Odds and Ends

An Odd Look at Veteran’s Day

So, did everyone’s great-grandmother keep scrapbooks where she pasted clippings from news stories about all the military personnel from her general area? Or was it just mine?

Click on all photos to see an enlarged version. This photo is very interesting. It’s such a basic reaction to shake a hand when offered and I wonder what would have happened to the soldier had he not caught himself in time.

My maternal grandfather’s mother spent untold hours of her life pasting newspaper clippings about military members into these now-crumbling scrapbooks. I am unsure how many of these she kept – I inherited these three after my mother died. They span from active war during WWII through the end of the Korean War and cover everything that could possibly happen to a person during and after war. Obituaries, mostly death in action notices. Missing in action notices. Deployment. Notices of boot camp graduation. Repatriation after internment in prisoner of war camps. Slices of life back home with new babies. Marriage notices. Fun stories about war brides who were waiting for their American GI husbands to get them back to the United States. Just thousands upon thousands of clippings about the men who served in WWII and the Korean War and who hailed from towns in and around Abilene, Texas.

There are some articles about men who were not Texans – for example, she saved a story about the four Roosevelt family members were were serving in active duty overseas and a story about a man from New York who died in action before ever meeting his triplet daughters who were born after he was shipped out – but the vast majority are stories about men from the towns around where she lived. I can only guess at her motives for maintaining these scrapbooks but I am beginning to suspect that I came honestly by my own obsessive interests and compulsive need to gather around me as many books and magazines as possible.

The pages of these scrapbooks are quite fragile. It’s impossible to really pore over them the way I want because the pages have all separated from the bindings. Some of the pages are crumbling and I really need to find a way to preserve them before they all turn to dust. These scrapbooks are piecemeal documentaries about war and places in time that seem worth holding onto for as long as I can. The newspaper articles are decidedly un-PC, referring to “japs” and “krauts.” They at times seem irreverent, discussing “Hitlerland” and “Nazi-Land.” Heartbreaking stories of teen boys killed in the line of duty bracketed by slice of life stories stateside. Harrowing stories of battles across both theaters of WWII. Some of them are baffling, like a soldier who initially refused to be traded with a Korean prisoner of war and repatriated, though he later changed his mind. I would love to know more about that one. Pages and pages and pages of the background characters in the story of the world, each the main character in their own story, even if only for a moment, but preserved for decades in a demented old woman’s scrapbooks. It would be terrible for these stories to be lost once and for all. I would love to somehow scan all of these clippings and get them on genealogy databases. I bet there’s a lot of lost family lore in these rotting pages. If an archivist comes across this paragraph and has some ideas, please let me know.

Her interest in all of these men and the wars that shaped their stories has, in a small way, rehabilitated my image of this woman who died before I was even born. Mary Isabelle “Mollie” Day was born in 1877, and like many women of her time, she had a passel of children and there was a significant, almost-generational gap between her oldest and youngest child. My grandfather was the youngest and he was tasked with taking care of his mother after his father died. I’ve discussed Mollie obliquely on this site before, mostly in a discussion of antinatalism, of all things. She was an absolute terror, or at least she was in her later life. Mollie ran roughshod over my sensitive and anxious grandmother and made my aunt a nervous wreck. My mother had to live with the old woman most of her youth and claims that she escaped unscathed but signs point to that statement being “a cope,” as the kids say. Mollie died in 1962 and all I knew of her is, of course, second-hand and, outside of knowing that in many respects she was a vile Irish hag, I know precious little about her.

When not documenting the soldiers from her old stomping grounds, Mollie collected feel-good stories about the war that probably made national news in some regard. I’d love to know her selection criteria because some of the clippings are straight-up loony. Like a cartoon depicting former German police dogs chasing down a terrified Hitler. Or one where a soldier who gave blood to save Tojo’s life was delighted when the man was hanged.

 

 

The poor thing lost part of its tail during a freeze.

