Oddtober 2024: The Melancholy Nostalgia of Rotary Phones in Horror Movies

Rotary phones. This whole entry came about because of the black rotary phone on Laurie’s chest of drawers in John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Lately I’ve found myself focusing on phones in older horror movies. The black rotary phone in Black Christmas that delivers deranged phone calls from a psycho killer to the helpless sorority girls. The white princess phone on the bedside table of the protagonist in George Romero’s Season of the Witch. Forget the phone in Scream, that movie’s too young. It’s just the phones in horror films before 1982, approximately.

I wish I had something deeper to root to this feeling of pleasant sadness when I see rotary phones in films, especially horror films. This will not be an erudite discussion along the lines of analyzing the meaning of the James Ensor poster in Laurie’s room. It’s just me explaining, as insane as it sounds, how older horror films trigger memories of people in my life who are gone and the places where they lived. It wasn’t a simpler time because life is always complex no matter what. But it was a more visually consistent time, when memories of people and places were not so subject to change and media influence as they are in contemporary films. It was also a time when a person could have an unassailed inner life if they wanted one, and they didn’t have to go full Unabomber to accomplish it.

For decades, my grandparents had the same telephone, a black rotary phone that sat on a side table in their dining nook. They also had an old fashioned phone where the microphone was attached to the wall with a spool-shaped receiver you held up to your ear. It wasn’t used but it remained on the wall anyway. I’ve always wondered who got that phone when my grandfather died.

My own childhood home had a basic wall-installed phone with a traditional handset that stayed in that place, unchanged, for the ten years we lived there. The cord was stretched out from being pulled across the kitchen so we could talk while we washed dishes or tried to stretch it into a bedroom for privacy. I didn’t hate answering the phone back then. Even though telephones brought bad news, when I was young a telephone ringing generally meant something good. A friend wanted to chat, a boy wanted to ask me to a dance, someone wanted me to go bike riding with them. As I got older, sometimes a ringing phone meant someone needed me to cover their after school shift at Michaels, but uniformly, a phone call was nothing more than an invitation to speak to an actual human being about something grounded to a shared reality.

I miss rotary phones. I especially miss phones where the buttons or dials are not housed within the handset, ensuring a life free of butt dials and accidentally handing up when you shift the phone as you speak. I miss them because they seem like a symbol of the last time in history when technology changed slowly enough that the phone you used in grade school was the same one you used in high school. I often feel like we as a world are descending into absolute social chaos because communication technology has and continues to out pace our capacity to adapt.

In Michelle Stacey’s book The Fasting Girl, which is about Mollie Fancher, a girl who was believed to have lived for decades without eating, she speaks about how the zeitgeist at the time was one of psychological chaos. Why? Because suddenly people could move from one side of the country to the other via the Transcontinental Railway in a matter of a few days. Suddenly letters could arrive to the recipients in other states within the same month they were sent. Then the telegraph enabled people to deliver urgent messages in a matter of hours. This rapid expansion of technology caused people to experience a paradigm shift that deeply affected their mental states.

How could one help being nervous in this mind-expanding universe, in which the emerging universe would threaten to change unrecognizably in the course of a generation? How could one avoid the ambient fear of all the noise and speed and light and steam? Humans had never been exposed to such phenomena; they had not learned yet to tolerate them.

Stationary phones with dials were wholly replaced with touch tone phones largely in the 1980s, though they persisted until modern life made it impossible to use them anymore. I have a better chance of explaining the origins of the universe than I do explaining or even understanding the technology that finally killed off rotary phones (beeps are involved, I think), but it stands to reason that if the possibilities of train travel and the promptness of the telegraph caused people to experience anxiety that manifested in psychological illness, what has happened to us all in the decades between rotary phones and these card-pack-sized devices that allow us to be reached at any moment via voice, text, social media, or email while they also give us the capacity to discover any fact from any place in history in a second. We can watch our lives fall apart into utter chaos when someone finds an old Tweet and decides we are fascist racists because we think lox is gross. We can listen to any piece of music, watch any movie, read any book, all the while avoiding direct human contact. And maybe that’s a good thing, because lord knows I don’t want to talk to anyone ever. But it’s undeniable that phones have now made it almost impossible to be alone, calm, and without the expectation that at any moment you may find yourself texting to several people at once as another scam call from the Fraternal Order of the Police gets sent to your voice mail.

Part of me knows I fixate on rotary phones because it’s a mental link to people like my grandparents. I also fixate on them because they’re stylish, because they make horror movie plots easier to create, because I despise speaker phones. But I also fixate on them because the horror they could convey was concentrated and specific. Nasty prank or obscene calls were of course a problem, but some asshole calling and hanging up or breathing heavily over the phone seems so much more… welcome than picking up a glass and metal device that fits into your hand and realizing that Twitter is coming for you, or that some weirdo has taken to using your phone number on credit card applications and skipped out on payments, or that a device that has access to all your data fell out of your pocket without you noticing and your best possible hope is that your thousand dollar ball and chain is in a toilet somewhere, utterly ruined, and not, say, in the hands of a teenager who can in seconds steal all your money. In Halloween, the worst thing that happened with a phone was when Lynda was strangled with a phone cord, and even then it was sort of okay because it meant we no longer had to listen to her annoying, continual giggling. And wouldn’t you rather go quickly via cord strangulation than the slow death of calling your credit card companies begging them to cancel your card after it is maxed out somewhere in Dubai?

If this sounds insane it probably is but I miss the homes and the things people used in their homes before the Internet came, and for some reason horror movies drive that home to me in a way other films do not. Sometimes it’s not just the phones. I remember the kitchens in Halloween as well, especially the kitchen at Lindsey’s home. Those kitchens were not showplaces influenced by the social media that drives so many of us to alter our homes into minimalist nightmares with kitchens with bare granite counters upon which many a smoothie is blended but meals seldom cooked. I know modern front loading washing machines are more water and energy efficient, but I hate them because clothes never get as clean as they do with top loaders with agitators, and the laundry room Annie used in Halloween when she got butter all over herself reminded me of the machines we used all throughout my life. Then seeing that cardboard box of Tide with maybe ten loads of washing powder… Did Costco exist back then? And if it did, would anyone in the seventies have bought a 108-pod value pack of detergent only later to rush their teen son to the ER because he ate several of them during a TikTok challenge? And would my grandparents have had a chance in hell of even understanding the preceding sentence?

I guess rotary phones in horror movies are a symbol of a calmer, less frenzied life. You go a hundred and fifty years back and those lives seem absolutely foreign to most Westerners. No cars, no electricity, indoor bathrooms were thin on the ground and no phones at all. But 1978, when Halloween was released, is not much different than today. Cars, air conditioning, easy means of communication – even the same damn snacks down to quickly prepared popcorn. But the grinding stress of the way phones now shape our lives is absent. Laurie didn’t need to worry about the crops coming in so her village wouldn’t starve, but she also didn’t have to worry about being accessible every moment to anyone who wanted to reach her. She only had to worry about one maniac who never spoke a word.

And it’s not like I’m looking back at the 1950s-1980s and proclaiming them “better days” or harking back to my childhood and insisting that everything is going to hell these days. As I said, life is a hassle no matter when you are born. I personally think Millennials and Gen-Z have it worse psychologically than I did as a kid. I guess I am just saying that all things considered I prefer the hassles common to the era of the black rotary phones than the hassles of Little House on the Prairie or those of the Internet age.

When I see black rotary phones, I feel an exquisite loneliness. The people and the time those phones represent are gone forever and I miss them. I miss the days when homes were not social media driven showplaces and people made Jiffy Pop over the stove, when phones rang and people answered them even though they had no idea who was calling, when no one except the killer had any reasonable expectation of getting you on the phone at two A.M. And when you threw your phone at the man in the mask, it probably hurt a lot more than hurling an iPhone at him.

Oddtober 2024: The Black Shuck

ETA: Last night, after completing this entry, I had a fourth “black shuck.” I’m reading a short story collection called Dark Blood Comes From the Feet by Emma J. Gibbon. One of the stories is called “The Black Shuck.” To paraphrase James Bond, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Third time is enemy action. The fourth time is the power of Oddtober compelling you.”

A common theme in my online life is that when I am not lost in a rabbit warren, I will notice an unlikely topic come up over and over in a very short span of time. That happened recently with the “black shuck,” the enormous black dog with shaggy fur that stalks the countrysides of the British Isles. Though I am familiar with the black dog of myth, I’d somehow never heard such dogs referred to as “the shuck” or “the black shuck.” I’d been learning about mountaineering disasters and somehow that caused my YouTube algorithm to suggest missing persons cases that happened in the countrysides in Europe, which then led to a charming film about the black shuck.

This is such a touching film. The black dog, the “shuck,” is ushering a newly dead woman to her afterlife. The film only has two words of dialogue. “It’s time.” The black shuck waits patiently for the woman to come to terms with her death, licking the tears off her face, gently leading her to the door that will take her to the next plane of her existence. It could be seen by some as creepy but I found it sweet, a “death positive” look at confronting the greatest unknown of our lives: what happens when we die. It reminded me, in a gentle way, of the people I’ve lost, of the animals I’ve lost, and the melancholy I felt was a pleasant one.

After watching that video, I wondered where on earth the name “shuck” came from. Wikipedia helpfully told me that: “According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the name Shuck derives from the Old English word scucca ‘devil, fiend’, perhaps from the root skuh ‘to terrify’.” That does not really align with the shuck in the above short film. That black dog is hardly a demon, and I filed it away to look up again later.

The next day I found in the massive cache of television shows that I believe Mr. OTC is collecting in the event that we have another pandemic or several months to spend watching television non-stop, a BBC program called Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country: Black Shuck. Lord a’mercy, it was not particularly helpful, focusing more on the gormless, titular Charlie’s attempts to see and hopefully photograph the black shuck as he struggles with the bed in his van and forgets his mother’s birthday. He interviewed several people who saw the black shuck and had a folklore expert speak of this demon dog that terrified people when they saw it. The black shuck either has green or red glowing eyes, or appeared like a cyclops with a single glowing eye in the middle of its forehead. The dog is described as being huge, sometimes as large as a bull calf. The small amount of actual data wasn’t surprising because this is clearly some sort of schticky program focusing on the foibles of Charlie Cooper as much as the stated topic of the show. But the show did show me that the black shuck in the short film is a softer take on a demon dog that some feel is so terrifying because its sighting can presage death or impending doom.

Third time was the charm. I was digging through ‘zines I had purchased recently, looking for content that I could digest quicker than a novel. I had gone down a folklore rabbit hole and purchased a lot of folkish ‘zines, among them Shuck.

I ordered it recently, and I knew there was a wolf drawing on the cover but I never noticed really that the title is Shuck. I think I didn’t recall the title because the word “shuck” meant nothing to me. I just knew it was a Halloween-y themed ‘zine. Last time I tried to discuss one of the more prominent folk culture ‘zines, Hellebore, I ended up talking far too much about bog people, so something smaller and more focused to Halloween seemed a better bet. When I noticed the title, I knew I needed to talk about this ‘zine and shucks in general.

