I did not begin this issueIn fact, I found the idea of coming up with a theme to be inwith a theme in mind. credibly daunting. Like any neurotic depressive, my instinct was to forge ahead in a state of denial. When asked about the theme for the first issue, I said that nothing had really solidified yet, which was true. I wasn’t expecting such a clear theme to emerge from the first submissions to the zine, and I didn’t realize it until I was actually well into the process of laying out the zine for pre-press. Staring at the blank pages I had reserved for some editorial blurb and a table of contents, it hit me. Of course the theme of the inaugural issue of HOUSE OF HORROR, a zine by and for fans of the horror genre who prefer our horror tinged with social commentary, dark humor, literary references, and incisive analysis, is the subject of survival: who survives, who doesn’t, and ultimately, what survival means for those who do earn their position as the horror film survivor. Many of the articles in this issue deal heavily with the subjects of abuse, sexual assault, and discrimination. These are the horrors that we survive in real life, and exploring horror fiction narratives, we find it is common for them to find their way into
we are the blood-drenched, crawling
we are sharpening our t
This is our
the movies we love in the form of zombies, vengeful ghosts, and hell-driven killers. Good horror takes the darkness of everyday life, the banality of evil, and elevates it, creating stories that thrill, terrify, and comfort us all at the same time. The submissions I got for this issue blew me away. I found myself re-examining staples of a genre I have immersed myself in for years with fresh eyes. I have always identified with the monsters of horror fiction, particularly in the face of what I perceive to be a lack of relatable (to me) human characters. But the articles I received for this issue brought me around to identifying with characters I never thought to before - not just identify, but celebrate for their place in the media they’re part of. It was kind of profound, but also it was fun - and a good reason to rewatch the Evil Dead trilogy! But it’s more than that, too. My thoughts with this issue are with horror movie survivors, but also - more so - with real life survivors like myself. I think there is a reason why so many survivors of abuse, etc enjoy horror fiction, and I think that the why and how of that is something that is explored very well in this issue. I hope this zine is fun and thought-provoking, and I hope that readers find it a strong start. The essays and narratives in here often come from difficult places; that is the nature of survival stories.
In This Issue intro/editor’s notes media round-up
Featured: Fuck off, You Die First!
Essays
Death of a Carefree White Girl (Laura Ellyn)
Turn Down The House Lights - reviews of new and classic horror movies
Warm Bodies as Metaphor for Trauma Recovery (Scott Snell ) The Women of the Evil Dead (Lisa Fernandes) Triple Threat (Laura Ellyn) TV Party - reviews and reflections on made-for-TV horror
We Lost Nine Minutes (Meda Kahn)
The Fundead
Ghost Edition (thePFA)
Horror Fiction
Five Children and the Dead Man (Laura Ellyn)
All illustrations in this issue are done by Laura Ellyn, except where specified
from the ground. we are into survival.
teeth, and our theories.
house now.
Horror Media Round-Up:
Things We Love
#1 Fuck Off, You Die First!
A fairly new blog dedicated to discussing, analyzing, and reviewing horror movies, TV shows, and video games with a keen eye for racial analysis, as well as examining horror media along the lines of gender and class. Perhaps most notable is their running review series of the TV show The Walking Dead. Check them out on tumblr: fuckoffyoudiefirst.tumblr.com.
#2 Guillermo Del Toro on Naoki Urasawa’s Monster
Guillermo del Toro has been confirmed as the director for HBO’s live-action adaptation of Naoki Urasawa’s manga horror opus Monster. If there is a better director to take on the creepy comic, I can’t think of one - while any other Western director might inspire fears of whitewashing (Tenma’s position as a man of colour in Europe being central to the plot), Guillermo del Toro’s sensitive and thoughtful handling of not only casting decisions, but also topics like war, disability, and adoption in horror movies inspires a lot of confidence and high expectations for this adaptation.
.....and
Shit That Sucks
#1 The Whitewashed Dead
While the movie Warm Bodies succeeds on some levels (see our article in this issue on Warm Bodies as a metaphor for trauma survival), on others it comes up sadly short - primarily when it comes to translating the diversity of the novel onto the big screen. Central character Nora, whose Ethiopian heritage is written as being important to her character and the way other characters interact with her, is played by white fashion model Annaleigh Tipton. Most disappointing of all is author Isaac Marion’s endorsement of this blatant act of whitewashing, stating in an interview that he was glad that the casting directors didn’t pay attention to the characters’ appearances. Really, Isaac?
#2 Uninspired US Remake Of J-Horror Movie Number Whatever
While the indie horror circuit is abuzz with news of “the first indie horror movie to make it into theatres in 3D”, we’re not convinced that Michael Taverna’s remake of the J-horror movie Apartment 1303 D is going to be up to snuff. Preview images seem derivative and the trailers have been confusing at best. Most of all, the original 1303 D film is primarily an emotional experience, centering on the relationship between mother and daughter as the real origin of horror; the remake looks to be more about rehashing tired tropes than exploring these fraught dynamics with a creepy horror theme.
was it really necessary to turn the ghost of 1303D into a blonde version of The Ring’s Samara? (source: bloody-disgusting.com)
Death of A Carefree White Girl She is thin, waif-like, and endlessly
beguiling. A sexual libertine, neither virgin nor whore; she takes her shirt off so she can feel free, dances barefoot through wheat fields, and when she meets a tragic end, it is always mysterious – pulling bystanders down a rabbit hole of obsession and terror.
