"We're gonna need a bigger lamp": the search for meaning in Mothman

Paranormal phenomena are so widespread, so diversified, and so sporadic yet so persistent that separating and studying any single element is not only a waste of time but also will automatically lead to the development of belief. Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to support that belief and thereby escalate it. If you believe in the devil he will surely come striding down your road one rainy night and ask to use your phone. If you believe that flying saucers are astronauts from another planet they will begin landing and collecting rocks from your garden.

John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies

On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge that spanned the Ohio River between Gallipolis, Ohio and Point Pleasant, West Virgina collapsed in the middle of rush hour. 46 people were crushed or drowned, including two who were never found. As always happens with disasters, people were left seeking some sort of explanation or meaning for the suffering. Local folklore had an answer: the Mothman, a mysterious winged figure that supposedly had been haunting the backroads and abandoned places of West Virginia for thirteen months before the bridge collapse, and theorized by some to be a harbinger of disaster. In the years since, the legend has only grown, aided greatly by John Keel's 1975 non-fiction book The Mothman Prophecies (a more grotesquely hilarious collection of paranormal crankery you'd be hard-pressed to find) and later its 2002 film adaptation of the same name, starring none other than Richard Gere. The Mothman now exists somewhere between folk devil, monsterfucker bait, and a cuddly creature to be commodified and sold to the type of people who wear T-shirts of Pikachu wielding a lightsaber. How did we get here?

True Crime and Punishment: Truman Capote and "In Cold Blood"

 

In the wee hours of November 15, 1959, two men broke into the home of the Clutters, a well-to-do farming family in rural Kansas. They were searching for a safe rumored to contain upwards of $10,000. When the safe failed to turn up — Mr. Clutter did all transactions by check — the family were all executed by single shotgun blasts to the head. The murderers made off with little more than about $40 cash, a radio and some binoculars.

The resulting media frenzy attracted the attention of one Truman Capote, accomplished author, soft-spoken dandy and self-aggrandizing fixture of the New York City social scene. Deciding apparently on a whim that he wanted to write about the Clutter family murders, he traveled to Kansas with his friend Harper Lee (yes, that one) in tow. After the killers were caught, he developed a rapport with them, becoming in effect their only friend in the world, for the sole purpose of getting them to tell him what happened that chilly night in 1959. The resulting book, In Cold Blood, published in 1966 (a year after the killers were executed on the same night in April 1965) was a smash hit, more or less inventing the modern true crime genre. Fast forward 55 years later and white women thirst over notorious serial killer Ted Bundy because of a hot actor who played him on Netflix. How did we get here?

Aliens, space horror and growing up Evangelical

original art from MOTHERSHIP

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."  

Aliens came out 40 years ago this week and I thought I should talk about it.

When I was growing up my mom kept an extremely close watch on what kind of media I consumed. Cartoon ghosts were condemned as demonic. Fantasy magic was devil worship. Sitcoms where the characters had extramarital sex were deemed harmful to my moral fabric. Even the Archie comics I collected were, for a while, the Al Hartley Christian comics because that's all my mother would let me read. I had been exposed to horror themes as a child, largely through gaps in my mother's surveillance: the odd ghost story here, playing Doom in my neighbor's basement there. But after my parents' divorce, my mom started paying a little less attention, and was a little more lax in what she was willing to let me read or watch or play; in that space I was able to cultivate a great love for horror that has lasted to this day.

The unbearable arrogance of elevated horror (Or: What CinemaSins Does to a MF)

In the absence of Content for the Content Mill I'm dredging up one of my blog post rants from the Medium era, of which I had a scant few. So what you're about to read is about a year old, but I was reminded of it because it's an ongoing complaint. I've edited it a little but it's otherwise unchanged. - June

god, this fucking bullshit movie pissed me off

Have you ever seen the remake of Suspiria? I’m a big fan of the original — it was bright, and colorful, and full of music, and quite intense and surreal; in short, the perfect late 1970s horror film. The sort of platonic ideal of the genre, if you will. The remake, meanwhile, was none of that, and as it careened towards its long-overdue finale I tried to figure out what about the film was bothering me. As I sat through the credits, I figured it out: it was basically an Ari Aster film without Ari Aster, and much like his actual films I initially felt really ambivalent about it. Ultimately, the strongest feeling I had watching it was a cementing of my dislike of “elevated horror,” both as a label and as a movement, and my finally being able to put to words what it is, exactly, that I can’t stand about it: it’s basically a rebranding of arthouse horror cinema, but slathered in money and metaphor to hide the fact that most of these movies aren’t meaningfully “smarter” than other horror movies. Finally, I came around to the inevitable conclusion: I fucking hated Suspiria (2018) and everything it stood for.