourglass of life. In addition, she has a strong following of LGBT devotees on both sides of the border. The devotional pioneer in New York City, Arely Vazquez, is a Mexican transgender while Steven Bragg, founder of the first shrine in New Orleans is gay. Saint Death has a reputation for being non-judgmental, so many folks who felt discriminated against or uncomfortable in Christian churches feel the embrace of a motherly-figure who loves you know matter who you are or what you’ve done. But her appeal is far wider than these two groups due to her reputation as a multitasking miracle-worker.

TheoFantastique: What are your thoughts on why Santa Muerte has such wide and increasing appeal?

Andrew Chesnut: Most importantly she has developed a reputation as the fastest and most efficacious miracle-worker on the Mexican religious landscape. I don’t know how many stories I’ve heard about how devotees has been praying to another saint, such as St. Jude, for months with no results, and then a friend recommended they petition the White Girl and within days they received what they asked for, such as a job, removal of a rival from their path or healing of an illness. Moreover, her role of supernatural proctectress is of paramount importance in a Mexico plagued by hyper narco-violence in which at least 80,000 have died since 2006.

TheoFantastique: You have referred to the cult of Santa Muerte as the fastest growing new religious movement in the Americas. How did you come to this conclusion, and how might it compare to other new religions?

Andrew Chesnut: Through surveys of shops that sell religious article and interview with leaders. However, the figure of 10-12 million devotees in Mexico, the U.S., and Central America is a guesstimate in lieu of any hard figures based systematic surveys.

TheoFantastique: You recently attended an international conference of scholars in the Netherlands that brought together diverse perspectives on Santa Muerte. You have shared some of your thoughts on this on your blog, but can you mention a few summary observations?

SantaMuerte_DC_5058Andrew Chesnut: Many of my colleagues at the Dutch conference haven’t conducted field research, and in lieu of that attempted to link the proliferation of devotion to St. Death to larger macro forces, such as the drug war and failing Mexican state. I object to such analyses because they divorce the skeleton saint from her religious context and present her as mere epiphenomenon of political and economic forces. No doubt that the insecurity prevailing in Mexico provides fertile ground for her devotion to flourish, but by no means is it the cause of her growth. In both my book, Devoted to Death, and ongoing research I have attempted to demonstrate the multifaceted identity of this Mexican folk saint. Yes, one of her roles is that of narco-saint, but she’s also a powerful love sorceress and curandera (healer) among other things.

TheoFantastique: Dr. Chesnut, thank you for your time and thoughts on this interesting phenomenon.

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Reflections on an Academic Conference on the Saint and ‘Cult of Death’

0 | November 24th, 2014 | Posted in Day of the Dead, death, Dia de los Muertos, new religious movements, Santa Muerte

smhollandposterSanta Muerte, the Saint of Death, and the international following she has is an area of interest here at TheoFantastique. R. Andrew Chesnut, author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press, 2012), recently posted on his blog regarding his thoughts on an international conference in the Netherlands that brought scholars together to discuss differing perspectives on this phenomenon. Here’s an excerpt:

Despite the fact that over 90% of Santa Muerte devotees live in Mexico and the U.S., the first ever academic conference dedicated exclusively to the skeleton saint was held in Europe, at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, on 11/21/14. Europeans have taken a particular interest in the growth of devotion to Saint Death partly because of the historical link to their own Grim Reaper or Reapress (la Parca) in the case of Spain.  Reflecting the increasing  globalization of the Americas’ fastest growing new religious movement,  the scholars presenting on Santa Muerte hailed from many different countries, including Mexico, the U.S., Germany, Denmark, Spain and the UK.

To read more about the conference and Chesnut’s observations click here. Chesnut will be interviewed here about Santa Muerte in the near future.

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TFQ Podcast 5.1 – Interview with Doug Jones on “Nosferatu”

0 | November 19th, 2014 | Posted in Doug Jones, Nosferatu, podcast, vampire


Doug Jones is interviewed by John Morehead of TheoFantastique.com. Doug discusses David Lee Fisher’s Nosferatu remix of the classic silent horror film and his long interest in playing Count Orlok. Through the interview you will get a sense of Doug’s passion, and learn how you can get involved in the crowd funding project to help make this film a reality.