Shuck, Issue 1 – The Dark was released in October of 2020, and is one of the prettiest ‘zines I’ve explored recently. There is a wonderful continuity of style throughout the ‘zine, with black and white stylized drawings. The ‘zine handles fairly creepy topics, as most folklore ‘zines do, but there was something… bolstering about it. Uplifting. It made me wish I had the time this Halloween season to try some of the rituals mentioned in the ‘zine.

Of course the ‘zine discusses the black shuck:

He can be the size of a large dog or the size of a horse, headless or in possession of two glowing red eyes, or one yellow eye (or green, or red).

The ‘zine also clarifies the origin of the name:

His name is said to derive from the old Anglo-Saxon word ‘Scucca,’ which means Devil, or from a piece of regional dialect where ‘Shucky’ means ‘shaggy.’

What is the purpose of the black shuck? Well, there is some belief he was Odin’s dog of war (which marries well with the one-eyed shucks). A more interesting theory is that smugglers created the myth of the black dog with glowing eyes to scare off locals who would believe their lanterns and ship lights were frightening supernatural hell hounds and would stay away from the coastlines when they saw something glowing in the dark. The appearance of these dogs means a lot of things but in Norfolk, the region this ‘zine examines the most, seeing the black shuck is a universally bad thing, an omen or a portent of something terrible or evil that will soon happen or befall upon those who see it.

The ‘zine also features a sort of “shuck” family tree, where variations of this animal and their assorted names show how the legend of this dog can vary greatly in regions that are close together. For example, Ipswitch has the “shug monkey,” Suffolk features a creature known as the “galleytrot,” among other iterations of the same folkish animal.

Also in this ‘zine are rituals helpful for the folkish believer during Halloween. Want to host a “Dumb Supper,” a silent banquet held in honor of the beloved dead, hoping the silence and presence of their favorite foods might encourage the dead to speak to you? Want to make sure the dead pass your home by on All Hallows Eve and have an urge to bake something? This ‘zine has you covered. The ‘zine also covers topics like the folklorish significance of the Yew tree, the history of Mischief Night, the implications of nyctophobia, and explains why you should never follow something called “The Lantern Man.”

The part of this ‘zine most interesting to me was the explanation of a type of divination board used in a manner similar to a Ouija board. Called a “Charm Board,” you use little “charms” to represent yourself or your desires and you cast them on a board with symbols and spaces on the board that will tell you your fate depending on where your charms land. Later there is a tongue-in-cheek analysis of other folkish beliefs the author, Ada, tested for accuracy. And the back cover features a paper doll so you can clip and dress your own Wise Woman of Irstead.

Non-believer that I am, I concede that sometimes I see meaning in coincidences. Whether or not all these mentions of a dog-like creature can just be chalked up to the fact that I like unusual things and this time of year all kinds of media are teeming with stories of monsters, the fact is that all three times I encountered the black shuck this month involved very gentle media. The video “Shuck” was so touching. Charlie Cooper’s program was mostly silly. And Shuck Issue 1 – The Dark is the paper equivalent of an elderly auntie serving you hot tea as she tells you stories about sprites and faeries and rituals to keep garden trolls at bay.

I submerge myself into a lot of darkness. I’m currently rewriting an article about a child murder I wrote about a few years ago. I read entirely too much splatterpunk and extreme horror. I watch violent horror films on an almost daily basis. Lately I’ve been sick at heart watching the whole disgraceful P. Diddy situation unfold. I dwell in very upsetting places as a default and sometimes I don’t notice that even I periodically need a pick-me-up until I see something that does not provoke disgust or anger in me. Every now and then even the hardest among us need something that doesn’t force us to confront the harm that human beings do, to discuss blood and viscera or torture or murder, or to contemplate dark literature or even darker conspiracy theory. If mentions of the shuck came up three times in rapid succession so that I could have a small break from dead children or violent murder or terror in general, I see no harm in just rolling with it. Such topics generally are thrilling to me but even a hardened cultural traveler needs a rest now and then and the shuck turned out to be my temporary but unlikely respite.

Oh, two other things about Shuck ‘zine. One, you can get a copy of issue 1 here (I intend to get other issues in the future). The other is that the creator of the ‘zine, a writer who calls herself Ada, presented a drawing of her favorite gravestone. September 20 is a very significant date in my life so it was interesting to see it on a tombstone in this ‘zine.

I too have a favorite gravestone. It’s from the Old Corn Hill cemetery in Jarrell, Texas. September 20 again, and you’ll note that Ernest died while still a child. Which I think is a sign that I’ve enjoyed this nice little entry but have come full circle.

Next week Oddtober 2024 ends, and I will begin a more reasonable posting schedule. But we do have a few more days in this spooky month, which means a few more Oddtober entries. Among them, I plan to revive my custom of discussing the latest Doug Brunell Sinful Cinema Series offering. This year focuses on a cult-favorite horror film that most seasoned horror fans have seen. Good times await, see you next week!

Oddtober 2024: Ben Thompson’s Gravestone

This is a repeat of an older entry that I ran during Oddtober 2017. It’s one of my favorite creepy Austin locations, and reading back over it makes me realize it’s been entirely too long since I took off on a “weird places” jaunt. Enjoy!

Ben Thompson doesn’t have the level of posthumous fame as his exploits should have earned. I think it’s because he didn’t have a catchy nickname. In the early days of Texas statehood, among impulsive, gun-crazy men with a violent streak, he was first among equals. But fame is fickle and it’s hard to pin down why some gunslingers are well-remembered and why some become footnotes. In many regards, outside of Texas history buffs, Ben Thompson is a footnote.

Still, among lovers of Old West or Texas history, some of us do remember Ben Thompson and this is a perfect time of the year to share his story. He was a soldier and a lawman, but among Texas lawmen during the 1800s, it was not uncommon for lawmen to also be criminals, and Thompson was definitely a criminal, and a violent one at that. So violent was his life that some people interested in ghosts and the paranormal say the power of his character affects his final resting place.

Ben Thompson was like many of the wild men who made Texas their home – he was a jack of all trades before he found his niche as a gunslinger. Born in England in 1843, his family emigrated to Texas in 1851. In his teens, he worked as a printer’s apprentice and in 1859 he went to New Orleans to work as a bookbinder. It was in New Orleans that the man he was to become showed himself when he killed a man whom he claimed was abusing a woman. Stabbed him to death. He was fifteen or sixteen when this happened.

He served in the Civil War, fighting with the Confederates, but the battles he fought didn’t quell his love of guns and rough justice because after he returned to Austin he shot and killed a man during an argument over a mule. A mule. Seriously. And since the mule was technically Army property, Thompson was arrested. That didn’t slow him down though because he busted out of prison and fled to Mexico where he joined Maximillian’s forces until the good emperor lost the war in 1867. Clearly a man unable to function outside of conflict, Thompson returned to Austin and promptly shot his brother-in-law for abusing Thompson’s wife. Oh yeah, Thompson got married during his stint in the Civil War. The civilizing effects of marriage didn’t really take with him.

So, Thompson was tried and sent to prison in Huntsville, and this time he was unable to break out. He served two years of his four year sentence until pardoned by President Grant. Once free he headed up to Abilene, Kansas with his family and opened a prosperous saloon with an old Army buddy, Philip Coe, and seemed to be doing reasonably well. That changed when Thompson was in a terrible buggy accident that injured him, his son and his wife, who lost an arm. While Thompson was recovering from the accident, Coe went and got himself shot by Marshal “Wild Bill” Hickok.

By any measure Abilene of the early 1870s was a tough town, and its city marshal – James B. (Wild Bill) Hickok – was up to the challenge of taming its rowdy visitors. Although there may have been many reasons that Hickok and Philip Coe did not care for each other, it is likely that the basis for their dislike was a woman they both cherished. Apparently she chose the gambler over the lawman and was going to leave town with Coe – or so she thought. During the evening of October 5, 1871, Hickok shot Coe, who had been firing his pistol into the evening air on a street in Abilene. Tragically, in the confusion of the shots taken at Coe, Hickok also shot and killed his deputy. (Texas Cemeteries, Harvey)

After that, Abilene, Kansas was tired of Hickok and all the cattle drivers who passed through, making trouble at the drinking and gambling establishments, so they relieved Hickok of his duty and banned undesirables from entering or remaining in the city. That included Thompson so he went to Ellsworth, Kansas and began his time as a professional gambler. Interestingly, it was in Ellsworth that Thompson encountered another name we all remember more than poor Ben:

After the shooting of Coe, Ben Thompson left town for Ellsworth, Kansas, where he met Wyatt Earp in one of the Old West’s classic “in the streets” confrontations. Looking down the barrel of Earp’s gun, Thompson backed down and soon left Ellsworth for the Texas Panhandle. There Thompson would meet and, in the ensuing years, form a life-long friendship with Bat Masterson. (Texas Cemeteries, Harvey)

Interestingly, Thompson’s brother shot and killed the Ellsworth, Kansas sheriff and fled. A couple of years later he stood trial and was acquitted – the Thompson family seemed to be able to avoid the worst penalties for their impulsive and criminal natures, but so did a lot of men during that time. Rustle some cattle and you’d hang immediately if caught but shoot a sheriff and people could understand how the sheriff may have had it coming.

From 1874 to 1879, Thompson made his living as a professional gambler, traveling around various Texas cities, and of course he got into trouble as he did it. On Christmas Day, 1876, a fight broke out in the Austin Theater. Thompson, seeing a friend was causing the commotion, decided to help his friend out and jumped into the fray. When the theater owner emerged with a rifle and shot at Thompson, Thompson returned fire and killed him in three shots. It was determined later that Thompson had killed in self-defense.

Looking for quick money in the Colorado silver mines, Thompson went west and while there teamed up with his friend, Bat Masterson, who had assembled a team of hired guns to work for Kansas-based railroads that were embroiled in a right of way dispute with Colorado railroads. Thompson was well-paid for his efforts so he returned to Austin and opened a gambling saloon that he called the Iron Front Saloon. Here’s where it gets kind of funny: Ben Thompson was scrupulously honest in the way he ran his gambling tables and earned the respect of Austin citizens as being an honest man, so honest that the citizens in Austin elected him to be city marshal, not once, but twice. And the hell of it is, he was an honest man. He just liked shooting people. So why not have an honest shooter serve in law enforcement?