Rummaging gently through the scrapbooks kept by a foul-tempered old woman is possibly the best way to remember the Armed Forces in America. It becomes hard, especially for someone who is not young herself anymore, to look at those earnest, well-scrubbed faces and know they all died, at ages far younger than me, decades before I was born. You see all those faces, all the specific people who carried the military mission on their backs, and you feel all sorts of emotions. Pride at the way the country came together during WWII (less so with the Korean War, at least for me), sadness at all the loss, empathy for mothers, wives and families who forever lost their futures, fury at the absolute waste of human potential, and bafflement when all those stories are flanked by a fluff piece about a dude who somehow brought a monkey back from the Pacific Front.

In among all these clippings, I did not expect to see a female Russian sniper.

You need to feel pride, sadness, pity, anger and bafflement when you think about the men and women who have served and currently serve in the American Armed Forces, I think. I wish I knew if this was something Mollie did her entire life. Are there scrapbooks of young American men who died in World War I that got separated from the ones I inherited? Why did Mollie decide to do this, aside from the obsessive compulsivity I mentioned earlier as a potential inherited trait. Mollie died in 1962, so she didn’t get a chance to collect clippings about the Vietnamese conflict, and by then the world was changing. I don’t think we’d see the same sort of oxymoronic jaded innocence seen in Mollie’s scrapbooks –  breathless stories about human triumph sandwiched between virulent racist caricatures were on the wane in the 1970s, though I probably shouldn’t say that with such conviction. I suspect had Mollie lived into her nineties and continued this endeavor, I’d walk away with similarly conflicted feelings.

War can show you the best and worst people can do, and in a weird way, Mollie’s scrapbooks reflects this dichotomy as it applies to her own legacy. These days I don’t immediately think “vile Irish hag” on the rare occasions I think about my great-grandmother. I now just think of her as Mollie, a weird, complicated old lady who probably would have understood my love of death photography. Mollie collected the images and faces of the people who lie beneath all those photos of military cemeteries you’ll see in your timelines today, and I wish I could share all of them today but I can’t. Even if time were not a consideration, I fear messing around too much in the scrapbooks lest they completely fall apart. But hopefully I shared enough of Mollie’s obsession that it makes this day a bit more complicated for you, too.

Lots of full-size photos of the scrapbooks under the cut.

Continue Reading “An Odd Look at Veteran’s Day”

Oddtober 2024: Catsploitation Zine, Part Three – The Black Cat edition

Clio will be so glad when Oddtober is over.

Told you I would revisit Catsploitation if I could. After discussing the first Catsploitation during ‘Zine September, I was eager to get my hands on more of these ‘zines for Oddtober but was worried I wouldn’t get them in time. Bast smiled upon me, and here it is, a look at Catsploitation Zine Part 3: The Black Cat Edition. Catsploitation Zine as a whole discusses fans of cinematic horror and their cats. This edition features fan reviews of horror films that feature black cats from 1934 to 1998, fan art and stories of the black cats owned by people who participated in the ‘zine in some manner. One of them is ‘zine creator Matthew Ragsdale’s memorial to one of his beloved cats, Mady.

‘Zines like this are difficult to discuss in depth because it more or less does what it says it is going to do. There are thirteen short film discussions with film-specific illustrations from fan submissions, and all of the reviews are helpful but succinct. Ragsdale found an interesting and diverse list of films to review for this ‘zine. I haven’t seen most of the films on his list, even though I am culturally aware of most them. This ‘zine will serve as a lovely playbill should I ever want to have a butt-numb-athon and spend a couple of days watching movies back to back.

I don’t want to spoil all of the films discussed, but I will mention a couple of them just to give an idea of the contents. Here’s a snippet from a discussion of The Black Cat (1934), which I am kind of ashamed to admit I have never seen:

Necrophilia, Satanism, drugs, a chess game of doom, torture, a black mass with human sacrifice, and a man being skinned the fuck alive. 1934’s pre-code The Black Cat is like a giant terror scenario onion that gets peeled back… sending us into a nightmare carnival of shadows with two mortal enemies locked in a game of death… and it’s marvelous.

This one is an early horror film two-for, starring both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. I really am surprised I’ve never seen this film.

At the other end of the spectrum is Kuroneko (1968), a movie wholly new to me:

Kuroneko (1968) directed by Kaneto Shindo is best approached less as a horror movie and more as a dark folk tale. There is the horror of inhumanity, but it’s not a frantic fear fest. Kuroneko is eerie. It’s a slow burn. Some may call it boring but it’s more of a tense journey into deals with the devil and revenge for atrocity against women.