The phrase “carefree white girl” was first coined by an anonymous blogger and journalist who, on their seminal blog carefreewhitegirl.tumblr.com,
states that naming and analyzing the phenomenon of the Carefree White Girl is about challenging “the ways in which popular imagery reinforces the deification of white womanhood.” Adding: “I do not hate white women... I’m not Napoleon. I’m anonymous.” While the blog’s initial focus is on the valorization of white womanhood – often at the expense of the careers, livelihoods and popular imagery of people of colour – in advertising, music, and fashion, not much time has been dedicated to looking at the place of the Carefree White Girl in horror fiction. Which is a shame, since she is an integral part of some classic and compelling horror narratives. Carefree White Girl never lives long in the horror movies that feature her. She is often played by blond-haired, blue eyed ingenues – she is Blake Lively in Savages, Anne-Louise Lambert in Picnic At Hanging Rock, Johanna ter Steege in The Vanishing, and Sandra Bullock in the American remake of the same name. Usually she is gone by the second act of the movie, but the memory of her lingers, mapping out the dark course for the remaining characters’ journey through the rest of the film. She is the source of psychic visions and vengeance-fuelled rampages. Sometimes her ghost, always clad in white, haunts ominous Victorian mansions.
But it is her status as a victim that I am primarily interested in exploring, because Carefree White Girl as Victim is something absent in the CFWG’s appearances outside of the horror, thriller, and crime genres. In music, drama, and the memoirs of sensitive young white boy musicians, the CFWG is alive and vibrant, forever tying back her hair with a colourful scarf and sipping fancy coffee on the terrace of some artists’ collective in sunny Spain. Alive, she inspires – dead, she motivates. She is the original Woman In The Refrigerator – spurning men down paths of passionate, obsessive revenge the way only a victimized white woman can. This creates, of course, a complicated intersection between misogyny and white supremacy. The CFWG in the horror genre is often the victim of misogyny – sometimes violent misogyny – in her status as an expendable prop, a woman who exists only to die, vanish, or otherwise be obliterated by the force of a narrative that requires her to be stripped of her agency and exist only as a figment of a man’s fevered imagination. Yet her status as an unassailable symbol – a woman worth fighting for, or searching for, or combating the forces of hell
for the memory of – is assured by her position as a representation of White Womanhood, with all its loaded history of being a tool of white supremacy, often used to vilify men of colour and paint women of colour as being less deserving of protection than their paler counterparts. But can one really be carefree as a victim? Isn’t the state of being murdered, or disappeared, mutually exclusive with the state of blissful ignorance that the Carefree White Girl lives in? What does it mean, the death of a Carefree White Girl? The essence of the Carefree White Girl is privilege, of course – the privilege of wealth and whiteness,
shields her from such inconveniences as consequences for her actions. Therefor, her role in horror movies must necessarily be brief, and by extension, tragic. It is tempting to reduce her role to victim, and therefor an object of pity, but of course, that is her purpose. The death of the Carefree White Girl marks a transitional point in a horror movie. In other movies, movies outside the horror genre, the Carefree White Girl is an agent of change, with an active role; in horror movies, ironically, it is her privilege that ultimately renders her as little more than a prop, or convenient plot point. The role of most Carefree White Girls in horror movies could usually just as well be filled by inanimate objects,
which facilitate the state of blissful ignorance that she lives in. But the state of a Carefree White Girl is a static one; her position is not one that allows for much character development, for any meaningful conflict – the Carefree White Girl accepts herself and others as they are, and has a fairly simple internal life. She subsists on whimsy, and aspires only to awaken a gloomy, anemic-looking white boy to live life in the moment. Everyone loves her, and those who don’t are simply too mundane to understand. Horror movies require of their characters a journey that is antithetical to the Carefree White Girl’s way of life. The seed of most horror movies – the spark that lights the fuse of the whole ordeal for the characters – is a transgression; the decision is made to breach the basement door, to read the tome aloud, to open the dibbuk box. These decisions imply agency; they are not things that merely happen to the central characters, they are actions taken, the consequences for which play out during the movie itself. The Carefree White Girl’s state of privilege
and with very little change to the actual plot of the movie; instead of obsessing over the disappearance of his effervescent fiancee Saskia, Rex could be obsessed with the destruction of a car, or a house fire. The women who end up the protagonists of horror movies, while often subject to stereotypes and tropes of their own, are more complex creatures. The Carefree White Girl, after all, does not really exist; she’s a construct, an amalgamation of elements of white womanhood, a representation of hegemonic ideals of whiteness, beauty, class status, and gender. She cannot continue to exist if we invest ourselves in a narrative where the characters go through trauma, confront demons (both metaphorical and literal)— or at least not in a physical sense. Much as she does in the real world, she serves primarily as a reminder of the otherness of those who survive as threedimensional characters; the otherness of anyone who fails to meet the standard of hegemonic, white supremacist, patriarchal beauty standards.
What does it mean, the death of a Carefree White Girl?
