A Lovecraft Sighting

I'm fitting things in as I come across them. I hope you don't mind going back and forth between topics this week.

I have been writing about teenager movies and high school movies, also about H.P. Lovecraft. Now I can write about both in the same entry. This past weekend we watched The DUFF, a teenager/high school movie released in 2015. It's a funny and enjoyable movie that hearkens back to previous movies of this type. It begins with an allusion to The Breakfast Club (1985). The principal reminds me of the character Onyx Blackman in Strangers with Candy (1999-2000). I imagine there are other references and allusions as well.

The title character in The DUFF is a girl named Bianca, played by Mae Whitman. She's a fan of horror movies. Rather than decorate the walls of her bedroom with concert posters and pictures of teen heartthrobs, she has chosen horror movie posters and other horror-related art. There is a poster for Murders in the Rue Morgue, starring Bela Lugosi and released in 1932, hanging above her bed. Above the title, in big, prominent letters, is the name of the original author, Edgar Allan Poe. Far less prominent on her wall is a small portrait drawing of H.P. Lovecraft--Lovecraft as teen heartthrob.

There is product placement in The DUFF. There is also president placement. Look for the names or images of Chester Arthur, James Buchanan, and Millard Fillmore, also for the middle initial of George W. Bush. There may be others. Be on the lookout for them. The Internet doesn't seem to have noticed this yet. Maybe you're seeing it here first.

Art by Karoly Grosz (1897-1952).

P.S. I have in the works a long series on Lovecraft. It begins this week.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales & Weird Fiction-Part One

The weird tale is a form, an old form to be sure. Weird fiction is a literary genre of more recent development, as all fiction is when compared to tales, ballads, legends, and so on. In the twentieth century, there became a kind of theory of weird fiction. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) seems to have been its chief theorist. I think Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940) played his part as well. Now there are weird fiction studies and weird fiction journals.

There were weird tales--tales of fate--long before they were so named. Originating in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, weird fiction is, again, a more recent development than is the older and more traditional weird tale. Weird fiction as a named or circumscribed genre, eventually with some kind of literary theory behind it, seems to have followed close on the heels of the writing and publication of the stories that make up the genre. In other words, the works came first, then they were thrown together into a named genre. That's how it seems anyway. But how did it all develop? I can't say for sure. All I can do is offer some bits of evidence gleaned from newspapers and literature, i.e., the results of searches I have conducted on line and in one lone book--a children's book called Weird! The Complete Book of Halloween Words by Peter R. Limburg (New York: Bradbury Press, 1989). I can't say that any of the following makes for a first. All I can say is that these are the earliest instances that I have found of the terms weird tales or weird tale, weird fiction, and weird (or the weird) as a noun in newspapers and in literary works, all from the late eighteenth and early to mid to late nineteenth centuries, and all from a time when literature for the masses was on the rise.

Weird Tales & Weird Tale

Earliest Use of Weird Tales in a Newspaper:

From the Manchester Times, March 25, 1843 (p. 4) in a review of The Story-Teller, or Table-Book of Popular Literature, A Collection of Romances, Short Standard Tales, Traditions, and Poetical Legends of All Nations, etc., edited by Robert Bell (London: Cunningham and Mortimer, Publishers, 1843). Specifically, the reference is to "the ballads and weird tales of Germany."

(This may be the same book as: The Story-Teller, Or, Minor Library of Fiction, A Collection of the Choicest Tales, Legends, and Traditions of All Nations, etc., Volume 1, edited by Robert Bell [London, 1833].)

Earliest Use of Weird Tales in a Novel or Romance:

From Cranford (1851-1853; 1853) by Mrs. Gaskell (Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell). From Chapter IV:

The room in which we were expected to sit was a stiffly-furnished, ugly apartment; but that in which we did sit was what Mr Holbrook called the counting-house, where he paid his labourers their weekly wages at a great desk near the door. The rest of the pretty sitting-room--looking into the orchard, and all covered over with dancing tree-shadows--was filled with books. They lay on the ground, they covered the walls, they strewed the table. He was evidently half ashamed and half proud of his extravagance in this respect. They were of all kinds--poetry and wild weird tales prevailing. He evidently chose his books in accordance with his own tastes, not because such and such were classical or established favourites.

(Here is an instance of the frequent association of the words wild and weird.)

Earliest Use of Weird Tale in Prose in an American Newspaper:

In "A Plea for Mendota," correspondent Alice Fay, writing from the shores of Fourth Lake, Wisconsin, recounted a "weird tale," told to her in a vision by the spirit of an American Indian woman, this in a letter to the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison, Wisconsin, August 21, 1856, page 3.

(Note that fay, meaning "fairy," is from the word fate.)

Earliest Use of Weird Tale in Verse in an American Newspaper:

In a poem called "Sending for God" by Mrs. Brooks in the Weekly Atchison Champion, Atchison, Kansas, November 12, 1859, page 1.

Earliest Use of Weird Tale in the Title of a Novel or Romance:

Bruar Castle: A Weird Tale for a Winter Night by Cecilia M. Blake (C.E. Weldon, 1867).

Other Early Uses in Newspapers of Weird Tales or Weird Tale in Reference to Literary Works or Authors:

• In reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge; 1840s and '50s.

• In reference to "The Enchanted Hare of the Ardennes" by an anonymous author; in Bentley's Miscellany, CCXLI, 1857.