And it was a pretty good decision – plenty of people thought Ben Thompson was the best marshal Austin ever had. But rest assured he didn’t stop killing people. In 1882, Thompson visited the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio and felt that the card tables at the establishment might not meet his level of scrupulous honesty and shot the theater owner, Jack Harris, to death. He was indicted for murder and resigned as marshal and it will surprise no one that he was acquitted of murder. Presumably the theater owner had it coming. Thompson returned to Austin and was given a hero’s welcome

Now, you and I, if we shot a popular entertainment establishment owner to death, we might be emboldened a bit if we returned home to the 1880s version of a ticker tape parade, but it takes a really bold person to return to the scene of the crime. Thompson went back to the Vaudeville Theater in 1884. He and his friend, John King Fisher, one helluva gunslinger in his own right, sauntered into San Antonio like they owned the place and news of their arrival spread quickly.

What happened inside the Vaudeville Theater depends on the sources. Some say that within minutes of entering the saloon area of the Vaudeville Theater, they were both ambushed and shot from behind. That’s some cowardly crap right there but, it must be said, that there would have been little chance for anyone to kill him in a straightforward gunfight. But other sources indicate that perhaps Thompson pushed things too far. He had already run into some of Jack Harris’ business partners inside the Vaudeville Theater, but stayed for the show and pressed his luck in the saloon

Thompson and Fisher had been drinking heavily in the saloon. Inside, Simms, Foster and three confederates were waiting. When the subject of the murder of Jack Harris came up, Fisher wanted to leave. But Thompson pushed on, eventually slapping Foster and putting a pistol in the saloon owner’s mouth. Almost immediately shooting broke the tension and silence of the room. As the smoke cleared, both Thompson and Fisher lay dead on the floor. Fisher had never drawn a gun, and Thompson managed but a single shot. Yet the bodies of the outlaw lawmen had nine and thirteen wounds, respectively. Ironically, a coroner’s jury in San Antonio ruled the killings self-defense. (Texas Cemeteries, Harvey)

Legends of the ambush grew far outside of the reality of what really happened. Texas history junkies talk of how it was that Ben Thompson killed six of the men who ambushed him with a single six-shooter and hit them each square like ducks in a carnival shooting game. The reality is that even in the scenario where he pressed his luck, he barely knew what hit him. I bet he’d have liked the way his own murder played out in terms of the myths that arose around him. But no one was ever charged with killing him, and his body was shipped back to Austin. He’s buried in Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery.

I first heard about Ben Thompson from a ghost hunter. I don’t hunt for ghosts, but I do like looking into ghost legends, and ghost hunters can be really helpful in finding out interesting stories. The lady I met told me that it was impossible to take a good photo of Ben Thompson’s gravestone because he hates the stone that was put on his resting place because it isn’t the one he won in a card game, so he makes sure all the photos people take are marred in some manner.

Bear with me, this story has some merit. The late Charley Eckhardt wrote up a lot of what he knew about some of the better and more interesting Texas legends and he wrote a short article about how it was that Ben Thompson won his tombstone in a card game. One night a tombstone salesman named Luke Watts played poker at a table at Iron Front Saloon and it just so happened that Ben Thompson was playing that night at that table as well. Watts tried to sell Ben Thompson a tombstone, but Thompson didn’t seem too interested. But when Watts had lost every penny in his pocket, Thompson’s demeanor changed.

Watts was not as good a poker player as he thought he was, and sometime after midnight he announced that he was cleaned out and was leaving the game. Thompson asked him how much his tombstones were worth. “It depends on what kind it is,” Watts replied.

Thompson said he wanted the best tombstone Watts had. Watts told him he had a fine marble stone that was worth $200. Thompson told him to bring it up and put it in the game. Thompson would accept it in lieu of $200 cash. The game began again and Thompson won the tombstone. Watts suggested that he carve at least Thompson’s name and date of birth on it, but Thompson said no. The stone sat in the poker room in the Iron Front for a few months, until Thompson ordered it moved to the basement.

Not long after this Ben Thompson died in the ambush in San Antonio, but according to Eckhardt his resting place in Oakwood Cemetery lacked a headstone until 1925, and that the tombstone he won remained in the basement of the Iron Front Saloon until it was demolished. Eckhardt wasn’t certain if the stone that was eventually placed on his grave was the stone he won in the card game.

I don’t know one rock from another but the stone that marks Ben Thompson’s resting place does not look like it’s fine marble and I don’t think that anyone was too pressed to rescue a slab of marble from the basement of a saloon marked for demolition.

Oakwood Cemetery is a favorite of mine and many others in the area. I spent a lot of time there searching for the burial places of the victims of the Servant Girl Annihilator, and while I was there years ago, I remembered that legend the ghost hunter told me and I took a photo of Ben Thompson’s gravestone.

And there you go. Maybe Ben really is angry about his stone and interferes with good pictures.

Join me under the cut as I behave like the killjoy I so often am.

Oddtober 2024: The Monster in the Closet Was Real

I’ve dwelt in the true crime cave for far too long, though it seems I will never “grow out” of my fascination with the worst people can do and those willing to do it. Over the last ten years, I’ll go a good while without falling down a true crime rabbit hole and it takes something shocking or bizarre to pull me in. The case of Tristan Brübach was such a case, as was the Idaho Four. Today’s case has been a morbid fascination for me for a few years because it is full of bizarre details that, if not wholly unique to the case, are so rare that even with my near-encyclopedic knowledge base, I can’t think of another case that has the same set of details.

In Lawton, Oklahoma on April 8, 1976, three-year-old twin sisters Mary and Tina Carpitcher were visiting their grandmother when they went missing. One moment they were in the house, watching television, and the next they were gone. Two days later, neighborhood children were playing in an abandoned house and heard noises coming from the refrigerator. Inside the children found Mary and Tina. Mary had died of asphyxiation but Tina had been able to breathe through a small crack in the seal on the refrigerator. Tina also had bite marks all over her arms, though some reports indicate she was bitten several times on just one arm.

Tina’s family insisted that she did not have any bite marks on her arms before she disappeared, implying that, for whatever reason, the person who abducted her had bitten her hard before placing her and her sister into the refrigerator. Tina told the authorities who had done this to her – a friend of her aunt’s named Jackie Roubideaux – but authorities dismissed her account because she was a toddler and therefore her testimony was unreliable, and there was little to no corroborating evidence to justify arresting Jackie Roubideaux.

A year and a half later, Nima Louise Carter, 19 months old, went missing from her home in Lawton. It was Halloween night, 1977, and her parents, George and Rose, subscribed to the parenting method of letting their child cry it out when she became upset at bedtime. Lots of parents follow similar advice, with the belief being that it enables children to learn how to self-soothe. George and Rose later regretted their decision to let their little girl cry alone in her room because she was missing when Rose went to wake her the next morning.

Initially, the police focused on George and Rose Carter as the primary suspects, as is common in such cases. However, their stories never changed and both passed a lie detector test. There were other suspects, among them the family babysitter, Jackie Roubideaux.

I have never been able to find details of the investigation that eventually led to the arrest of Jackie Roubideaux, but she was arrested at some point in 1978 and went to trial in 1979. She was only arrested for the attack on the Carpitcher twins, however. Nima Carter’s case never went to trial because the district attorney felt it would be too expensive to pursue it. Roubideaux’s first trial ended in a mistrial as the jury could not agree on a verdict but her second trial resulted in a conviction. Tina Carpitcher gave testimony at both trials, and defense attorneys tried to dismiss her testimony as being coached, that a small child could not have possibly remembered all the details that Tina gave on the stand. It’s impossible now to say how much Tina’s memory was affected by her age and overhearing details from others, but her story had a ring of truth, and once it was on the record, other people finally came out and gave details they failed to give the police in 1976 because they did not want to get involved.

Tina said that she and Mary were watching television at their grandmother’s home when Roubideaux walked into the house and urged them to come with her. The girls recognized her, as she was a friend of their Aunt Thomasine, and initially seemed happy to accompany her. However, the two girls began to offer some resistance, as a neighbor reported seeing Roubideaux pulling the two girls by their arms as she walked by with them. The neighbor, the wife of the town fire chief, did not come out with this admission until Roubideaux was suspected in the Nima Carter abduction and murder. Once inside the abandoned house, Tina said that Roubideaux insisted they explore the house and when they finished looking around, she forced the girls into the refrigerator. She played it off as a game, telling the girls that when their aunt Thomasine found them, she would take them out for ice cream. The girls remained in the refrigerator for two days until older children who were playing in the abandoned house found them. If Tina herself indicated that Roubideaux had bitten her, I could not find testimony to that effect, but evidently she gave a fairly detailed account of what happened to her, so detailed that the defense attorney tried to impugn her testimony on the basis how young she was when the attack occurred. Testimony from very small children is always seen as suspect but Tina, who was nine and ten when she testified against Roubideaux, claimed she remembered these details with no prompting. Ultimately, the jury believed her in the second trial and sent Roubideaux to prison. She died in prison from liver cancer in 2005.

Although Roubideaux was sent to prison for the Carpitcher case, Nima Carter’s case technically remains an unsolved cold case. However, the circumstantial evidence in this case is compelling. Jackie Roubideaux was a babysitter who often cared for Nima when George and Rose Carter would go out on the weekends. George Carter said that Nima loved Roubideaux and would run to hug her whenever she saw her. But there were signs that perhaps Roubideaux was not as wholesome as she seemed. Nima’s grandmother said that Roubideaux always seemed odd and rubbed her the wrong way. A friend of Roubideaux’s reported that shortly before Nima was abducted and murdered, Roubideaux was angry that the Carters had used a different babysitter. She said the family had told her that she was their main babysitter. Angry, she proclaimed that if the Carters wanted it that way, so be it.

The Carter case was an unholy cross between a locked room mystery and urban legends come to life. The Carter home had been locked up that evening, but there was a back door that did not lock properly. Roubideaux, who was a frequent visitor to the home, knew about that door. Nima had been unusually upset that evening and cried for a very long time. Her exhausted parents stuck to their guns regarding letting her cry it out once it was established that she wasn’t hungry or in need of a diaper change. When Nima finally settled down, they fell asleep on the couch. When they woke the next morning, Nima was gone.

George is haunted by the notion that if they had only just checked on her, they might have interrupted or prevented entirely what happened to their daughter. There is an uneasy belief that Roubideaux had crept into the home much earlier and had hidden in Nima’s closet, waiting for the elder Carters to fall asleep. Once they crashed on the couch, Roubideaux is thought to have carried the little girl out of the house. Nima was taken to an abandoned duplex and placed alive in a refrigerator, where she was found almost a month later. The abandoned duplex was less than a mile from the abandoned house where the Carpitcher twins were found. Since Roubideaux was arrested after two attacks, there’s no way to say that she had a “signature.” A signature in this regard means a series of specific actions meaningful to the killer that connects the killer to the crimes, as well as linking together the crimes as being the work of one killer. However, there were some very interesting overlaps between the Carpitcher and Carter cases.

–The Carter and Carpitcher families were of Native descent. In the 1980s census, Comanche County, which included Lawton, only 4.9% of the population were of Native, Alaskan or otherwise indigenous heritage.

–The children in both cases knew Jackie Roubideaux.