And yet, it is these others who survive the movie – by the end of any horror movie that begins with the Carefree White Girl, she herself is little more than a figment, a memory, or at most, a ghost, haunting an abandoned house, waiting for the next group of real people to fall under her spell. In order to survive, the horror movie characters must confront, fear, fight, bleed, run, deal with loss, and ultimately develop to the point where their survival is earned.
And if the ending of a horror movie is to be uplifting, the Carefree White Girl must be left behind.
Carefree White Girl has blood on her hands, is carefree about it.
Warm Bodies
as a
metaphor for surviving trauma by Scott Snell I think that most people who have even a little bit of cultural knowledge will notice while watching Warm Bodies that it has a lot of references to Romeo and Juliet. The names of the couple are Rrrrrrrrr and Julie, they are from feuding houses, there’s a balcony scene, there’s very little emotional depth (zing). I couldn’t help but notice that Rrrrrr deceived Julie into staying on the jet for longer than she needed to, there was definitely some Beauty and the Beast stuff and someone more qualified than myself can talk about the problematic aspects of that. What really spoke to me, though, was how it was an uplifting story about healing and building a new life/persona after abuse/trauma. In the film we know from the outset that R is different from most “corpses”. He has some definite high level thinking going on and is able to speak in a very limited fashion. Early on he’s right about where the zombies in the newest Romero films were. He has no memory of his life before death and instead pieces together his own new life. He collects things, in particular records, musical instruments, pieces of art and various knick-knacks. I never owned a record nor did I ever find music that truly spoke to me until I got away from my abuser and started changing. He spends his rest time in an abandoned airplane. He wastes a few lines of dialogue, perhaps amounting to 15 seconds of running time, pondering who he was before but the focus of the film and his journey is who he is now and who he can/will become. I envy him for this since I spend so much of my time trying to heal by addressing what has happened to me in the past, trying to make sense of it and trying to
convince myself that I was wrong for believing that it was my fault. Clearly, the biggest departure from his nature early on is when immediately after consuming the brain of her boyfriend, R saves Julie from the rest of his mob and guides her back to his home. By eating Perry’s brain R is able to feel emotions to some extent, to feel human. In the scenes where he ate a piece of brain then had a flashback (a clever mechanism to build Julie and Perry’s characters) it reminded me of when, early on, I would eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s and not feel terrible for a little bit. As Julie spends several days with R he gets better at communicating, speaking in sentence fragments and regaining quite a bit of his coordination. He even feels extreme guilt for killing Perry. It took me a hell of a lot longer to start socializing with people on a high level, but when I did that’s what got me changing and healing in the same way R did. The film illustrates his huge change with a heart beat. In real life it’s never quite dramatic but instead in small steps like being able to read people beyond knowing when they will hit you. When he finally starts actually helping Julie get back home, he finally confesses that he was the one that killed Perry. I can’t speak for everyone but I know that I harmed people while I was in the early stages of recovery, perhaps not as dramatically as R obviously, but the fact is I knew very little about interacting with people other than my abuser and I caused harm. Neither of us are excused by our nature or history, which is why his revelation was largely what fueled the played-out romcom device of the heroine running away and the hero needing to pursue her to get her back.
By the end of the film he is very different from the walking corpse we saw in the beginning. There is color to his cheeks, his eyes look normal, he isn’t quite human but he is close. The most important thing to me and what really crystallized this film as being in company such as Elfin Lied was when she asked if he remembered any more of his name and he said no, just R, he couldn’t remember anything additional of his past but that was OK because he was happy with who he was now and how he was living.
this was when I saw myself as R.
I’m never going to be the person I was before I started to be abused. Maybe it wasn’t quite so blatant to other viewers but in my reading, this was when I saw myself as R. I’m never going to be the person I was before I started to be abused. That person is dead and gone. All I can do is build up myself, continue to change for the better and figure out who I am today. Like R, I will try as hard as I can to be better tomorrow than I was yesterday and even if I never find someone who can romantically love me for who I have become at the very least I know there are folks who have cared about me since I was early on in my transformation into my current self, and accept me as I am.
Triple Threat Blumhouse Film’s three most recent blockbusters tread familiar ground by Laura Ellyn Blumhouse Films is the production company behind some of the most critical and commercial successes in contemporary horror - perhaps most notably the Paranormal Activity series. Like the first Paranormal Activity movie, most of their films tend to be the kind you either love or hate, and usually I find myself taken with them, but they often walk the line between tense and creepy, and laughably bizarre. This has been particularly obvious with their three recent films - movies which, frankly, rehash the exact same story, with minor creative changes which prove both the strengths and weaknesses of most Blumhouse films. The story for the films Insidious, Sinister, and Dark Skies is the same, down to even the most minor details. A family of four, following a recent move, with a stressed-out mother and a distant, avoidant father, are threatened by some mysterious, malevolent force. Thinking at first that it is connected to the house, the family first tries to deal with the threat in an external way, but it is soon revealed that the source of their supernatural troubles is much closer to home. The narrative then shifts to identifying who the real target of these ominous attacks is: the father, or the son. I suppose my biggest problem with this storyline is the mother; relegated to the role of tireless supporter, she never gets much in the way of development. She is always the first person to embrace that the odd events
plaguing her family are supernatural in origin, and thus is cast as first the complaining cassandra, and second as the true believer. She is overwrought, overwhelmed and self-sacrificing, and the role really only works in the movie Sinister, in which the actress manages to bring some passion to the role that is sorely lacking in the other two movies. In Insidious, when the mother delivers the line, “I feel like the universe is trying to see how far I’ll bend until I break”, it should be an emotional moment, but her flat, whinging delivery makes her seem self-absorbed and annoying rather than tired and overwhelmed. The key to the success of the movie Sinister, especially in the face of the failure of its sister films, lies primarily in the execution of the supernatural evil, though. The reveal is slow and tense, and the film doesn’t rely too much on jump scares to drive home the horrifying nature of a demon that preys on children. Unlike Insidious and Dark Skies, the special effects are kept to a minimum, which lends the movie a sense of authenticity that is nowhere to be found in the smokemachine-created astral plane of Insidious. With 13 movies in production for the next two years, Blumhouse studios would do well to learn from the main lesson of these three movies: the key to success, for them, is to keep it simple, tense, and moody, rather than overwrought and emotional.