Another film on the list is a title that whenever I see it, I always think that I need to stream it but I never get around to it. Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) is probably worth seeing for the title alone, but it sounds interesting beyond that:

Vice is a wicked delight; a slice of Italian Gothic dripping with atmosphere, psychological torment, and conniving characters practically begging for their comeuppance. Martino (and co-writers Ernesto Gastaldi and Sauro Scavolini) transposes the mood of a Mario Bava period piece into present day, and captures the insidious, um, vice of his characters. The Poe-Like mood is definitely there, even if the adaptation is loose.

But because I am one of those cat ladies that JD Vance is so worried about, my favorite part of this ‘zine is the section with pictures of people posing with their own black cats and telling stories about them. And it’s not just because it gives me a sort of perverse permission to share my own cat pics here. I just like seeing people expressing affection for their pets. The world is awful and it’s always nice to be reminded that there are so many kind people who adore animals.

Here at Chez OTC, we have two solid black cats, a tuxedo, a tortie, and a calico, and because the editor of the ‘zine included his tortie in the pics at the back because it’s his ‘zine and he can, I’ll share my own non-black cats because this is my site and I can.

He also goes by Booberry Cat, but you have to say it just like this in a high-pitched voice: “Booberry booberry booberry cat!”

This is Boo Radley. He’s named after the psychologically shattered character from To Kill a Mockingbird. He was raised with a golden retriever, and I took him on when my mother became terminally ill. He’s a big, skinny, shaggy wolf-cat and always seeks out a lap to sit in even though he finds it impossible to sit still. He’s our awkward, handsome boy.

 

Not even kidding. Clio is tired of Oddtober and my shit in general.

This is Clio. She’s a short haired, glossy black girl who has the attention span of a hummingbird and never stops purring. She is the happiest cat we have ever known. She is also a talker, constantly mewing and chirping, We adopted her with her sister Calliope.

 

 

Calliope is one of the most beautiful cats alive, fight me.

 

Calliope is a big, sturdy tortie who is quieter and probably smarter than her sister. She’s shyer but she also seeks us out when she needs attention. She went through a nickname progression, beginning with Callie, breaking off into Opie, which merged into Opus, which then became Opal, and now she’s often called “Opal Divine” after a fish and chips restaurant. She absolutely loves Paulie.

 

Puddin’ is partially blind, has no teeth, is 14 and has terminal cancer so she politely asks you to cut her some slack in regards to her rumpled fur.

This is Pretty Polly Puddin’ Pants, and she’s technically male but she was believed to be a female for so long that it seemed easier to just switch to Paulie, and mostly we call her Puddin’. She is absolutely the sweetest cat. Her nickname is Uncle Grandma because the three young cats in the house adore her because she really has strong maternal energy, and respect her because she’s a much older male. She is currently at home in hospice because she has cancer and her time is nearing. We adopted her in 2012 as an injured stray, with her sister Molly, who was also injured. Molly was solid black and died in January in 2023 from GI lymphoma.

She may look like a soft little bunny cat but she’s the cranky mothercat, even to the cats much older than she is.

This is Mirabelle, also known as Miss Belly. She’s a calico who basically despairs of us all and secretly runs the place. She does not like being held but she will crawl all over us when we are lying in bed because it’s harder to snitch her up and make her be the baby when horizontal. She, Clio and Calliope are all close. Mirabelle lived rough before we adopted her. She is very small compared to her peers, and lost all but one of her kittens once she was rescued. She’s beautiful and imperious.

Feel free to tell me about your cats, any color and breed, and if you would like your own copy of Catsploitation 3: The Black Cat Edition, you can get one here.

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: 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.

Clearly the evilest baby since Damien.
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: The Obscenity Trial of Remy Couture

Ahh, where would we be during Halloween without a good moral panic now and then? Because in some respects, that is the only way to scare seasoned horror fans. It’s a simple formula for fear: take a normie who doesn’t understand that special effects are a thing, mix that with one part idiotic police and two parts puritanical prosecutor, cut it with half a soupcon of angry online Christian moms and you find yourself worried that watching Terrifier 3 could send you to prison.