–The children were taken to abandoned homes.

–The children were placed in abandoned refrigerators while still alive.

–The murder sites were within a mile of each other, indicating a killer operating in a specific area where he or she felt comfortable.

–Both times, other children found the girls in the refrigerators.

Though forensic psychologists cannot pin a signature on the above facts, we laypeople can safely say that these facts are unusual enough that it is very unlikely that two different people killed children in such a specific manner in such specific places focusing on such a specific ethnic group knowing children would likely find the bodies.

One of the most unpleasant potential signatures were the bites found on Tina, but the investigation is muddled enough that I don’t feel comfortable speaking about it. The bite marks were not photographed well, and at least one forensic expert said the bites resembled what one would expect from another child, speculating that Mary bit Tina several times as they struggled to get out of the refrigerator. This is not uncommon. In several cases where children were suffering and left to die (the Hinterkaifect case and several incidents where toddlers were accidentally left in sweltering cars immediately come to mind), children bit themselves and tore out their own hair. It does not seem impossible that Mary bit Tina when they were crammed into that refrigerator.

The bite marks are especially awful to discuss because if you research this case, you come across people who actually blame Mary’s death on Tina, speculating that Mary bit her sister because Tina would not permit her access to the small amount of air coming in on Tina’s side of the refrigerator. I guess those commenters think that three-year-old girls crammed in a refrigerator have the logical skills to figure out how to move positions continually to maintain access to air and that one of the toddlers decided to kill her own sister rather than share. It reminds of me all the idiocy that surrounds the Tristan Brübach case wherein people think a thirteen-year-old boy must have been a seasoned male prostitute who was killed by a john simply because he was a latchkey kid and rumors swirled around insisting he received terrible anal injuries in the attack.

George Carter maintains that he does not believe that Roubideaux killed his daughter. He just doesn’t think she had it in her to be so violent and cruel. He’s the only one who feels this way. His own mother said that she absolutely believes that Roubideaux took Nima and left her in that refrigerator. I can’t attest to why George believes that Roubideaux did not abduct his daughter and leave her to die but I have some theories. One is that often men have a hard time believing a woman – any woman – would do such a thing. After all, his daughter loved Roubideaux, so she must have been a good woman, in George’s eyes. Another is that if he believes that Roubideaux did, in fact, abduct his daughter, he has to also admit there is a good chance that Roubideaux was already in the house and that her presence in the dark scared his daughter so much that she stayed up crying for hours, and he and his wife made the decision to ignore her cries. That’s a heavy burden for a parent to carry and it makes perfect sense that he would want to imagine a master criminal did this to his child and not the dumpy babysitter he willingly let into his home many times before.

Of course, every parent of a crime victim can play the moral accountant and find all kinds of reasons why they could have prevented harm to their child if they’d just done something different. The Carter family back door did not lock, but Lawton at the time was a small big town, if that makes sense. The town had about 80,000 people, but it was a simpler time in a simpler place. It’s easy to see why a broken back lock would not be immediately repaired, especially since only people close to the family would have known about the lock. No one in the family bears any responsibility for what happened to Nima. In fact, the broken lock may not have mattered in the long run because Mary and Tina were abducted in broad daylight after Roubideaux let herself into the house. The back door just enabled her to abduct the girl at night when there would be fewer witnesses.

Tina Carpitcher never deviated from her story that Jackie Roubideaux was her abductor and the murderer of her twin sister and Jackie Roubideaux never admitted any guilt. There is, of course, a chance that Roubideaux was innocent but the circumstantial evidence doesn’t really point in that direction. In the end, two little girls died terrible deaths, in a dark confined space, unable to get air. Perhaps I am looking for comfort in believing Roubideaux killed Mary and Nima because someone has to pay for such a crime, but I sincerely believe that Tina, at age three, had the capacity to say that Roubideaux was her abductor. She knew the woman, she had enough language acquired to convey that Roubideaux abducted her and her sister, and she accused Roubideaux from the very first time someone asked her what happened to her.

This story brings with it parallels to a couple of urban legends that maybe aren’t so legendary after all. For example, consider the stories about a stranger lurking in a child’s closet, secure in the belief that parents won’t come investigate because they will dismiss any fears as “there’s no monster in your closet, now go to sleep.” That actually has happened in real life more times than I can link to. People are always told to remove the doors from old refrigerators and freezers when they are thrown away because children can crawl in them and die, and of course these instructions only came on the heel of many small children suffocating inside old appliances. This case was a perfect storm of how it is that the weird, creepy stories we get told about a friend of a friend’s cousin’s niece have some basis in reality and it’s hard to feel safe in a world where just wanting your child to sleep through the night can be the reason they are killed.

In the end, Nima Carter’s Halloween night abduction may ensure parents double checked their locks and reminded their children of stranger danger, but ultimately it drove home a far more frightening fact: in the right circumstances, someone you trust could creep into your home, take your child and spirit them away without making a noise.

Oddtober 2024: Bad Religion – Catholic Horror Movie Crapshoot

What do you know? Another APac mini ‘zine is shaping another OTC entry. I’ve over-relied on these little ‘zines because my will to write came back so late in the game that I had very little time to create any sort of theme for Oddtober. I didn’t even have enough time to just read some new horror and supplement it with books I’ve read but have yet to discuss. These ‘zines help me frame a topic and give me the urge to consume media new to me, and since they focus on films, I can, conceivably, create a new entry after three hours or less. I’m grateful I found them before Oddtober began.

I had high hopes for Sickest Catholic Horror Movies and it didn’t disappoint, not really, but I can say that Amèlie Paquet’s taste in religious horror movies is eccentric. The ‘zine lists some very good films, like Martyrs, The Devils and The Exorcist, which gave me the impression that the other films listed would have similarly strong and obvious ties to Catholic horror. But “sickest” covers a lot of ground, and in some cases it may not mean gory. It may not mean “sick” as a synonym for “cool.” It may mean “so bad it’s good except it went on too long and became bad again.”

Two other films APac features in this “sickest” list are so… not good that I almost don’t know where to start. With the hope of assembling a quick entry I watched one of the films on APac’s “sickest” list thinking I could discuss it while linking it back to some insane childhood story or amusing call back to my various neuroses and bing, bang, boom! Another Oddtober entry finished.

Except I watched John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness and I don’t even know what to do. So I stayed up late and watched another film on the list, Stigmata, and now I’m even more fucked.

I disliked In the Mouth of Madness so much that I genuinely have no idea what to say. Do I address the various problems in the film, like an incoherent plot filled with so many bizarre images that the horrible characterization is almost negligible in comparison? Do I just shake it off and ignore it and discuss Stigmata instead because at least I can easily verbalize what was wrong in that film?

I guess the best thing to do is rip the band aid off and do my best. In the Mouth of Madness stars Sam Neill as an insurance fraud investigator, John Trent, who is recruited to find Sutter Cane, a Stephen King-style writer, who has disappeared as his work causes those who read it to lose their minds and become violent but even those who haven’t read it go nuts as well, as there are riots at stores that sell out of the book before people can buy it. It makes sense if you don’t think about it. Anyway, Trent is hired to find Cane, because when you need to hunt down a famous author who has disappeared under paranormal circumstances, you need a free-lance insurance fraud investigator. Trent and some woman whose presence in the movie is so meh that I cannot recall her name, drive to Cane’s hometown and encounter bizarre, unrelated, non-thematic issues, like running over old men on bikes, feral children chasing dogs, and a strange land lady with a man handcuffed to her leg. They find Cane and we have no idea why his books are driving people crazy or what his motivations are in causing such chaos. It ends with Trent in a loony bin and we have no clue what all these tangents mean, and the only reason it seems vaguely Catholic is because John Trent covers himself and the walls in his padded room with crosses he wrote in black crayon.

He was watching a far better movie than I watched…

Even were I to take In the Mouth of Madness as a film that is meant to just be… sort of scary with a dash of ridiculousness, I’d have to overlook the appalling acting from everyone involved, including Sam Neill, whose character is such a dick I wanted him dead within the first twenty minutes. He does not play assholes well. Or maybe he didn’t play John Trent’s brand of assholism well. But he’s a great actor and it was weird seeing him in this cringy role. Regardless of the quality of the actors in this mess, nothing made sense, we have no idea why any of this happened, and the best scene was when John Trent punched an asylum orderly in the balls.

Stigmata is a baffling mess, but at least I understand its links to Catholicism. But mostly this film made me cringe, which is all the more awful because I like both leads, Patricia Arquette and Gabriel Byrne. Byrne plays Father Andrew, a priest who is a scientist and tasked with researching religious miracles. He is sent to look into Frankie, a Pittsburgh hairdresser, who is an atheist but is also displaying the signs of stigmata. Frankie came into possession of a rosary owned by a dead priest who found and translated the Book of Thomas, a gospel that is said to be as close to coming from the mouth of Jesus as any known Christian document. In turn, the priest who owned the rosary possesses Frankie and Father Andrew must try to ferret out what is happening to her. In the end, he thwarts a church attempt to kill Frankie, a plot predicated on the notion that the Christian faith would be destroyed if the Gospel of Thomas is released and people find out the Gnostics were right.

The movie reeks of Spice Girls circa 1997. Frankie wears bright colored plastic jelly shoes with socks. As a hairdresser, she and her friends have some of the worst hair styles imaginable. She lives in a loft that looks way more expensive than a hairdresser could manage and is filled with mannequins and hundreds of candles so we know Frankie is whimsy personified, a hip free spirit. Father Andrew is just… good looking and evidently very easily sexually manipulated despite his clerical vows. He clearly develops a thing for Frankie and is ultimately the hero of this piece but mostly he just shoots intense gazes and struggles mightily with his romantic feelings for Frankie, feelings that trump his desire to get the real word of God disseminated to the people.

If I overlook the 1990s cringe aesthetics and pretend that there was anything approaching chemistry between Arquette and Byrne, I still hit a brick wall considering the plot. There are so many theological and common sense issues that they require yet another OTC point by point breakdown.

–When did the Catholic church begin to recognize possession by ghost? Because Frankie isn’t being possessed by a demon, she’s being possessed by a dead man’s soul.

–How on earth does the possession by a ghost trigger stigmata? What possible purpose is there for a dead priest to infest his own rosary and then enter the body of some random girl with spacebuns and a hipper than thou apartment and slowly give her the five wounds of Christ?

–Since when did the Catholic Church believe that demonic possession is like the common cold and can be transmitted like cooties in a kindergarten? According to what I recall, possession can only occur when someone opens their psyche to possession through substance abuse, sexual perversity, greed, or actual invitation to the demonic. You can’t get possessed by handling a rosary a priest once owned.

–The above applies to ghosts, too, since there is no Catholic belief that ghosts can possess anyone, let alone via transitive property.