gimme some sugar, baby:
the women of the
e v i l My heroines have always been demons. Some may try to knock this, but it’s always fun to take a little poke at your darker nature. In celebration of both the twentieth anniversary of the release of Army of Darkness and the release of the Evil Dead remake, I think it’s time to examine the women of the original trilogy, their secret strengths and unexplored faults. Don’t be scared, now. Let’s pull open the trap door and take a look around the fruit cellar, shall we?
1. The Evil Dead
Once upon a time, there were three girls: Linda, a college student, Cheryl, an artist, and Shelly…who’s kind of there. One day, they went for a weekend trip to a remote cabin. And then hell broke loose. But there’s so much more to it than that, and there’s something fascinating about the way the movie portrays their individual transformation into embodiments of demonic evil. Though I doubt Sam Raimi intended it to play this way, each of the three embody a different facet of purity – Cheryl prudence, Shelly romantic loyalty, and Linda charitable sweetness. When turned, they become their own darkside twins, Cheryl vulgar and loud, Linda a wicked Kewpie doll, and beautiful Shelly a smoking, skin desiring demoness. Of these three girls, Cheryl’s my favorite. Poor Cheryl. Known primarily for what happens to her (and I don’t need to repeat what that thing is) versus what she does (being the only person smart
enough to realize they’re being stalked by Kandarian demons before shit goes bad; in her Kandarian form, converting Linda and nearly tormenting her brother to death), which is pretty damn unfair. The girl’s tough as nails and just as determined as Ash. Look at it this way. In Army of Darkness, we learn that it’s Ash’s destiny to defend the world from the Deadites. In an attempt to assault Ash’s sensibilities, they tried to take the people most important to him. Their first victim? His sister Cheryl. Says something, no? While the rape she is subjected to turns her toward the dark side, it only sharpens her sense of personal justice. She’s going to claw her way out of the woods if she has to, and it takes a bridge collapse to keep her at the demon’s mercy. If anything, her Deadite self is a strange extension of her own personal determination. But Linda – with her kewpie-doll face and high-pitched cackle – is the most memorable Deadite. Oh Linda, you exergue of Sam Raimi’s madonna/whore complex. In one night, you go from the perfect, idealized girlfriend in a virginal white nightgown to a headless, thigh-humping, knife-licking, hand-biting, giggling demon. On the surface, she’s that perfect cliché - the good girl gone terribly wrong. But under the skin there’s much more going on. Linda is Ash’s inspiration. I’ve covered the fact that his feelings for her run so deeply that he cannot force himself to hurt her - and when he does, he goes completely mad with grief.
d e a d
The love he has for her is strong enough to rid him of demonic possession, for heaven’s sake, but we get no clue as to the depth and breadth of their love in the backstory department. Since Linda’s a ballet dancer and Ash is a pianist, one senses a life of harmony, duality. We never get to learn just why Linda’s phenomenal enough to keep Ash going, make his physical surrender to the Deadites entirely impossible. That alone means she deserves respect as a character. Without her memory, it’s probable that he would have simply given in and allowed them to take his soul. Wicked and yet kewpie doll cloying, she holds Ash in frightening thrall, terrifying and twisting him, yet leaving him unable to kill her. In the end? The women win, in their own way.
2: Evil Dead 2
There’s only one lady in the Evil Dead 2, but her part is far larger; she’s a heroine, nearly as central a figure to the story as Ash. Annie tends to take a bit of flack from fans of this trilogy, for everything from her scream to her looks to her so-called ‘uselessness’ . They tend to forget that without Annie’s knowledge of ancient Sumerian Ash wouldn’t have been able to open the porthole to properly expel the demon from the modern realm, that it’s Annie who not only helps Ash create his iconic chainsaw hand but offers him backup while he goes into the cellar to retrieve the final pages for that incantation, that Annie remembers to sing “Hush Little Baby” to the demonic Henrietta, which taps into the monsters’ buried human memories and distracts it enough to allow Ash an advantage in their battle - a trick the demon previously tried on Annie. Even though she makes some mistakes (chiefly stabbing Jake - but since it’s his fault Ash is (re) possessed and he had just held both Annie and Ash at gunpoint, I say they’re even) she’s no whinier than Ash, and has arguably lost just as much as he has (her mother, father AND fiance in the space of a week). She, like Ash, transforms into something of a warrior,
brandishing an ax she isn’t afraid to use. And on top of all of that?: She loses her life trying to save the world. In short, without Annie? Ash would be dead. Even Sam Raimi only quasi-jokes that she should’ve been the movie’s hero.