Learn more at the Kickstarter campaign page for “Nosferatu” at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/82215933/nosferatu-the-feature-film-remix.

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Titles of Interest – Religion in Science Fiction: The Evolution of an Idea and the Extinction of a Genre

0 | November 19th, 2014 | Posted in religion, science fiction, Titles of Interest

51p9gosa8JL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Religion in Science Fiction: The Evolution of an Idea and the Extinction of a Genre by Steven Hrotic (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)

Religion in Science Fiction investigates the history of the representations of religion in science fiction literature. Space travel, futuristic societies, and non-human cultures are traditional themes in science fiction. Speculating on the societal impacts of as-yet-undiscovered technologies is, after all, one of the distinguishing characteristics of science fiction literature. A more surprising theme may be a parallel exploration of religion: its institutional nature, social functions, and the tensions between religious and scientific worldviews.

Steven Hrotic investigates the representations of religion in 19th century proto-science fiction, and genre science fiction from the 1920s through the end of the century. Taken together, he argues that these stories tell an overarching story-a ‘metanarrative’-of an evolving respect for religion, paralleling a decline in the belief that science will lead us to an ideal (and religion-free) future.

Science fiction’s metanarrative represents more than simply a shift in popular perceptions of religion: it also serves as a model for cognitive anthropology, providing new insights into how groups and identities form in a globalized world, and into how crucial a role narratives may play. Ironically, this same perspective suggests that science fiction, as it was in the 20th century, may no longer exist.

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Titles of Interest – Holy Sci-Fi! Where Science Fiction and Religion Intersect

1 | November 19th, 2014 | Posted in religion, science fiction, Titles of Interest

51Dzhi4kieL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Holy Sci-Fi! Where Science Fiction and Religion Intersect by Paul J. Nahin (Springer, 2014)

Can a computer have a soul? Are religion and science mutually exclusive? Is there really such a thing as free will? If you could time travel to visit Jesus, would you (and should you)? For hundreds of years, philosophers, scientists, and science fiction writers have pondered these questions and many more.

In Holy Sci-Fi!, popular writer Paul Nahin explores the fertile and sometimes uneasy relationship between science fiction and religion. With a scope spanning the history of religion, philosophy, and literature, Nahin follows religious themes in science fiction from Feynman to Foucault, and from Asimov to Aristotle.

An intriguing journey through popular and well-loved books and stories, Holy Sci-Fi! shows how sci-fi has informed humanity’s attitudes towards our faiths, our future, and ourselves.

By the author of the popular books “Time Machines” and “The Science of Radio”

Discusses the opinions and writings of philosophers and scientists (Pascal, Hume, Nietzsche) and science fiction authors (Arthur C. Clark, C. S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov)

Draws connections between science fact, science fiction, philosophy, and theological debate over the past five centuries

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Call for Papers – ‘The Company of Wolves’: Sociality, Animality, and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Narratives—Werewolves, Shapeshifters, and Feral Humans

0 | November 19th, 2014 | Posted in call for papers, conference, shapeshifter, werewolf

dore‘The Company of Wolves’: Sociality, Animality, and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Narratives — Werewolves, Shapeshifters, and Feral Humans

Conference, University of Hertfordshire, Sept 3rd-5th 2015: Call for Papers and Panels

Wolves have long been the archetypal enemy of human company, preying on the unguarded boundaries of civilisation, threatening the pastoral of ideal sociality and figuring as sexual predators. Yet, in their way, with their complex pack interactions, they have served as a model for society. Lately, this ancient enemy has been rehabilitated and reappraised, and rewilding projects have attempted to admit them more closely into our lives. Our company with wolves has inspired fiction from Ovid, through Perrault and the Grimms’ narrators, to Bram Stoker and Kipling; and, more recently, to Angela Carter, Neil Jordan, Anne Rice, Marcus Sedgwick and Glen Duncan.

The Open Graves, Open Minds Project was initiated in 2010 with the Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture conference and reconvened for the Bram Stoker Centenary Symposium in 2012. We turn our attention now to creatures not strictly undead but which haunt the peripheries of the vampire— werewolves and shapeshifters. Such beings have served in narrative fiction to question what humanity is; weres tend to reveal the complex affinities and differences between our existence as linguistic, social subjects and our physiological continuity with other animals. They also draw our attention to questions of hierarchy and sexuality, to the instinctive, and to what extent our conceptions of these are ideological.