–The Catholic Church has been aware of the Book of Thomas since 1945. They’ve been struggling with tamping down Gnosticism for centuries. Why on earth would a Pittsburgh hairdresser’s stigmata suddenly plunge the world into chaos because a Book of Thomas believer decided to invade her body and how on earth would that be the final straw on the camel’s back in terms of legitimizing that particular gospel? Out of all the other attempts to bring down the Catholic church, this hairdresser’s fits will be the final boss?

–What is the purpose of a ghost possessing an atheist and giving her stigmata? Initially I wondered if it was a nod to the gnostic idea that the kingdom of God is within us all, but wouldn’t that message have been better delivered by a genuine Christian who understands the significance of what is happening to them?

–Why is possession by a ghost who somehow induces stigmata visually indistinguishable from being tortured by demon possession?

–The final scene where Frankie essentially becomes a new incarnation of St. Francis of Assisi was a garbled, fairy princess mess and I resent such a strange, pointless connection between these two. St. Francis received his stigmata after a vision of an angel during a fast, after he spent years ministering to lepers, after he made very good on his vows of obedience and poverty. His stigmata was a reward for his stalwart faith and he received all five wounds at once. Francis suffered from the wounds but ultimately the stigmata was a gift, a sign that his faith was rewarded via proof of Divine intervention. Frankie, on the other hand, suffers and for no purpose she recognizes. She is not being rewarded. She is being punished, and she is being punished worse than a drunken pedophile being tortured via demonic possession. What possible good does it do to give an atheist stigmata when she was never looking for proof, when she had no desire to find God within her, if she has no idea why this is happening to her?

Patricia Arquette has a very fey, vulnerable quality about her that works because there is generally something steely behind the sweetness but in this movie she seems like Baby Spice simpering and flirting with the priest. No bite behind it like her role as Alabama in True Romance. She’s irritating, and one needs their stigmata infested heroine not to be irritating. Gabriel Byrne’s Father Andrew doesn’t really evince the power of his beliefs – he’s just a handsome priest who makes bizarre decisions because he’s taken with pretty Frankie.

Father Andrew seems strangely okay with a bloody woman’s wrists being so close to his face.

The whole film is full of bizarre decisions. Like Frankie thinking people will let her work on their hair when her wrists are covered by bloody bandages that she does nothing to hide. Or how about Frankie’s friends, who think that when your friend has holes running right through her wrists that the best possible thing to do is get her loaded at a club so she can unwind (she promptly develops the crown of thorns scars on the dance floor and then runs out into rainy traffic).

I curse my decision to watch films from Sickest Catholic Horror Movies that I had not yet seen. I should have rewatched Martyrs, which for all its flaws (I hate the ending so much) is a provocative, interesting film. Fuck, Ken Russell’s The Devils would have been a helluva movie to revisit. Even going over the well-trod ground of The Exorcist would have been more interesting than reacting with a jaded sigh to these two films.

APac’s ‘zines, even when I question her choices, are always thought provoking. And I guess there’s nothing wrong, really, discussing why I dislike some of the films she mentions in her ‘zines, especially this go around because I think “sickest” can mean that these films handle Catholicism poorly, and if that is the case, these two films definitely belonged on that list. Instead, if I were a betting woman, I would wonder if she was trying to steer away from all the usual suspects, like The Omen, The Prophecy, The Rite, Constantine, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and others. I appreciate that she tries to present films that are not ringers.

And sometimes it’s kind of fun to discuss bad films, if I can corral my tendency toward hyperbolic savagery. But at any rate, this ‘zine encouraged me to watch two films and they both sucked and here we are. If you want to see the rest of the films mentioned in this micro ‘zine, you can get your own copy of this ‘zine here.

Have you seen In the Mouth of Madness or Stigmata? Do you agree with my assessments or have I got this completely wrong. Feel free to sound off in the comments.

Oddtober 2024: Bad Religion – Cartoons for Christ

I really want to know – and I am being completely serious here, this is not a rhetorical question – do you know anyone whose faith was changed or otherwise influenced by unsolicited religious cartoons? Because it’s hard for me to fill in the dots between this interesting piece of mail we got during the summer and sincere religious awakening.

Behold these offerings from gospelpostcards.com, sent so that they might give us “the courage to trust in Jesus” (and click on each image to see the larger version): An arrogant man smoking a cigar is smugly expecting to get into heaven because his sins were fairly venal. God choinks that notion right out of his head because he hasn’t been saved but drops him back on Earth so he can try again because God’s cool like that. He reads the bible and is now ready to die and go to Heaven.

And that this lunatic piece of mail is laminated better than a Denny’s menu just makes sense. This won’t be biodegrading any time soon, which is a blessing in surprise. Truth like this needs to be preserved at least long enough after the eco-collapse so that the aliens tracking our progress as a species will understand what exactly went wrong.

As I considered these bizarrely flippant cartoons, I was reminded of a piece of my childhood. When I was a little girl, there was a woman on my street who gave out homemade treats for Halloween, like popcorn balls wrapped in wax paper. Because the whole “razors in apples” canard was getting its legs, of course no parent would let their kids eat those treats so eventually very few kids went to her house on Halloween. However, even though she tossed any treats I received from the neighbor, my mother always made me go trick or treat at her house, because in addition to the homemade treats the neighbor also gave out Jack Chick tracts, as well as a nickel or a dime, which I think was meant for kids to give to UNICEF.

If you are unfamiliar with Jack Chick and his tracts, they were small cartoon ‘zines with horribly exaggerated ideas about how evil society is and how doing any small thing – like participating in role playing games, smoking a cigarette, or watching horror movies – can lead directly to a life of absolute depravity and ensure permanent residence in Hell. The official Chick tract site still has tracts you can order to include with candy when innocent children come to your door on Halloween. Even the watered down tracts meant for children are terrifying, so really they are appropriate to give out on Halloween, the scariest of the scary days.

My mother loved those Chick tracts. She was a Christian, with a reasonable level of respect for Christian sects, but she found Chick tracts so hilarious that she made me go to that house even though I felt weird doing it. I was pretty much the only kid on the street who went. In retrospect, I bet it made the lady happy that at least one kid came to her door, and even though she was the sort of woman who gave Chick tracts to children, she still went through the motions of making nice treats. She was just stuck in the 1950s when giving out homemade fudge was acceptable and was blinded to the horror of those tracts because they were cartoons, like that lovable Charlie Brown and his well behaved coterie of friends.

So, telling the “Johnny deeper” story can and will condemn you to hell. Good to know.

My mother cackled over those stupid tracts, absolutely grooving on how lunatic they were. Jenny took a toke and ended up strung out on heroine and a prostitute in under a week, or Johnny smiled too long at the quarterback during homeroom and found himself on the wrong end of a glory hole in a truck stop in Peoria. Of course that’s just an exaggerated paraphrase of the content in such tracts, because I can’t recall exactly what they all said, but I do recall one of the tracts’ content fairly clearly because it just added to my fear of being watched. “This Was Your Life” features a sinner getting mowed down by Death (complete with a scythe) and being taken to heaven where he was forced to watch as his entire life was played out, projected on a wall like a home movie. God had scenes from his life to show him the extraordinary amount of sin he had engaged in since birth. He played with a dragon plush rather than a sweet little doll. He told a dirty story in junior high. He glanced at a pretty woman once. He wondered who was winning the football game while he was supposed to be contemplating the sermon in church. He was summarily cast into Hell, and the tract helpfully gave humans a better path to follow to avoid eternal damnation.

So I got to marry God’s continual home movie camera poised over me to record every time I told a fib with my fear of some lunatic living in the walls of the house, watching my every move. I tend to think I would have had an easier childhood had I just worried about nuclear war, the boogeyman, and random perverts.

And all of this reminds me of the infamous “Lisa” Chick tract. If you’ve managed to make it this far in life without knowing about “Lisa,” you’re truly blessed. It’s sickeningly awful, but I’ll paraphrase it for you anyway. You see, a little girl named Lisa had the misfortune of belonging to a working mother and alcoholic unemployed child molester father. Because his wife has to work to support the family, Dad feels emasculated and drinks even more and begins to have sex with his very young daughter, Lisa. His neighbor can hear him molesting Lisa through the shared wall of their townhouse and says he won’t tell if he gets a shot at Lisa, too. Then dad has to take Lisa to the doctor, where he learns she has a sexually transmitted disease. The doctor knows the dad is raping Lisa, but instead of calling the police or beating Dad to death with his bare hands, he preaches about Jesus and BOOM! Dad and Mom embrace the word of the Lord and promise Lisa she will no longer be forced to sexually service adults, hurray!

I share all of this because it means I can also share Alice Donut’s take on the Lisa tract in their video, “Lisa’s Father.”

If you need me, I’ll be playing Dungeons and Dragons and smoking a cigarette while watching The Craft.

Oddtober 2024: Tears of a Komsomol Girl by Audrey Szasz

Book: Tears of a Komsomol Girl

Author: Audrey Szasz

Type of Book: A hybrid of true crime, photography, literary fiction, historical fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Jesus Christ, this book…

Availability: First published in 2020 by Infinity Land Press, you can get a copy here. My copy is from a 2022 reprint.

Comments: I said in yesterday’s look at Grady Hendrix’s take on the final girl trope that today I would be discussing an anti-final girl, and while that is sort of a flippant way to broadcast a new entry, it’s still an accurate assessment. Arina, or Arisha as her mother calls her, dies several deaths in this novel, and though she (sometimes only) dies in her dreams, her deaths are no less real and devastating for that fact.

This is one of those times when I realize I’ve come across something rare and so odd I am almost uncomfortable trying to discuss it. I know there are subtexts I will miss. I know that there are ideas and emotions Szasz is trying to convey that I will overlook entirely. But the inevitability that I will get things wrong also comes with a bit of excitement, especially if it means others who have tackled this book come and discuss it with me (hint, hint).

Arina is fourteen and lives in Russia during the heady days of glasnost and perestroika, an uneasy time when the culture change from communist control to a more open approach to trade and politics is just beginning. The specters of the old ways are crashing headfirst into the dangers of the new ways and Arina is trying to find her way in the midst of this change. Alongside Arina’s arrogant yet hopeful explorations, the Ripper of Rostov, one Andrei Chikatilo, is murdering people in horrific, gory ways and he too is a specter that haunts Arina.

This is a novel with an unreliable narrator and pays no attention to a linear progression of time. Arina, an accomplished violinist who aspires to become a professional musician, attends a boarding school for gifted students but she also attends a school near her home, sometimes returning to a dormitory, sometimes returning home to her mother. Sometimes she is an orphan, sometimes she lives with both parents, and sometimes only her mother is at home.

Arina’s versions of her life are always grounded in some very specific realities, mainly that she is small and looks younger than she actually is and she knows she is prey even as she hopes one day to become a predator in her own right. She does not want to be a murderous predator, but rather hopes her already jaded approach to male-female interactions enable her to make “connections” that will serve her well when she is an adult. She approaches the dying days of the USSR by graduating from Young Pioneers to becoming a Komsomol girl, and she approaches party politics the way she does her sexual interactions – it is something she does with an eye to building connections that can later assist her in her future ambitions.