3: Army of Darkness
And then there was a noble lady. Poor Sheila. Unlike Annie, who at least has the esteem of Raimi and Co. as a character, Sheila is often slighted by her own creators as being underused, and somewhat unworthy of Ash’s love. ’He should have already moved on to another woman’, they declare as Sheila turns evil and Ash raises an army to defend Kandar. Raimi even goes so far as to describe Ash and Sheila’s one night stand as Ash’s ‘night with the devil’ during the movie’s commentary track. It’s interesting that they can’t seem to see that Sheila is in fact the movie’s moral center. She’s is a girl of noble birth, and thus somewhat haughty, but never too haughty to apologize for her mistakes. She - like Ash, like Annie - has lost a family member to the neverending war between humanity and the Deadites. Like Ash, she’s unwilling to allow this loss to break her and channels her hurt into anger. If this means Ash must die to satiate that lust, she’ll take his head gladly - and she’ll hit him across the back of the neck with a freaking rock to accomplish it! Once she figures out that Ash is the Promised One, and that the Wiseman’s prophecies are true, she tries to make amends, only for Ash to presume she’s trying to cozy up to him sexually. When they finally do make love, HE’S the one who decides he wants her - and who cannot bring himself to hurt her after she grows weary of his insults and smacks him across the face. People always remember Ash’s subsequent
“That’s just what we call pillow talk, baby,” line after she confronts him after his failure to retrieve the Nec properly from the cemetery. Even though he’s caused hell to rain down on her people, she’s still smiling sweetly at him. She thinks they’ve made an emotional connection during their sexual encounter and he, clearly, does not - but she’s not about to let him get away from the scene with a whimper. Her response is often lost, but it is a clarion call to Ash’s buried conscience that eventually jump-starts his move toward heroism. ”It was more than that! I still have faith in thee. I still believe that thou would save us. I…”
And in the end, Sheila doesn’t cling to Ash and demand he stay. He’s breaking her heart, but he has not broken her, and even though she’s been to hell because of her love for him she’s not going to throw herself onto her sword for the loss. She’s going on to a life of her own, one that could end up being just as grandly adventurous as his. Sheila is a heroine, in her own way. And she is fucking awesome.
she takes a look at his expression here and swallows hard, storming off. “Coward.” Sheila - as much as she believes she loves Ash - simply. Does not. Put up. With his bullshit. Ever. Seriously, look at the fourth cap up. She’s being held captive by a demon that’s bent upon sexually assaulting her, on turning her into a Deadite. And what does she do? Spit. In his fucking. Face. THAT is fucking defiance, people.
a remake?
4: And then there was And how does it begin? Once upon a time there were three girls. Their names were Olivia, Mia and Natalie. One day they traveled to a cabin together…
meda kahn
we lost nine minutes. on the reverse of safety – from the very first episode, the x-files sets up a constant reality of memory loss. all evidence is lost except for a single nose implant, which scully then turns over to the authorities. nothing can be known for certain. there is no correct narrative. everything is already unknown, unstable, unrecognized, from the very beginning, and that gives the show more overall stability than any other work of fiction i’ve encountered. the x-files will not say shh, there is a way out, you’re safe. the x-files does not tell you you’re being paranoid. it says yes, you’re right, all your worst fears have already been realized. everyone is out to get you. you can trust no one, least of all your own mind. what are you going to do about it? and you can finally breathe a sigh of vindication and relief, pick up your fractured memory and move on. on being one-of-those-who-has-been-subject-to-mistreatment – nobody in the x-files is a ‘victim’ or a ‘survivor’ of abuse, because that is an automatic status. you would never need declare yourself as such. mulder and scully, in particular, exist in an assumed state of continual victim-survivorhood. it’s taken for granted, passed over, reaffirmed as they are abused again and go on again. it’s accepted as an injustice but not regarded as a break in reality, not a surprise, not ‘who could do such a thing’. it’s omnipresent and must be worked with. which seems to me far more realistic than ‘this thing happened to me and now i am a victim/survivor of it’. no; it’s a continual state, it’s the price you pay for living in this horrible world as yourself, especially if you are a person like mulder and scully. and you’re doing well enough, despite everything, to want to stay. what are you going to do about it? the nooks and crannies of the world all betray horrors. it is exactly as you have suspected. you are alone and confused and finally, you begin to see the horror as not your fault. for the fear exists outside your own head. the monsters are real. on monstrosity – mulder and scully are our heroes, dispatched to fight the monsters.
