Tweet of the Day (Kimmy Monte, on Being ‘Down for the Count’)

“I hate when boxing announcers say a boxer is ‘down for the count.’ I don't care that he loves Dracula; I just want to know who's winning.”— @KimmyMonte, tweet of June 9, 2014

Quote of the Day (Music‘s John Oates, on Seeing ‘Night of the Living Dead’ After Dropping Acid)

“Oh boy . . . bloody, slack-jawed, bone-crunching zombies staggering and lurching around a grim Pennsylvania town in a movie shot in grainy 16-millimeter, and the three of us [Oates, friend and musical partner Daryl Hall, and Hall’s sister Kathy] sitting in the old sedan, eyes big as saucers and brains pulsing on what the fuck is happening. The fact that the movie was narrated by a well-known local newscaster named John Facenda (who many football fans will recognize as the longtime NFL films' ‘Voice of God’) made the jacked-up realism even more intense. In fact, we were more than a little freaked out, alternating our attention between the undulating outdoor screen and the car's side windows . . . paranoia washing over us with a growing, genuine terror that the zombies might actually be right outside the car. . . . ‘Wait ...what was that?!’”—Rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter John Oates with Chris Epting, Change of Seasons: A Memoir (2017)

I couldn’t let the old year go out without a bit of a chuckle, and this quote from John Oates’ enjoyable musical memoir fits the bill nicely. 

I never got around to noting the 50^th anniversary this year of George Romero’s legendary low-budget shocker Night of the Living Dead. Scruples have prevented me from commenting on this film that I have never watched except for a scene here or there on TV.

But the little I have seen—plus Mr. Oates’ helpful (not to mention sanguinary) summary—confirms what a close relative told me back in the mid-Seventies about the film. “It’s the scariest movie I’ve ever seen,” the relative said. “The grossest, too. I was shaking when I got out of the theater.”

How can that heart-popping fear be topped? With the mind-altering substances that Hall and Oates took in their wild younger days, of course—days that they can laugh about now when they want to unbend after a show.

As for me, I don’t need to see this (literally) scene-chewing mayhem. Reality has its own various and abundant terrors. Do you think it’s an accident that The Walking Dead has lasted for nearly a decade on cable TV? Why?

"Zombie fiction and movies, when they're good, aren't about zombies. They are stories about people and how they respond," Jonathan Maberry, author of many zombie books (e.g., Rot and Ruin), told Newsweek’s Raina Kelley back in 2010, just as The Walking Dead premiered.  "A zombie is a stand-in for anything we fear: pandemic, racism, societal change, depersonalization of humanity, pervasive threat and how this threat affects people. It's the core of drama and a never-ending blank canvas."

In zombie movies and television, best friends can turn on each other, no longer able to recognize their common humanity. Thank Heaven that didn’t occur in the sedan where Mr. Hall and Mr. Oates sat huddled against the evil they (wrongly and hilariously) believed surrounded them…

Quote of the Day (Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ on Falsehood and the Abyss)

"When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? I feel as if I were walking on the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands are crowding and endeavouring to plunge me into the abyss.” —English novelist Mary Shelley (1797-1851), Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)

A Wall Street Journal article by Ed Finn and David H. Guston reminded me that 200 years ago this month, Frankenstein made an inauspicious beginning—released anonymously by a little-known British publishing house that, when sales languished, discounted the title.

That wasn’t the only indignity faced by 21-year-old author Mary Shelley, who, when sales finally began to climb and gossip soon spread about its possible author, had to endure sexist speculation that a mere woman couldn’t have produced such an original work without high-powered help—from husband Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In their provocative essay, Finn and Guston observe that, only now, through genetic engineering, has the central premise of the novel—the unintended, horrifying consequences of scientific creation of life—finally come to the fore.

For all its vast, often take-for-granted, influence on science-fiction and horror literature (and, after the 1931 big-screen adaptation starring Boris Karloff, cinema), Frankenstein still has the capacity to jolt and shock, much like Victor’s obsessive electromagnetic experimentation. 

Today’s “Quote” is one example. It’s placed in the middle of dialogue by Elizabeth, Victor’s fiancée, a character, in her sweet innocence, often regarded as a drip.

But her statement, shot through with irony (she has no idea that Victor is responsible for creating the monster now marauding through the countryside), made me sit up and take notice when I first encountered the words.

In the petri dish of politics, American voters conducted their own mad experiment: electing to the Oval Office—heck, entrusting responsibility for the fate of mankind—not only someone with neither political nor national-security experience, but a man who, throughout his adult life, has never evinced the slightest regard for the truth.

After walking away, for an extended period, from observing politics, commentator Andrew Sullivan emerged to gasp at Donald Trump’s emergence as a Presidential candidate. “I was happy doing that and was hoping to continue, when this Grendel started stirring in the forest,” he explained in an interview with The New York Times. “You could almost see the coffee vibrate on the table, as this creature came out of the swamp.”

That analogy is close, but not quite comparable to what we see now. Grendel, you see, implies the existence of a Beowulf, a solitary hero who will slay him. No such personage appears remotely on the horizon for us.

In the first third of the last century, most of Europe fell under the sway of a liar of staggering proportions who did indeed lead the continent into an abyss of violence and shame. Nobody ever dreamed that such a monster could emerge on our shores. But why should we think we are so different from everyone else?

Tweet of the Day (‘Gia,’ on Becoming a Zombie)

“Honestly, my biggest fear about becoming a zombie is all the walking.”—Gia (a.k.a., Gashley Madison), tweet of Feb. 4,2017

Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, on a First Encounter With Edward Hyde)

“Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. ‘There must be something else,’ said the perplexed gentleman. ‘There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or Is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it Is on that of your new friend.’”— Scottish fiction writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886)

The creation of Edward Hyde, the embodiment of pure evil in the physical ugliness so vividly portrayed above, is what has led so many to view this “Strange Tale” as a horror story.

But there is another horror that, to Dr. Henry Jekyll, might be just as dismaying: Hyde’s creator and opposite is not a saint, but the same old Jekyll: a proper, basically decent Victorian gentleman who cannot banish his primal urges—“that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.”

According to a fascinating Huffington Post piece by Melanie Kendry, “When Does a Man Become a Monster?”, the original draft by Robert Louis Stevenson indicated that the crime of the “ordinary secret sinner” Jekyll was not murder (or even the consorting with prostitutes shown in so many cinematic versions) but homosexuality. 

It was an anticipation of a later, wittier, but equally horrifying story of a double man in Victorian society, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Such were the taboos of the time in England, however, that even in the latter, more daring case, Gray’s secret sexuality could only be implied.

(The image accompanying this post shows John Barrymore, in the classic 1920 silent film version of Stevenson’s novella. Remarkably, Barrymore depicted the violent and disturbing physical transformation into Hyde without benefit of special effects. As fine as the 1933 Fredric March performance was—worthy enough of an Oscar---I still prefer Barrymore’s. I may be the only person I know who still recalls Kirk Douglas’ performance in a 1973 TV musical adaptation of the tale by composer Lionel Bart. That production was a horror story all its own!)