Arina doesn’t hesitate to discuss herself as a bratty girl. She complains endlessly about the cheap, man-made leather shoes her mother purchased for her, one of the consistent threads in her different stories, she admits she has the sense that she is better than others, and she engages in uneasy behaviors, like covert masturbation as her family is gathered, watching a video of one of her performances. She does not worry that her recitations of her less positive qualities will ever hamper her, as she is profoundly confident in her capabilities to navigate the world around her and manipulate the situations in which she finds herself. Or at least she thinks she can until she encounters the killer she calls Satan, Mr. Chikatilo, and it is in his presence, even if it is only in her nightmares, that she encounters a force that genuinely reveals her vulnerabilities and forces her to regard herself as a victim who does not have control, dignity or even bodily integrity if a strong adult decides to take them from her.

It’s so tempting to discuss this novel in terms of the collision between old communism and the changes that awaited Eastern Europe after the dissolution of the USSR and the fall of the Berlin wall. Chikatilo, born in Ukraine right after the Holodomor and right before the horrors of the Second World War, endured a savage upbringing. He may or may not have lost a sibling to cannibalism, but undeniably he lived in dire poverty until he was an adult. Shaped by chaotic political violence, it would have been difficult for him to conform to the necessary self-control required in the USSR even had he been sane. But he wasn’t sane and the structure that communism would have given him he ultimately devoured with every person he killed. Arina, on the other hand, raised in structure so confining that she lives a life longing for ultimate freedom, was more than poised to leap into the brave, new, unstable world of travel, work and freedom but was herself devoured by the chaotic past, and it happened over and over, each dream of her death at the hands of Satan worse than the one before.

But that is just one of many ways to look at this astonishing novel. Another is that all the versions of herself that Arina conveys are elements of the experiences clever but underprivileged girls faced in the USSR, even as it became Russia. One could see her different stories as the results of small changes in her environment that, when reset, left her on a similar but somewhat different path. She is in turns a girl from an abusive home where fathers beat unfaithful wives, a girl sent to an orphanage when her parents died, a girl who was preyed upon by those in power in a supposedly classless society, a girl who would be ravaged by the past before she could begin living her future. But Arina also represents every teen girl anywhere. The anger she felt over her man-made leather shoes that looked cheap and did not hold up to the weather well, being unable to please her mother no matter how much she practiced her violin, being in possession of a new body and the new power that comes with it – this is the state of all girls everywhere. The arrogance of youth is universal, as is its hope. I would have been an age peer of Arina’s and her inner life was not wholly different from mine and the main difference is that Arina, by virtue of where she lived, was more or less born to be prey and no matter how her life changed from chapter to chapter, her end would always be the same. She may live a different life during the day but at night Satan always takes her in her dreams until one day she does not get a chance to rewrite the story of her life.

Arina’s dreams and reality can be summed up in a passage where she meets a man with whom she begins a sexual affair (and keep in mind she is fourteen and looks even younger while he is very much an adult), a man she calls Uncle Vanya. She walks past his chauffeured car and it is so obviously a symbol of the wealth and power she one day hopes for herself that she stops and looks at the car intently, seeing her own reflection shining back at her from the immaculately clean vehicle. This seems like a great symbol – she sees herself in the objects that represent a life far better than the one she currently lives. But then the chauffeur steps out and threatens her, telling her to leave. Uncle Vanya tells his driver to stand down and takes his measure of Arina, feeling her out to see how much intolerable behavior she will accept. When she lies and says she is much older than she is, he understands she is both too young to understand the near-Faustian bargain she will make if she accepts the ride he offers, but is old enough to feel as if she controls the situation since she caught the eye of a much older, wealthy and powerful man. And in the end, Arina does not seem to mind what Uncle Vanya and his friends want from her and because she is willing, she does not see it as a violation because she experiences true violation every time she dreams of Satan. It’s also interesting to note that one of her sexual fantasies where she is not raped and murdered involves a very involved dream about a Lenin statue coming to life.

This is a brutal novel but even in the most excruciating passages discussing the harm that comes to Arina, Szasz writes the horror with an almost poetic hand, but other times her hand holds a hammer, as does Satan during one of his attacks on Arina.

The photography in this book is disturbing, showing what happens to Arina in her dreams of Satan. Photographed and illustrated by Karolina Urbaniuk, the black and white photos in this book are of Szasz, wearing the same clothes and hair style but experiencing violence differently in each nightmare attack. Each chapter begins with a photo of Szasz as Arina, featured in a collage of other famous people and common sights in Russia, with a photo of her ravaged body later in the chapter. Each violent photo is accompanied by a paragraph or so of Russian that looks as if it could be from a newspaper clipping. Intrigued, I used Google Image translate and realized the text in those images came from the things Arina says during her attacks.

The final attack is, understandably, the one that affected me the most. Arina, wearing the dreaded synthetic leather moccasins she hates, is rushing to a Komsomol Youth meeting where lateness is not tolerated. The bus breaks down and everyone is forced off the bus in the rain and Arina is distressed about potentially being late and in trouble. Chikatilo, who has been stalking her, is on that bus and attempts to comfort her, reminding her that she had no control over the bus breaking down. He urges her to come with him back to his home where she can dry off and wait out the storm, and knowing she absolutely should not follow him, she does anyway, almost fatalistically going to her death. Once she arrives inside the shack, she knows she is in trouble but remains calm, holding onto a sliver of doubt that perhaps this would not end poorly, thinking perhaps she is being too hasty in her opinions. But then it happens and nothing can save her, and in this scene I forgot how obnoxious Arina was, how arrogant and scheming and bratty she was.

She became to me what she was and always was – a teen girl in a dangerous world where terrible things happen to the weak and no amount of pleading or dreams of power could change that.

There are so many ways to explore this novel that I hope others who have read it find this discussion and tell me how they processed it. I cannot say if this is a book you should read, because it is violent and upsetting. However, I can say I found this to be a remarkable book, so remarkable that you may notice by their absence the swaths of text I often reproduce when I discuss books. I did not quote from this book because I have no idea which section would best represent the elements of this book that spoke to me, a former spooky girl who lived in my head and never knew what damage was waiting for me to find it. The entire book is a memory and a revelation to the right reader, and if you are that sort of reader, I highly recommend it.

Oddtober 2024: Final Girl Meta – The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

Book: The Final Girl Support Group

Author: Grady Hendrix

Type of Book: Fiction, horror, dark humor

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s not wholly odd, but sometimes you can veer off the odd path when it’s Oddtober and you want to discuss final girls.

Availability: Published by Berkley in 2021, you can get a copy here.

Comments: Grady Hendrix really knows how to create tiresome female lead characters who really drive home how irritating they are even as you want them to win. He did it in Horrorstör, which has been discussed on this site, and he did it in The Final Girl Support Group. The heroine in this novel really is quite tiresome, but I kept reading even as I was rubbed the wrong way because Hendrix, through the use of high tension and a perpetually caroming plot, keeps his reader in such a state of anticipation that the miserable inner chaos of his lead character seems very fitting.

There have been several movies and books released over the last decade or so that use the “final girl” trope. I discussed one of them in yesterday’s look at the film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, I am neither pro nor con regarding meta-heavy looks at horror, but I prefer those that are black comedies or outright parodies. Though Hendrix manages to maintain a tense plot, this is a comedic book, mainly because the heroine, when juxtaposed with the other final girls in the book, is such a mess. The book can be very deep in terms of psychology, giving a look at what PTSD can do to survivors of violent crime, but ultimately it is mostly a rollicking, fun horror novel that takes the final girl trope and runs with it in a million directions all at once. And, to give Hendrix his due, I had a couple of “a ha!” moments after reading that were gratifying, like realizing how it was one character’s computer was “hacked.” Just half an a hour ago before writing this I suddenly understood why the psychiatrist’s son was being such a brat, antagonizing one of the final girls and urging her to read his self-drawn comic book. It’s hard to have a tight, labyrinthine plot, but Hendrix pulls it off with such ease you don’t realize it until the black humor fades and the plot points take center stage.

Here’s a quick synopsis and be aware that there may be spoilers though I am going to do my level best not to ruin the ending: In the fine tradition of Palahniuk’s use of support groups to bring together unlikely characters, final girls from notorious murder cases that closely mirror the plots of famous horror movie franchises have come together for group therapy. The recovery from their violent pasts has varied from woman to woman, but none have struggled more than Lynnette, whose descent into PTSD-fueled paranoia has taken over her life and turned her into a terrified but well-organized fear machine who is also surprisingly cowardly when push comes to shove. Then one day the woman who best handled her attack – Adrienne – is murdered, and on the day she is killed the rest of the group experience odd and violent events that make it seem as if they are all under attack again. Lynnette, paranoiac that she is, knows something terrible is happening to them but has a hard time convincing the other girls. When it is revealed that Lynnette had been writing a book about the group that had very unflattering portrayals of the group and their psychiatrist, Dr. Carol, Lynnette becomes the temporary villain of the piece, as she was the reason so much information got out about the final girls, putting them in danger. As Lynnette is forced to find the other final girls and plead her case about them all being in danger, she is hurled through all sorts of violent and harrowing situations as she pieces together what is really happening. When she realizes who the killer is, she sets in motion her extremely violent redemption.

That’s all I will give of the plot, but it will hurt nothing to discuss the final girls in this book because half the fun of the novel is the sort of fangirl (or boy) experience of seeing the characters who shaped the horror films of your childhood reconfigured into the women in this novel. Here’s a look at the cast of characters, who all have the first or last name of the actress who portrayed their characters:

Lynnette Tarkington is inspired by a girl who had a very limited role in the first movie in the “so bad it’s good” Christmas horror franchise, Silent Night, Deadly Night. The role is played by scream queen, Linnea Quigley, and Lynnette is clearly a call back to “Linnea.” When the deranged Santa in the film breaks into a family home, he finds a girl who had just had sex on the family pool table, picks her up and impales her on a mounted stag head, ramming the antlers through her torso. Lynnette plays dead and survives, and part of the reason she was never able to move on as well as the other final girls in her support group is because she merely survived the attack that killed her entire family. She did not kill the men who harmed her, and that has caused some of the women in the support group to believe she is not a genuine final girl. She wants to support the other women but when she is initially given the chance to save one of her therapy-mates, she chokes. Overcoming the bone-crushing fear that narrows her focus to her own survival and nothing more will be difficult for her.

Adrienne Butler is a rare black final girl who is inspired by Alice from the first installment of the Friday the 13th franchise. She survived and killed the man who attacked the counselors who let his son drown (he never really had a son though) and was appalled when her struggle was turned into a film. She later sued, took control of the franchise and bought the camp where she was attacked and turned it into a retreat for abused and victimized women.