all my previous fictional identification, pre-x-files, had been with monsters. and i submit that mulder and scully would play the monster roles, in many other shows. they are cold and emotional by wrong turns, socially stunted, visibly off from the bulk of humanity-normality. they operate in their own small, modified social world, where they can speak in paragraphs and echo textbooks and move funny and never smile. despite the fact that they fit into a lot of societal categories that are incorrectly perceived as the ‘standard’, they are not the right kind of people. who is pegged as the monster is a function of an arbitrary collection of qualities and behaviors, many of which mulder and scully fulfill, even as the narrative presents those behaviors as normal and natural. i know many people who watch the show may not hold this view; people tend to read mulder and scully as however ‘normal’ they perceive themselves to be. it is easy not to notice their inherent weirdness (hence monstrosity) because they are not presented that way. i believe there is a wide swath of media in which they would be. but here, they get to seek out and punish the real monsters, the kind who kill people without reason, who commit genuine crimes. it’s as though they’re given a chance to prove what the difference is: to prove that they can be humans, in spite of their less-than-human affects, and are not on the side of that which is dark and twisted. however much they may internally feel that they belong on that side, the show holds them up as the right and the good, again and again. and you realize it has been an injustice, for the world to regard you as a monster. you realize. i realize. for the first time i feel time like a heartbeat. on the first-person singular pronoun – at the worst part of my life, when i was hanging onto consciousness by a thread and buried under miles and miles of delusions and misuse, i watched the pilot episode of the x-files. and the world had dwindled to an unbearable dark point, but when it began to dilate again it was still at its smallest. and i walked from my dorm to commons at nine at night, having just gotten up from sleeping, and for the first time in years i could tell i had a body. and i had an inkling that ‘i’ existed, that ‘i’ was a thing. for i heaved myself over into the shape of scully and i fit. and the death i’d given myself to began to ease, but it was all still so small, the world was the tiniest darkest corner of my mind and it was bearable. when you watch the x-files, something creeps up on you in the night like the opposite of a monster. shh, shhh. you are a person. you are terribly and constantly and always-already hurt. you are terrified and downtrodden. you are here.
WORD LIFE, PUNKS. As a SEASONED GHOST HUNTER with MANY YEARS OF EXPERIENCE tracking down spectres using TAXPAYER MONEY, I’ve learned a thing or two about our SAUCY ECTOPLASMIC CHUMS. I have decided to write down my AMAZING GHOST-PROFILING PROCESS with my own MIGHTY ARMS and WORD PROCESSOR and apply it to GHOSTS IN POPULAR CULTURE for the EDIFICATION OF PLEBS. So with NO FURTHER ADO, let’s get started. room service carts around definitely gives him a (metaphorical) leg up on your average squirrel or raccoon. WEAKNESSES: Doesn’t know not to slime people wielding positron accelerators PATRICK SWAYZE Oh my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time. HAUNTS: Whoopi Goldberg STRENGTHS: Is fuckin’ sexy WEAKNESSES: Unable or unwilling to put baby in a corner OBI-WAN KENOBI A Jedi master, strong with the Force. His record in fights with the Sith stands at 1-1-1. THAT GIRL FROM THE RING HAUNTS: Harnessing the power of VHS technology, Sadako or Samara or Ice planets, swamp planets, places that you wouldn’t want whatever unleashes a reign of terror on complete strangers by to go to anyway. going to their houses and looking at them. STRENGTHS: HAUNTS: If you strike him down he will become more powerful Wells, barns, cassettes than you can possibly imagine. STRENGTHS: WEAKNESSES: Progress is built upon the shoulders of giants, and she was given If you don’t strike him down, he’s a pushover. quite a boost by Kim Mitchell. Also, kids are creepy. TEAM SHINING WEAKNESSES: The assorted ghosts of the Overlook Hotel are one of the DVD, Blu-Ray, and other non-writeable digital media. creepier hints that Stanley Kubrick was forced to fake the HAMLET’S DAD moon landing by Ryan O’Neal. Fierce proponents of a luDone in by his brother Claudius, Hamlet’s dad manifests before dic lifestyle, they ask that people play with them forever, his melancholy son and asks him to get revenge. and claim that a lack of play will render one dull. HAUNTS: HAUNTS: The rotten-ass state of Denmark Room 237, the ballroom, the elevator STRENGTHS: STRENGTHS: He’s fully committed to his quest for vengeance. They can possess any aspiring novelist with a substance WEAKNESSES: abuse problem that falls into their clutches. His indecisive stoner son is less committed. WEAKNESSES: NOTES: Can only operate at room temperature. Real talk, is ear poison even a thing? GHOSTFACE KILLAH BLINKY Wu Tang general. The Iron Man. The Wallabee King. He’s the red one. Communist? Don’t fuck with Ghost, you’ll feel sorry. HAUNTS: HAUNTS: Mazes The slums of Shaolin STRENGTHS: STRENGTHS: Weathers crises by turning into Cruise Elroy. Master of the 36 chambers of Shaolin, trained by Bruce WEAKNESSES: Lee. Still lets Clyde call the shots. WEAKNESSES: Hasn’t been hungry since Supreme Clientele. SLIMER Slimer has heroically taken upon himself the responsibility of preventing ant infestations by eating all the food before they can About the author: get a chance to. PFA holds the world record for most viewings of Ghost HAUNTS: Dad, with two. The Sedgewick hotel STRENGTHS: His innate ability to phase through walls and telekinetically haul
HOUSE OF HORROR
FICTION
5 Children And A Dead Man
The town of Cumberland reached its industrial peak in the early 1900’s. When I moved there, I was four, and it was 1989. By then, it was all abandoned mine shafts, overgrown cemeteries, and ancient roads cracked by glacial potholes. 200 students attended the local elementary school. 2000 people made up the total population. There was a post office, an auction hall, a liquor store, a bakery, and a gas station which made up the main drag, which, if you followed it long enough, would lead you to the skeletal remains of what was once the largest Chinatown in Canada – now totally abandoned, with many of its residents having been relocated to the Chinese cemetery, 15 minutes outside of town. There was no direct road to the Chinese cemetery.. If you craned your head in the backseat of your parents’ car while they sped down the old highway, you could get glimpse of it through the trees – the path and gate in totally overgrown with ghost-like Morning Glory flowers, the graves marked with rotting wooden posts. Nobody went there. The people who tried, usually drunk teenage boys looking for a place to smoke up, returned pale-faced with disjointed stories about massive figures, blindingly illuminated by some unseen light source, and the sudden, overwhelming urge to run. The ghosts of the Chinese cemetery – and there was no doubt among the residents of the town that these were ghosts – had reason to be angry. We saw their coal-stained faces and bloodied bodies, not in spectral visions, but every year during the annual field trip to the local museum, where newspaper archives showed us photos of them, along with the headlines of the day: Cave in at number 3 mine, 30 casualties. Local soccer player loses leg in mining accident. Explosion at number 4 mine kills 15, wounds 20. These were intense field trips for a bunch of fourth graders, but probably most uncomfortable for the Dunbar kids, whose family had once owned most of the town, along with the deadly mines at which almost every man in town had been employed. “6o miners lost their lives in this explosion,” the museum tour guide would say, pointing to an enlarged black and white photograph of a group of women examining several bodies, lined up along the ground like firewood. “Their wives heard the explosion, and came to identify their bodies as they were carried out.” And we would all turn to look at Charlie and Annie Dunbar, who would in turn look down at their shoes.