The case I want to discuss today didn’t make a huge splash when it happened in 2009, but the Remy Couture obscenity trial was a chilling attempt at censorship and moral grandstanding using a legal and judicial system so infested with idiocy that it hardly seems like it could have happened the way it did. I cannot emphasize enough how stupid the case against Remy Couture was.

Remy Couture is a French-Canadian special effects makeup artist who created two very gory films to showcase his skills. The films in question, Inner Depravity 1 and Inner Depravity 2, may strike some as disgusting, and, to be frank, the subject matter and execution were a bit puerile (the first film opens with the silly slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to taste”), but overall any sensible person should have been able to see that the two films were Couture featuring his work in two very extreme shorts. Both films depict the same, masked drug addict who preys on women, killing them, raping them after they are dead, and at times keeping their bodies in barrels so he can defile them again later. The second film features the same killer but this time he has an “apprentice,” a boy whose body language and appearance kind of reminded me of Cha-Ka from the 1970s television show, Land of the Lost.

In 2009, a German Internet user came across the videos and reported them to Interpol as depictions of genuine snuff. Evidently the German man could not read English (or French because I believe Couture’s site at the time had both languages to describe the films) and Google Translate was still pretty new, so perhaps we can understand his alarm. After all, this is hardly the first time such a thing has happened. In the 1990s, national disgrace Charlie Sheen came across a copy of one of the notorious Guinea Pig films, specifically, The Flower of Flesh and Blood, and was so convinced it portrayed genuine torture and murder that he contacted the FBI. Mistakes happen.

But surely one would expect that French Canadian law enforcement might read the description of the films before going off half-cocked and accusing him of murder, but they didn’t. Eventually the investigators were able to piece out that his films were not literal depictions of murders, and when they did they then shifted gears and Couture was accused of obscenity in the first trial of its sort in Canadian history. Ultimately in 2012, Couture won the case against him, but he had to spend $30,000 CAD to defend himself, and the Canadian tax payers had to pay a cool million for their chance to participate in a moral panic.

I had seen the two films in question before charges were brought against Couture, but I didn’t associate them with his name until I read an article about his legal woes and sought out the films in question. When I realized I had seen them before, I could hardly believe anyone was so naive and lacking in the ability to judge films using common sense and context that they could both believe the films could, in any way, depict something that actually happened, or that it would be considered obscene in a time when horror films can be very detailed in their gore.

Please do not think what follows in any way impugns Couture’s skills in his field, because he is pretty good at what he does. But it does beggar belief that anyone felt the two short films depicted actual violence or were anything worse than what one could see in the Saw franchise or in necrophilic exploitation films like Nekromantik. Human beings love them a panic and Remy Couture accidentally gave those people what they wanted – a stupid witch hunt.

I don’t want to upload the videos to this site because it is recommended that only those over the age of eighteen watch them, but if you are interested, you can find the videos here. There are enough warnings on the site that hosts them to cover their behinds and hopefully indemnify me if some middle-schooler clicks over there from my site. Both films involve rough content. Women are bound, attacked, sexually defiled, mutilated and even victims of extremely casual cannibalism. Half of the time, the brutality is so over the top that if it were not so dark it would be funny. Honestly, the little apprentice is pure comic relief for the right sort of jaded viewer (hi!).

On its face, there is no way an intellectually honest person could have believed that Couture recorded his own acts of actual depravity or that the intention behind the two films was to “corrupt morality.” ID1 literally begins with a full-scale police investigation, as cops and forensics personnel are examining the semi-nude body of a sexually violated woman whose death is later shown in graphic detail. If the murders in the film were accurate depictions of genuine murders, it should have taken no more than half an hour to run down the details of the case to determine which police jurisdiction had investigated the murder. Moreover, someone is videotaping the law enforcement investigation from multiple angles without trained investigators noticing someone using 2005 technology hovering around them in a muddy, wooded area. The video taken of the investigation clearly could not have been police video, as it is visually in keeping with the rest of Remy Couture’s style, and is identical to the style used in the later depiction of the murder in the film.