Heather DeLuca is an amalgam between Nancy from the first A Nightmare on Elm Street and Kristen from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Though she is clearly meant to signal association with Nancy, played by Heather Langenkamp, she has become fairly insane since killing her more prosaic attacker (Hendrix has to limit the supernatural elements a bit to keep this novel grounded in a more possible reality) and has a terrible drug habit as well, which links her to the character Kristen, played by Patricia Arquette. She’s erratic, and is as ruthless about her survival as Lynnette. She is darkly hilarious, as well.

Marilyn Torres is my favorite final girl in this novel. She is based on Sally from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and is the most self-contained, resilient and reliable woman in the group. She was a Texas debutante who insisted she be able to attend her coming-out ball, even as others felt it was in bad taste, just to give her attacker one final metaphorical fatal blow. She married into extreme wealth and is the woman the others go to when they need help, especially after Adrienne is killed. She is polite, kind, and maniacally focused on doing what she considers to be morally sound. She is also very dignified and proper in the fashion of women raised in big town Texas in the 1980s and 1990s, which rings very true to me.

Dani Shipman threw me for a moment because she was a woman whose brother broke out of an asylum on Halloween and ostensibly found her to try to kill her in the parking lot of a hospital. This to me was clearly a reference to Jamie Lee Curtis’ role from Halloween 2, so her name should have been Jamie, right? Except later in the franchise, when Jamie Lee Curtis’s character is killed at the beginning of Halloween 4, a new Jamie is introduced as Michael Myers niece, and she is played by an actress called Danielle Shipman, who later plays Annie in Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake in 2007. Dani is in a relationship with a woman dying of cancer when the events of the novel get rolling and, in my opinion, is the saddest final girl in the book because she really does have everything taken from her in the end, or at least everything that really matters.

Julia Campbell is based on Neve Campbell’s character from Scream. She kills her two attackers but ends up a paraplegic as a result. She’s my least favorite of the final girls and I am not sure why. Likely because the first introduction to her shows her to be a confrontational, somewhat mean girl, but really, who could blame her. She and Adrienne were the faces of the final girl phenomenon as it played out in the press.

Because I do not want to spoil this book entirely while wanting to talk about Marilyn some, I’m going to discuss one scene from the book that doesn’t really affect how it ends. Dani has been taken into custody because there is some belief that her brother did not commit the murders in the hospital and that Dani killed him unnecessarily. Dani’s wife, Michelle, is dying of cancer and Dani had promised her that she would make sure Michelle was able to die on her ranch, but when Dani is arrested for shooting at the police who wanted to take her in for questioning, Michelle is placed in hospice care. Both Heather and Lynnette descended on Marilyn when their lives began to implode after Adrienne’s death, and Lynnette manages to persuade Marilyn to drive them to see Michelle. Once there, Lynnette’s conscience demands that she get Michelle out of there so she can die at home like Dani promised her. What follows is grimly hilarious, and the only thing that keeps it from becoming an outright atrocity against a sick woman and the nurses who want to keep her comfortable is Marilyn’s innate decency and Texas rich girl ability to control bad situations.

As an orderly seems as if he is about to prevent them from leaving with Michelle’s near-corpse, Marilyn saves the day with her taser:

“You zapped him in the nuts,” the teenaged girl says, incredulous.

“Fucking A,” Heather says.

“I want you to know that I deeply, deeply resent the position you’ve put me in,” Marilyn tells me.

The three manage to get the dying woman into Marilyn’s super expensive SUV and unfortunately the woman loses control of her bowels. Against the wishes of the other two she decides to deal with the situation:

“I am not going to let this woman sit in her own mess,” she says, curving down the exit ramp onto a surface street, heading toward a Ralphs supermarket. “She is Dani’s special friend, and she deserves some dignity.”

When Heather makes a smart remark to this, Marilyn takes her in hand:

Marilyn parks, cuts off the engine, and rounds on Heather.

“This is a natural human process,” she snaps. “We will accord her the respect that any of us would expect if we were in her situation.”

She then barks orders at Heather and Lynnette, goes inside the store to get adult diapers and some water, and once she can comfortably clean up the dying Michelle, she does so without any complaint. She places all the soiled towels and clothing into plastic shopping bags.

“Heather, go throw this away.”

“I’m not touching that,” Heather says. “Just leave it.”

“We are not litterbugs,” Marilyn snaps. “Throw this away or I’ll smack you.”

Heather does as she is told. I just adore Marilyn.

I was hesitant to read this book because I was lukewarm toward Horrorstör and because I’d read reviews that said this book was hard to follow, with too many characters and other complaints about the pacing. That is why I seldom read reviews before I read any book because mileage varies so much in fiction, all the more so in genre fiction, that reviews often lead me astray. I found the book very easy to follow once I realized the key to understanding who the women were and what they represented, and that happened as soon as I noticed there were characters named “Heather” and “Adrienne.” I suspect that if a reader does not have a very strong background in horror films, especially those from the twentieth century, this book may seem confusing at first. Luckily that was not a problem for me. I really enjoyed this look at what becomes of final girls when their monsters are slain, and it’s an excellent meta-look at the trope of final girls, how women deal with institutionalized violence and how hard it can be to rise above what is done to you. Highly recommended.

Come back to tomorrow for a look at a sort of anti-final girl book, a book where there is only one girl who is killed over and over again.

Oddtober 2024: Final Girl Meta – Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

By now, all horror fans worth their salt are aware of the tropes that horror films use. Wes Craven’s 1996 film Scream was one of the first horror films that dissected the tropes as they were happening, showing us the rules to horror movies as they played out on screen. We all should have a firm grasp of horror tropes now. The killer is never dead at the end, no matter how charred his body is, or how riddled with bullets he seems. Taking your clothes off for any reason is a bad idea. The person who says, “I’ll be back in a minute,” will never return. Never for any reason go into the basement when the killer cuts the power lines. Basic stuff.

The rules satirized in Scream also helped define the Final Girl in horror films. Bad girls who drank, did drugs and had sex were going to be killed first, leaving the sober and sexually virtuous good girl as the “final girl” who faces down evil and destroys it (until the killer is resurrected for the sequel). Scream subverted that rule, as Sidney, the final girl, loses her virginity right before she is tasked with eliminating the two doofuses who have been terrorizing and killing people.

Final girls have always played a part in horror films that focus on killers. Their roles are almost instinctual, primal, repeating the same pattern of behavior regardless of the film or the director. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre gave us blonde, brave but terrified Sally, who escaped when everyone else fell to Leatherface. She didn’t kill the cannibals but she managed to get away, definitely a final girl. Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Laurie from Halloween, Alice from the first Friday the 13th, Sarah from Descent, and, of course, Sidney from Scream all embody the sort of purity combined with intelligence that permitted them to survive at the end.

There are too many examples of this trope to list them all, and there have been a lot of self-aware films like Scream or Cabin in the Woods where the Final Girl trope is explored, but none are as good, in my opinion as Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a terribly underrated mockumentary and black comedy about an aspiring serial killer and his preparation for his first real rampage. All the serial killer tropes are laid out, alongside self-referential takes on how much cardio a killer must engage in to be able to track down running victims, the ridiculous desire for victims to clump together, the equally bizarre tendency for fleeing victims to trip and fall on level ground, and similar rules. But the best bit of meta in this film is the “final girl” trope, which is called the “survivor girl.”

Right about here you may want to stop reading if you have yet to see this film because there will be spoilers.

A quick summary is in order: Taylor, an aspiring film maker arrives in a small town in Maryland with her two member crew to record the preparation of one Leslie Vernon, an ostensibly abused boy with a miserable back story, for his return to the town that spurned him to exact revenge on as many teens as he can. Leslie and Taylor have a weird chemistry that becomes more obvious as the film goes on, as Leslie introduces Taylor and the crew to his serial killing mentor, played by the superb late Scott Walker, and discusses all the cliches and tropes Leslie engages in and uses in his preparation for his rampage. Leslie has ostensibly selected a virginal blonde named Kelly to be his “survivor girl,” and he intends to descend on Kelly and her friends as they hang out in the old Vernon home to get stoned and party. Taylor and her film crew decide they can’t let Leslie kill the teens and Taylor engages in a final showdown with Leslie. The film also features the late Zelda Rubenstein as a librarian and Robert Englund, Freddy Krueger to you and me, as Leslie Vernon’s psychiatrist. His role harks back to Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis in Halloween, and he clearly had a great time chewing the scenery in every shot he was in.

The relationship between Taylor and Leslie is the most interesting part of this film. Leslie is training to become a legendary serial killer like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, and initially Taylor is enthusiastic, if not a little squeamish, to document Leslie’s preparation. Initially they seem to have an openly symbiotic relationship – she gets to make a (hopefully) well-received documentary and he gets to enjoy the fame and notoriety such a documentary will give him. But Taylor’s humanity rises up, almost predictably, and if I can predict it, that means that Leslie did as well. Taylor discovers that Kelly was not really ever meant to be the “survivor” girl, and that Leslie’s plans for mayhem were far more carefully laid out and prepared for than she could have imagined.

Taylor is watching Leslie get ready to begin his rampage, putting on makeup. The gender role reversal here is very interesting.

In one scene, Leslie discusses the sexual elements of the serial killer versus victim interactions. Killers seldom pull characters out of closets and kill them because closets symbolize a sacred safety in the womb. Final girls almost never use guns because part of the credo demands the girls find and use a phallic-like object to kill their attacker. And since those survivor or final girls are supposed to be virtuous virgins, by using a phallic object to kill an attacker, they are symbolically becoming women while changing roles with the male killer as the penetrator. Leslie wants his survivor girl to be worth all the effort he has put into his plans, especially since his mentor ended up marrying his final girl, and he cleverly sets up Taylor to play a far more hands-on role in his rampage.

As absorbed in the meta as this film is, the interesting connection between Taylor and Leslie gives this film an interesting tension that plays well alongside the humor in the film. Leslie Vernon is intense but he also has a jocular sense of humor, and Taylor’s flustered attempts to control what is happening are outright funny as she cannot help but engage in the exact tropes Leslie has explained to her. In one especially funny scene, Leslie forces Taylor and her crew to leave the house where the teens are partying because he says she has a look on her face. What look, you may ask. “The we can’t just stand here and let this happen look.” Later, when Taylor tries to convince her crew to help her stop the massacre, she utters that exact phrase, which her crew points out is exactly what Leslie said when he threw them out. Later, Taylor realizes Kelly was never meant to be the final girl. Taylor, virginal and nervous, is the final girl, and far from it being a terrible betrayal, it’s clear Leslie made his selection because Taylor was the best possible foil.

Sometimes the one you’ve planning to kill was right in front of you all along.