When the Dunbar family closed the mines, putting most of the population of the town out of work and effectively turning Cumberland into a ghost town, they didn’t bother filling in any of the old mine shafts. The opening of each mine site was simply closed up, sometimes collapsing on its own and never being repaired. This left a network of mine shafts running underneath the entire town. Cave-ins never being properly excavated even before the closing of the mines, these tunnels functioned essentially as a catacombs, tombs for miners who were buried, crushed, or suffocated to death in the regular explosions and collapses that would shake the whole town. In 1996, residents would still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to tremors, like echoes of those greater explosions, as some remaining mine shaft somewhere deep below gave in to time and nature. We were all used to these little pseudo-earthquakes, so I have a hard time remembering exactly which one it was that unearthed the pit. It was summer when we found it, and a real scorcher, the kind of weather that sent us deep into the woods, where the trees and the damp earth remained cool. We found the pit about half a mile into the woods behind the elementary school soccer field. I call it a pit, but it was really more like a hole in the earth, leading down into a tunnel that seemed like it might cave in at any minute; an old mine shaft, uncovered slightly by the forces of nature. We couldn’t quite get down through the hole to explore the tunnel fully. First, we were a bunch of kids – Caroline, Sarah, Amber, and me – and we had no ropes or shovels. And second, there was a man in the pit already.
I say “man”, but it wasn’t obvious to us at first. He looked like some kind of animal, or maybe a Wendigo. His skin was a rotten, bruised looking colour, and was in some places sloughing off. His eyes were empty, sunken pits in his face. His teeth, which gnashed threateningly, were broken and jagged, and his fingers were broken stumps, the bones of his knuckles sticking out through his dead flesh. He moved sometimes on both feet, but more often on all fours, not unlike a bear or a cougar. It was Caroline who figured it out first. Caroline’s mother was a hippie, and so she was allowed to stay up late and watch horror movies any time she wanted. “That,” she said, “is a zombie.” We stood around the pit and watched him darting back and forth, snarling, as though daring one of us to come down to see him more clearly. “Weird,” said Sarah. We didn’t make any formal agreement not to tell any adults about the man in the pit, but it was understood that anyone who told would be considered a bitch squealer for the rest of the summer, an unfortunate position that no one wanted. Bitch squealers would always be picked last for soccer teams, and would be the first to be not invited to sleep out at the lake in Amber’s family’s RV. We went out to the pit regularly, and eventually devised a game. One person would lower themselves slowly into the pit, legs first, until they were dangling there, ready to drop into the open mine shaft, hanging on to a strong nearby tree root to keep them from falling in. Then, when the man came darting out of the shadows, growling his low, hollow-sounding moan, we would haul them up out of the hole before the man could touch them. It was a stupid game, but it had the same appeal as cliff-diving out at Stotum Falls – the danger was real, but we were young, and still figuring out what we could get away with. Once, I tried this game. I wasn’t usually the kind of kid who did stuff like that, but Caroline had a way of convincing you. “If you don’t do it,” she said, “I’ll tell everyone you’re a lesbian.” None of us knew any lesbians, of course, and it was imagined that lesbianism was kind of like being a zombie, but grosser, more sexual. No one would be allowed to hang out with a lesbian. So I sat down and lowered myself, bit by bit, until I was hanging on to the thick tree root, my head, shoulders and arms above ground and the rest of my body hanging there, dangling into the darkness. Almost immediately there was the sound of the man running, and I shouted, “NOW!” to give Caroline and Sarah the cue to pull me up, but Caroline and Sarah had run, laughing, into the woods, and I was alone. I kicked my legs frantically, hitting something hard and wet, and pulled with all my might, reaching for a further root sticking out of the ground. By the time I pulled myself out, I was shaking uncontrollably, my shirt and jean shorts caked with dirt. I lay on the ground and sobbed, because that was the kind of kid I was; I fell apart easily, especially when there was no one around, or at least, no one but the predator under the earth, now pacing restlessly back and forth. I examined myself for bite marks much later, in bed. I found scratches on my legs, but nothing resembling a tooth mark. Still, I monitored myself for days, weeks even, for any sign of oncoming zombification. I started washing my hands more – 4 times a day, six, twelve, eighteen. Twenty four. I became distracted by the lines on my hands, and obsessed with the beds of my fingernails. I pulled my hair out, strand by strand, examining the follicles for signs of decay. I picked at the goosebumps on my flesh, until oil, and then blood, seeped out of holes in my skin. I monitored these wounds closely. They scabbed over, which meant I was alive. I picked the scabs off to see if they would continue to