The second film, strangely, is less skilled than the first. In ID2, at about the 3:37 mark, a bound woman’s arm is cut off just above the wrist and it is clearly faked. The bleeding stump looks like something you’d see in a professional horror film from the 1980s. Again, no shade against Couture, but the only way someone could have looked at that scene and worried that it was real was someone who really hoped it was real. Couture did not have film industry money behind him as he made these shorts to showcase his talent. That there may be some elements of the films that don’t deliver perfect believablity is to be expected, and it is astounding that any law enforcement professional could have watched the film and think any of it was real. Then when Couture cuts off another limb, he cinematically films himself taking a bite and then tossing it to his little Sleestak/feral hobbit to gnaw on. The whole scene is shot to include the perspectives of Couture and the woman being killed, which points in the direction of it being staged. Additionally, all of the women portrayed in the films were actresses there on their own free will, and candid behind-the-scenes shots show them laughing and interacting with Couture.

So eventually it became clear no one was killed in either film. Unwilling to let it go and chalk up their idiocy to a mistake, the Crown decided to charge Couture with obscenity with the intent to corrupt morality. They classified the films as violent pornography with no higher artistic purpose and therefore a threat to public morality. That on its face should never have happened because Couture was clear when he posted those videos – they were essentially exhibitions of his skills as a makeup artist, not an attempt to create pornography.  Imagine a Tom Savini proof-of-concept video being used to prove he wanted to corrupt morality. Think about snippets of Greg Nicotero’s work being mistaken as an attempt to prove zombie films are obscene and without artistic merit. But it was staggeringly dense to claim ID1 and ID2 sought to degrade public morality because both films are foul. The public whose morality would be challenged by either film was very small because most people who watch horror content are not taking notes. They aren’t looking at a demented drug addict wearing nasty masks and his little companion gnawing on arms and having sex with rotting corpses and thinking, “You know, working a day job and raising my kids in the suburbs is a loser’s bet. I want to take my son, force him to be a cannibal and live the life of this shambling, filthy necrophile.” Luckily the jury agreed with my assessment and found Remy Couture not guilty in spite of shrill protests from a vocal minority that if you supported Remy Couture’s right to freedom of speech and expression, then you support violence against women.

Unfortunately, while that verdict ended the legal witch hunt against Couture, it hasn’t stopped breathlessly naive people who have no idea Google image lookup is their friend from taking stills from these two films or images from other Couture projects and insisting they depict actual victims of Satanic murder or are hijacked to use in politically charged lies. One particular image of a woman with a crucifix impaled through her throat has been used to fan the flames of Satanic Panic or in political scapegoating. Don’t worry, the actress in the photo is very much alive, the woman whose face is presented next to the gory image is not the actress in Couture’s image, and if that woman was killed for being a Christian, a pox on everyone who demeaned her death in this manner.

No matter how many years pass from the massive Satanic and moral panics from the 1980s through the early 1990s, the sparks that could ignite another witch hunt are always there, burning quietly but steadily, just waiting for a loosely hinged True Believer or political/judicial official in need of a moral platform to spill the gasoline that will save no one from physical or spiritual harm but can burn Western civil rights to the ground. It seems as if Remy Couture’s career did not end due to the absolute lunacy that was unleashed on him when a German internet user had a bad night, but his legacy is still haunted by people completely misrepresenting his work as genuine atrocity, sometimes with racist implications. This particular week of Oddtober 2024 is pretty gross in terms of content, but out of all of the topics I will discuss this month, this is the grossest and the one that should scare you the most.

Oddtober 2024: Haunted Houses by Kathryn Hemmann

Told y’all we’d be talking about some Oddtober-related ‘zines! I know we just got finished with ‘Zine September but the first few Oddtober 2024 entries have been a bit heavy. I need something lighter to end the week and Haunted Houses by Kathryn Hemmann fits the bill. It’s got a creepy bite to it, but if a ten-year-old kid picked it up, they could flip through it without ruining their childhood.

Haunted Houses is an extremely pretty ‘zine, with drawings and seventeen pieces of flash fiction. The inside cover says:

The seventeen short stories in this collection dwell in haunted places. If you get lost in the words, you might be alarmed at first, but you’ll get used to it.

You live here now.