This film is notable to me because of the very real relationship shown between the final girl and the killer. No long-lost sister, no revenge motive. Just a girl selected specifically by the killer because he knows she is the perfect woman to play the role of the final girl, seeing in her the capacity for survival that she would never have seen in herself. It’s a strangely touching conceit, to create such a bond between killer and final girl, one that is not tainted at the end like Sidney Prescott’s bond with the killers in Scream. The killers in Scream hated Sidney and wanted revenge on her for her mother’s own promiscuous behaviors that broke up families, but they never selected her believing that she could potentially defeat them. The motive was revenge, pure and simple (and also because they were psychopaths…). Leslie’s choice for his final girl is far more personal and, strangely, egalitarian. He picks his final girl because he knows she could defeat him.

If you are a fan of horror movies and you have not seen this film, go and watch it. Even though I spoiled it, there is a lot – a lot – I have not touched on. It’s a funny, violent, creepy and unexpected gem of a film. Check in tomorrow for more on the Final Girl trope.

Oddtober 2024: Murder Ballads, Part Two

Continuing on the topic of yesterday’s discussion about murder ballads that deal with femicide or star-crossed lovers, let’s talk about murder ballads that celebrate killers as folk heroes. When I think of murder ballads, one of the first names I think of is “Stagger Lee,” which is based on a genuine crime that took place on the day after Christmas, 1895. Evidently a man named Sheldon “Stack” Lee shot to death a man named William Lyon. The two were friends, but they had a conversation about politics that led to ill-will and culminating with Bill Lyon snatching Lee’s hat from his head and when Lyon refused to give it back, Lee shot him. The number of people who have performed variations on this song are numerous, among them Elvis, The Ventures, and, incredibly, even a disco-country hybrid by Dr. Hook. The adulation of Stagger Lee seems to be based on his general badassery and the fact that the ladies evidently loved him. I’m including Nick Cave’s take on “Stagger Lee” because I won’t have enough time to discuss his Murder Ballads album in the depth it deserves and feel conflicted about it. I really do need to revisit this topic when I’m not doing Oddtober entries and and spend more time down the murder ballads rabbit hole.

Another criminal as folk hero song I immediately thought of is all the variations on “Tom Dooley.” I include it in the folk hero category because even though the titular Tom shot a woman to death, the focus of the song was less on why it is men need to kill women and more on how Tom handled the death sentence he received. The most famous version of “Tom Dooley” is performed by the band Kingston Trio and it never explains why old Tom killed a lady but instead focuses on how it was he would have gotten away with it had a lawman named Grayson not found him and how very sad it was that the “poor boy” Tom was going to meet his end at the gallows. It straddles the line but since the more famous variations really do focus on how unfortunate it was that Tom was going to hang, it seems more folk-hero-ish to me.

Murder ballads in the United States, when not borrowed from the “boy knocks up girl and kills her” tradition from northern Europe that influenced the songs from the old South and the Appalachians, often focus on rogues associated with the western frontier. You can’t shake a stick at all the songs written about Jesse James, variations of which were performed by Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, The Kingston Trio and many others. One of the more famous versions of the folk hero murder ballad considers Jesse James a sort of dogpatch Robin Hood, lauding him for stealing from train barons and giving it to the poor (which is a very interesting way of looking at his crimes), and excoriating Robert Ford as the coward who shot him. Similarly you’d have a hard time pinning down all the versions of murder ballads praising Robin Hood, either mourning his death (generally by bloodletting to cure an illness) or celebrating Robin Hood’s aim as he killed by bow and arrow those sent to put an end to his generous ways.

And all of that is well and good, but the most interesting folk hero murder ballads I found were in the rap and hip hop genres. “97 Bonnie and Clyde” by Eminem is an autobiographical folk hero murder ballad. He is Clyde, his daughter is Bonnie, and is by his side, an innocent witness, as he disposes of his wife’s body. He’s his own hero, invoking the memory of a beloved but fairly awful couple, likening his actions to those of the duo who robbed and killed their way across Texas and Oklahoma, dying in a shoot-out in Louisiana. Bonnie and Clyde show up in a fair number of folk hero murder ballads in bluegrass and country music, as they too had the appearance of being Robin Hood-style thieves whose deaths at the hands of law enforcement was seen as heroes going down in a blaze of glory. One song in particular sung by Merle Haggard insists that some may see Bonnie as a victim of Clyde’s, forced to do what he told her to do, but that she was the real hero in that rampaging duo, rehabilitating her image in a way.

The most puzzling folk hero murder ballads I’ve come across are by a band called SKYND, a two-person effort wherein the band members have somehow remained anonymous. I suspect fourteen-year-old me would have loved this music but in my current incarnation I have questions. SKYND performs original songs named after killers or their victims and it can be hard to pin down what exactly the band wants to convey, especially when the videos are considered alongside the songs themselves. This is music made for the digital age and the videos are the vehicles that first reach listeners so they seem pretty important in sussing out what this band is trying to do.

SKYND performed two very sympathetic songs, “Bianca Devins” and “Elisa Lam,” about two doomed young women, but their songs about serial killers are not as clear to me. For example, the song about Gary Heidnik, a psychopath who kidnapped prostitutes to keep in his basement as sex slaves, is told from Heidnik’s perspective that is also mixed with a bit of third person narration. The song itself is basically a recitation of Heidnik’s terrible crimes with punchy lines like “the dog food looked good enough, good enough to eat,” making light of the kidnap of one victim on Thanksgiving, and that’s all factual – Heidnik fed the women dog food when he wasn’t forcing them into cannibalizing one of their dead basement-mates, and one victim was indeed taken on Thanksgiving. It could be considered an edgy song about a serial killer until you see the video. The video seems to be painting Heidnik as a some sort of playboy, the white, leggy models he kidnapped looking nothing like the poor drug-addicted minorities he preyed on. He dances with the victims, showing them hanging off of his arm like starlets next to male leads, arriving at a movie premiere.

The video itself is unsettling to the point of parody, and I wondered if the singer was mocking Heidnik by showing what might be considered his point of view – a handsome lothario with women clamoring to worship at his feet – but that was not Heidnik’s goal. He wanted sex slaves who could bear his children, and though he felt that he could create a perfect race of mixed-race children (his victims were all women of color), there did not seem to be a religious element to it that justifies showing the women clamoring for their captor. There is something to the idea that Heidnik saw himself as a messianic figure, as he founded a cult that was so loyal that they continued to meet after his arrest (it was a very small cult, around 50 members). The song has lines like “God, He would be amused to see you at my feet,” and “God has a sense of humor,” which leans toward assigning Heidnik a messianic goal, but given all the bizarre choices in the video, I have no idea why the band decided to show his victims as fawning over him.

Heidik’s crimes were actually so horrible that I wonder if that is one of the reasons I have had such a kneejerk reaction to this campy video. He inflicted some of the worst torture imaginable on the women he kidnapped. Heidnik himself was a cretin. Even if SKYND is approaching the song as a parody of the mind of a demented killer, they miss the mark.

Their other videos are similarly head-scratching. I’m all the more uneasy because the people in the comments for these videos seem to understand what SKYND is trying to accomplish yet do not evince any positive emotions for the killers, though the stranger elements of the videos, like Gary Heidnik trying to run human limbs through a blender, cause commenters to praise the loony gore.

Perhaps part of my puzzlement is that I know way too much about some of the people SKYND discusses in their songs, and have known about them in some cases for decades, and immediately can smell bullshit or shallow research into these killers. The lyrics demonstrate a shallow dive, indicating either the worst was tamped down to accommodate a weird hero narrative or were the result of a jaded songwriter who is in on a joke many of us don’t get. But whatever the intention, SKYND’s catalog is mostly looks at socially relevant killers or those who still have online cache, like Jim Jones, the Columbine mass shooting, the suicide whisperer Michelle Carter, Richard Ramirez and more, and are beyond a doubt murder ballads. Some may belong more in the “boy kills girl” category, like the song “Bianca Devins,” but most of the band’s catalogue presents such uneven or odd looks at some foul human beings that I feel comfortable placing the band’s songs in the folk hero murder ballad classification.

Narcocorridos are murder ballads that make more sense to me, and like most gringos, I was unaware of them until Breaking Bad let us know about these songs.

Narcocorridos are songs about Mexican criminals, often cartel members, whose acts of violence and lavish lifestyles fuel folk hero murder ballads about them. The stories of absolutely frightening (mostly) men who distribute drugs, torture and kill their enemies, control the police and live lavish lives are presented in a folk hero manner. Songs praising Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and El Chapo present them as badasses whose lives are enviable, but these songs have also led to the murders of band members who perform these songs. You piss off one cartel boss by praising his enemy, you could very well end up killed yourself. Valentín Elizalde Valencia found this out the hard way. He had written a song that antagonized the Los Zetas cartel and actually received a note during his last performance asking him not to perform the song as a Zetas member was in the audience. Not willing to be controlled, as well as knowing that the note was also a tacit death notice, Valencia played the song twice and met his fate after the show. In fact, the actions Valencia took to play his music and the price he paid are themselves excellent fodder for a murder ballad.

Even more upsetting was the death of Chalino Sanchez. Not as famous as Valentín Elizalde, his story is no less epic and deserving of its own murder ballad. He was killed in 1992 and is considered one of the most influential narcocorrido singers. He too received a note, while on stage, and what it said no one knows, but it’s clear from his body language that it was not a letter wishing him well. Despite this, Sanchez performed his set as usual, and after was shot to death by killers unknown. It was the second time he had been shot that year – his songs clearly rattled some cages – and it is largely believed that narcos killed him.

Frankly I hope a murder ballad has been written to make Sanchez a folk hero. It takes some huevos to read a death threat, choke down the fear, and perform as usual.

There are so many narcocorridos that I have no hope of discussing even a small sampling beyond what I have already presented here, but it is a rabbit hole in and of itself, a reawakening of a story-telling form that began to wane elsewhere in North America in the 1980s because, as a whole, I think society began to find it hard to praise men who killed women because they had sex with them or to avoid marriage, or find much value in such messages. But the hero worship element lends itself better to the modern ear when the murderers are local boys who made good through crime and stayed in power via violence against enemies and law enforcement. They may have been terrible killers but the perception of their roles as badass heroes comes from people who see their narco heroes as people who are self-made and willing to kill corrupt government stooges to remain strong. The notion of the narcos discussed in such songs as heroes is also bolstered by the fact the narco gangs have begun to police themselves, eliminating members who do not abide by certain codes. But like Robin Hood, if you have men in an economically depressed country fighting back against ruthless powers that prefer for the poor to remain poor, the worst and violent narco’s actions can be seen as a blow for the common man. Plus young men really just like to listen to songs about men who do what they want and win at it (until they don’t).

One day I will definitely revisit this topic. I was just looking for some interesting Oddtober topics online and did not expect that a Norah Jones song would lead me down this cavernous rabbit hole that stretches back over 400 years and has spread into numerous musical genres. If you have a favorite murder ballad, share it with me. Your suggestions may well be my next rabbit hole.