do so. They did. I pulled the skin off my feet and examined it, strips of translucent whitish skin, with raw, pink flesh underneath. I was not a zombie, but I was becoming something else. Maybe a zombie bite turns you into a zombie, but a zombie scratch is what makes you obsessive-compulsive. After that, Caroline and Sarah and I never talked about the man in the pit. We never talked about them running off and leaving me there, but the dynamic between us had changed. Where Caroline had once been my best friend, now she was spending more and more time with Sarah, and when we did hang out as a group they were bossy and cold towards me. “Go buy us some Cokes,” they would say, and I would dutifully trot off to the gas station. When I returned, they would stare at me like I was stupid. “Didn’t we tell you to get Sprites? God, you are so stupid sometimes.” They knew then that they could treat me however they wanted, and I would not protest or tell. They had left me to die, but I was the one who went over to Caroline’s house the next day for lunch. I was miserable, but more than anything, I wanted to be liked. I felt like they could leave me to die any time, even when we stopped going to the pit. My mother sensed that something was wrong. “You should try spending time with some other kids,” she said. “I don’t want you spending all your time with Caroline and Sarah. They seem like trouble.”
My mother invited Jenny Leung and her family over for dinner. Jenny Leung’s parents owned the only grocery store in town. They had been in business since 1889, the store having been opened by Jenny’s parents’ parents, or maybe their parents, I was never sure. Jenny Leung took figure skating classes. In the winter, when the lake froze over, she would practice figure skating while everyone else played hockey. I was no good on skates, so I would sit nearby, breathing into my mittened hands and watching Jenny. She would spin around and leap, her hair flying all around her face. Sometimes I imagined what it would be like to be a strand of Jenny’s hair, whipping around, catching in the corner of her mouth. Once, at lunchtime at school, she’d been unable to get the top off a bottle of orange juice. We were sitting on the jungle gym, her perched above me on the bars. “Give it to me,” I said, and she tossed it down. I twisted the cap hard and it came off with a loud pop, and the look she gave me as she reached down for the bottle made me feel like I had just performed a violin recital, only all the applause was happening in my stomach. I wanted her to look at me like that again, which is why I told her about the man in the pit. We sat in front of the TV in the living room while our parents drank wine in the kitchen, and when they laughed particularly loudly, I leaned in towards her and said, “Do you want to see a zombie?” “A what?” she asked. We took the emergency flashlight from my basement and snuck out to the pit. When we were there, I said, “Look,” and shone the light right down the hole, into the shaft. At first there was nothing, but then the man appeared, moaning up towards the light. How he sensed it without eyes was anyone’s guess. Maybe he heard our footsteps above him. Jenny grabbed my arm and my stomach flipped over like a fish. Jenny brought Charlie Dunbar over to my house. “He wants you to show him the thing,” she said, when the three of us were standing alone on my front porch. I liked the feeling that being an expert on something gave me, especially something that Jenny wanted to see. “Okay,” I said. We rode our bikes into the woods. “I don’t see anything,” Charlie said. “Look closer,” said Jenny. When he was at the edge of the hole, that was when she pushed him, and we ran. As we ran, she reached out and grabbed my hand. My heart pounded in my throat until I had to stop running, at the edge of the woods, and vomit. “Don’t tell,” said Jenny. “I won’t,” I said. She squeezed my hand. The disappearance of Charlie Dunbar made the local news. When his body was discovered, it was determined that he had been mauled by a cougar. It had, after all, been a long winter. The woods were full of bears and cougars, hungry from all the months of hibernation, and a chilly spring. There was no news of the man. It was Caroline’s brother who burned out the pit. He went into the woods with his girlfriend and the bonfire they started turned into a forest fire. After the fire department beat back the flames, the pit was nothing but a charred crater. Over the years, it became a place where teenagers went to drink and make out away from the prying eyes of their parents. It was a small town, and there wasn’t a lot else to do. You drank, you snuck out into the woods, you picked at the skin on your feet until they bled. We got by. I went out there myself many times, to smoke cigarettes with Caroline and Sarah. Sometimes Jenny came along, and as it got dark, our hands would find each other between the fallen logs we perched on, holding a secret service in the place where only we knew death had been. Other times, we rode our bikes to the edge of town, crashing through the morning glory vines to sit together in the Chinese Cemetery. It turned out it was peaceful there, for us at least, with Jenny teaching me the meaning of the characters still visible on the wooden posts, and me cooling my tender feet in the grass. The tremors continued for years, but I never saw a living dead man again.
fin.-
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