Werewolves, along with vampires, have recently become humanised, even romanticised, as identity politics became mainstream and the Other assimilated. The ancient paradigm of Beauty and the Beast lives on in paranormal romance. And just as the vampire figure both conditions the shape of the subgenres it dwells in and draws other genres into its sphere, so fictions about werewolves, wild humans, and human-animal relationships also invoke questions of genre and intertextuality. Thus, we are also interested in other narratives and discourses such as beast fables, taxonomies, human metamorphoses, and stories of feral children and those raised by animals which question the boundaries between animal and human.

Amidst concerns about our relationship with nature, in a culture informed by Romanticism and a post-Enlightenment doubt about the centrality of humanity, contemporary fictions often turn to the animal, and to transitions between animal and human (particularly the werewolf and kindred figures) to interrogate what is special about our species. In her werewolf paranormal romance, Shiver, the YA author Maggie Stiefvater quotes Rilke: ‘even the most clever of animals see that we are not surely at home in our interpreted world’. This perhaps captures our amphibious nature and raises the kind of questions we are interested in.

The conference will explore human social existence and its animal substrate, and the intersection between the human and the wolfishly bestial as expressed in narrative media from a variety of epochs and cultures. It will provide an interdisciplinary forum for the development of innovative and creative research and examine the cultural significance of these themes in all their various manifestations. As with the initial OGOM conference, from which emerged a book and a special issue journal, there will be the opportunity for delegates’ presentations to be published.

The conference organising committee invites proposals for panels and individual papers. Possible topics and approaches may include (but are not limited to) the following:

* Werewolves, lycanthropy, and shapeshifters
* Feral and wild children
* Language, culture, and nature
* Instinct and agency
* Animal studies and humanist perspectives
* Phenomenology and the philosophy of language, mind, and body
* Animality and sociality from Hobbes through Rousseau to Darwin
* Narratives of the Grimms, Perrault, Kipling, Angela Carter, Neil Jordan, Anne Rice, Maggie Stiefvater, Glen Duncan, Marcus Sedgwick
* Genre, intertextuality, and narratology
* Young Adult and children’s fiction
* Urban fantasy and paranormal romance
* TV, film, and other media
* Folklore and anthropology
* Fables, fabliaux, and fantasy
* The Gothic, fairy tale, and myth
* Sexuality and romance
* Species, ‘race’, identity, and taxonomy

Abstracts (200-300 words) for twenty-minute papers or proposals for two-hour panels should be submitted by 31st March 2015 as an email attachment in MS Word document format to all of the following: Dr Sam George, s.george@herts.ac.uk; Dr Bill Hughes, bill.enlightenment@gmail.com; Kaja Franck, k.a.franck@googlemail.com

Please use your surname as the document title. The abstract should be sent in the fol-lowing format: (1) Title (2) Presenter(s) (3) Institutional affiliation (4) Email (5) Abstract. Panel proposals should include (1) Title of the panel (2) Name and contact information of the chair (3) Abstracts of the presenters. Presenters will be notified of acceptance by April 2015

The programme features Neil Jordan and plenary talks from Sir Christopher Frayling on ‘Angela Carter’, Dr Catherine Spooner on ‘Wearing the Wolf’, Dr Stacey Abbott on ‘The Sound of the Cinematic Werewolf’, Dr Sam George on ‘Wolf Children’ and Dr Bill Hughes on ‘Werewolves and Paranormal Romance’. There will be contributions from novelists Marcus Sedgwick and Glen Duncan (tbc) together with special guests. OGOM PhD students, Kaja Franck and Matt Beresford, will present papers on their current research involving werewolves. Delegates will have the opportunity to visit unique places associated with our theme, and to actually ‘walk with wolves’.

For more information, contact Dr Sam George at s.george@herts.ac.uk.

The conference is organised by the University of Hertfordshire, UK http://www.herts.ac.uk.

Click here to see details of the Open Graves, Open Minds book
Our website is at: http://www.opengravesopenminds.com and our blog, with updates on the conference and project, is at:openmindsopengraves.wordpress.com

For more information, contact Dr Sam George at s.george@herts.ac.uk.

The conference is organised by the University of Hertfordshire, UK http://www.herts.ac.uk.

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