Kathryn Hemmann wrote the stories and created the drawings and through them explores different ways places can be haunted. She explores how people can be haunted, too. Though this is pretty and all together less horrifying than the two books that started Oddtober 2024, there is some very creepy darkness in it as well. An endless hallway that rivals the five and a half minute hallway in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, decaying neighborhoods that swallow people, a person who creeps through houses at night so he or she can smell people when they are sleeping, and more. My favorite is the extraordinarily effective and creepy “Final Project Proposal.” The story is very short, micro-fiction actually, coming in at under 200 words. In that short piece, Hemmann incorporated the trope of the mad scientist, the evil dungeon master, and the miserable experiment forced to live penned up. So effective and so horrible. It’s perfect.

Because this ‘zine is flash fiction, I cannot engage in the in-depth dissection approach I prefer to take when discussing works here. But if you are a fan of the deceptively creepy, always wondering what unnerving things lurk in offices and old homes, you’ll like this little ‘zine. I wish I had not ordered this specifically for Oddtober because I would have loved to give Mr. OTC a copy for Halloween and since he proofreads my entries here, it would have ruined the surprise. If you’re interested in a copy, you can get one here.

Hemmann also continues with the goodwill I’ve come to expect from ‘zine makers, and included a couple of gratis items, including a lovely bookmark. Said it before and I’ll say it again: ‘zine makers are some of the most generous people with their work.

Be sure to keep an eye out for next week because I think I may actually have a book or two even the most ardent horror fans may not have seen. Bug chasers. A Komsomol girl versus a serial killer. Folk horror. And more! See you Monday.

Oddtober 2024: I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me

When I was a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old, I watched a movie on television that affected me deeply. I’ve discussed some of my very specific fears before on this site and interestingly all of them were provoked by media and not some innate fear common to children. For example, I get very antsy around people wearing full-face masks or too much makeup, and that was the result of being terrified by an Alice Cooper tour commercial I saw when I was very young.

For all that it scared me, this is actually is a very sad film.

The fear I want to discuss here developed after I watched the film Bad Ronald. Have you seen it? It’s a made for TV film adapted from a novel by author Jack Vance and it absolutely messed me up. The plot of the film is that a divorced mother who suffers from mental and physical illness, has raised her with the hopes that he could become a doctor so he can cure her sickness. Her teen son, Ronald, is awkward and an outsider at school – kind of like a male Carrie but without telekinesis – and one day he decides to ask a girl out on a date. She declines and laughs him down. Later her younger sister mocks Ronald, who pushes her so hard on the ground that she suffers a fatal head injury. After racing home and telling his mother what happened, she decides to cover a door with wallpaper and essentially walls Ronald up in the house so the police can never find him. Seclusion causes Ronald to descend into a fantasy world where he is a prince who is going to protect his princess from an evil intruder. Then his mother dies and the house is sold, unaware that Ronald was living in a hidden room. The new owners have three teen daughters and Ronald decides one of them is his princess and that an older boyfriend is the evil intruder and things go bad but ultimately the only other death is a nosy neighbor who is literally scared to death.

Clearly Ronald never crept into the shower.

For the record, it is not a good movie. Not the worst movie made in 1974 but arguments could be made that it belongs on some sort of “worst of” top ten list. It also stars Scott Jacoby, who was also in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, an early Jodie Foster/Martin Sheen film that also involves a hidden cellar entrance and a creepy man who accesses the house.

Ronald becomes filthy and creeps around the house at night, eating food, stealing family items, watching the family sleep, all while still living in his dream world of himself as a prince trying to protect a princess from harm. The images of him emerging from the dark, dirty and deranged, spying, stealing and moving things around, affected me and eventually every time I heard something creak in the house, I would freeze in fear like a squirrel who sighted a hawk. I began to develop the idea that someone was creeping around in the house between the walls, which would be impossible with the crappy little 1950s house we lived in. I even intuitively understood that we did not have the sort of house that could provide enough room for an intruder to skulk between the walls, but I still could not shake the fear that every time I heard something or felt like something had been moved without me touching it that someone was in the house, stalking me.

This specific fear was cemented during a two month period when both of my parents were working night shift. I was in the third grade and had to be alone in the house from the time I got home from school until my father arrived home after midnight (my parents were broke and had interesting perspectives on child rearing plus we had no family in the area, so don’t think too badly of them). Add to it that at the time we didn’t have phone service, and I spent a nice chunk of time absolutely terrified.

This scenario is somehow still less upsetting than Bad Ronald creeping around the house.

It faded over time, but the fear of someone being in the house would remain a thought in the back of my head until my mother and her new husband moved into a far less ramshackle home. However, even living in a place that made far less noise didn’t eliminate the fear entirely. When Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs came out, it revived the fear and twisted it into a generic fear of someone being in the house. Given who I am, when the movie cycled over onto cable, I watched it every time I could. The titular people under the stairs were portrayed as monsters, but they were made into monsters by their captors and ultimately were forces of good, but the idea of ragged, abused people living under my nose without me knowing, was just another wrinkle in the same “someone’s here and watching” cloth.

Then, god help me, I read about the Lalaurie case. Whether or not the details are all true, the accepted story is that Delphine Lalaurie, a demented slave owner in New Orleans, was experimenting on her slaves, chaining them throughout the mansion and performing ghoulish experiments on them that sound as if they were straight out of Nazi research or Unit 731. A fire broke out in the house in 1834, allegedly started by a slave who was chained in the kitchen and was hoping to draw attention to her plight, and the fire brigade discovered the horrific torture chambers. The abuse was so egregious that even during Plantation era slavery in Louisiana, people were appalled and stormed the house, but Madame Lalaurie was able to escape and is believed to have fled to France. No one had any idea she was doing this, torturing, maiming and killing slaves right under the noses of her neighbors. I’ve often wondered if the Lalaurie case was partial inspiration for The People Under the Stairs.

I did not develop a phobia or fear from the Lalaurie case and a Wes Craven film, but the essential premises linked my brain back to Bad Ronald: there may be a hidden place in homes where deranged people are living, or, worse, being harmed. But mostly I forgot about it because I had student loans and the Internet had not been invented yet.

Enter Reddit.

I cannot recall how many times people have found a hidden space in their homes that someone had been living in, or found evidence of someone living in an attic or cellar. Sometimes families lived in those homes for years before discovering someone had been creeping into their house without them knowing, doing god knows what while they were sleeping. When we bought our house, luckily we purchased a more modern built home that is essentially cardboard held together with wall putty but lacks a basement and the only place someone could hide is, interestingly, under the stairs, but we’ve been in and out of that space making repairs over the years, so I know no one is there. Plus an adult male who seldom leaves me alone at night lives here so when the cats do something that produces creepy sounds, he can go and check on it. Also I’m sort of an adult now, and can permit the adult part of my brain to drive me around these days. I still am extremely uneasy when people wear scary masks or wear corpse paint apropos of nothing but I’m not afraid of them. I just wish they wouldn’t. And this is similar. It was never as closely as held a fear as my mask/makeup issues – it’s just something I remember viscerally when “triggered.”

But every now and then, I see something like this and I feel that same sort of chilly creepiness that I experienced the first time I saw Bad Ronald.

Even though this video is fake, it’s still so horrifying I have to include it here. An aspiring actor hoping to go viral concocted this video of a woman living in the crawlspace over his apartment. The premise: he set up the camera because he’d noticed food and things going missing. This woman was descending into his apartment at night, eating food, watching television, and even urinating in his kitchen sink. Because I also have a germ aversion (caused by the same house I lived in when Bad Ronald warped me, a shit heap if there ever was one), the idea that someone could creep around at night and pee in my sink is just too much to think about.

There are a shocking number of videos about this sort of thing happening on YouTube and I am unsure how many have been debunked. It almost veers into the supernatural, thinking about how someone can creep around your home, creating their own home while you sleep or are away, and you never know it until you set up a camera after noticing things going missing, or remodel the house and break through a suspiciously thin wall, or get norovirus repeatedly because a stray human keeps urinating in your sink.

All in all, I have remarkably few genuine fears for someone this neurotic but this was one of those times when the fear that plagued me as a kid actually manifested for other people in real life. But I’m also proud to announce that I watched The People Under the Stairs on Shudder last week and was able to reminisce about my weird childhood rather than force Mr. OTC to search the house top to bottom when our stupidest cat fell off a shelf into the laundry bucket at three A.M.

Tell me about the weird thing that scared you when you were young. Was it the result of unmonitored television time? Did you grow out of it or did it get worse as you got older? Let me know!