• In reference to the Scottish poems "Tamlane" and "Kemp Owain"; 1858.

• In reference to Sir Walter Scott, of course a Scottish author; 1858, 1859.

• A newspaper item referring to an unnamed "weird tale of a haunted house," in actuality a reference to "The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain," a novelette by Edward Bulwer-Lytton published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, DXXVI, August 1859. Note the Scottish place of publication. "The Haunted and the Haunters" was reprinted in Weird Tales in May 1923. It was the first in a series of reprints called "Masterpieces of Weird Fiction."

• In reference to: Sir Rohan's Ghost, A Romance by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1859, 1860). Harriett Prescott Spofford (1835-1921) was an American author. She is in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, in an entry that you can access by clicking here. I don't know when and where the story is set, but Rohan is a Celtic surname, originally from Brittany. The word itself is similar to rowan, another name for mountain-ash. Rowan is a word used in Scotland and northern England. The rowan tree is said to have magical powers.

• Other references, some to real-life tales of death and fate, 1851 and after.

Use of the terms weird tales and weird tale became more common as the nineteenth century went on. In 1885, Scribner and Welford of New York, New York, and John C. Nimmo of London published Weird Tales by E.T.A. Hoffman. Ten years later, the Henry Altemus Company of Philadelphia began publishing various editions of Edgar Allan Poe's Weird Tales. These were popular editions. I suspect they sold well, and it may have been that by the early years of the twentieth century, no one would have puzzled over the meaning or shrunk from buying and reading a collection of weird tales. It seems to me that the negative connotations of weird came later, after the original meaning of the word as "fate" or "destiny" had fallen away. Now weird is thought of in the sense of "that weird guy over there . . . ," and nobody wants to get near him or the word weird.

* * *

Before going any further, I would like to write about Cecilia M. Blake, who has nothing on the Internet in the way of a biography:

Cecilia M. Blake (ca. 1825-?)

Née Cecilia McKenzie

Aka Mrs. Blake

School Mistress (Perth, 1851), School Principal (Seton Castle, 1861), Annuitant (Pitcaithley House, 1871), Proprietor (Private school, 1881), Annuitant & Authoress (Gartartan Cottage, 1901)

Born ca. 1825, Perthshire, Scotland

Died 1901 or after, presumably in Scotland

Cecilia McKenzie was born in about 1825 in Perthshire, Scotland. She married Thomas Whittet while still quite young. Afterwards she married John Chalmers Blake, with whom she had a daughter, Cecilia Hill Blake, born on March 16, 1855, in Eastwood, Renfrew, Scotland. Cecilia M. Blake was a teacher, school principal, and school proprietor. Annuitant is in reference to her status as the receiver of an annuity, possibly as a widow.

Cecilia M. Blake, also known as Mrs. Blake, was the author of:

• Glenrora: Or The Castle, The Camp, And The Cottage (1864)
• Bruar Castle: A Weird Tale for a Winter Night (1867)
• Cecile Raye: An Autobiography (1868)
• Among the Water Lilies (1895)
• Tephi, An Armenian Romance (The British Girls Library, date unknown) 

I don't know the date or place of her death. It's worth noting that she was a native of Perthshire, in which Birnam Wood and Dunsinane Hill, mentioned in Macbeth, are located.

* * *

Weird Fiction, plus Weird (or the Weird) as a Noun

Earliest Use of Weird Fiction in an American Journal or Newspaper:

In reference to a story called "A Christmas Reminiscence" in the New Orleans Crescent newspaper, Christmastime, 1868, as "a strange, weird fiction." The story, by a pseudonymous author calling herself Hagar and originally published in The Crescent Monthly magazine, concerns Voodoo or Voudou. In the story itself, reference is made to "that weird woman Juba."

Other Early Uses in Newspapers of Weird Fiction in Reference to Literary Works or Authors, 1860s through 1880s:

• In reference to The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851).

• In reference to Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1842).

• In reference to Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo (1866), specifically in reference to a fight with a giant octopus.

Earliest Use of Weird as a Noun in Verse:

• In "Her Answer" by Robert Burns (1795).

• In "Hic Jacet Robin Maroun" by R.H.A., a poem in remembrance of the poet, in the Chester Chronicle, Chester, England, September 28, 1810, page 4:

"hear Robin's weird, wi' trickling tear-- 

He's sunk to ruin."

A glossary to go with the poem defines weird as "fate."

• Peter R. Limburg's book led me to a search of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. I found six instances of weird in Shelley's complete verse, including in his long poem "Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude" (1815, 1816). In every instance, weird is used as an adjective, including in this striking line from Canto 9 of "The Revolt of Islam" (1818): "Some said, I was a fiend from my weird cave." I also found weird in Keats' poem "Lamia" (1820), where it is also used as an adjective.

• "The Weird of the Douglas, A Metrical Tale" in Taits Edinburgh Magazine, No. 49, January 1838. Scottish surname, Scottish place name.

Some Uses of Weird (as in the Weird) as a Noun in a Novel or Romance:

• The Weird Sisters, a Novel by William Lane (1794).

• In Bannockburn, A Novel by John Warren (1821), a character called "the weird woman" speaks:

     "Carry the corpse away!" said a hollow voice, "and cry the coronach! The weird is run--the raven croaks--the black banner flies! Oh, happy, happy hour! Vengeance! vengeance! Hour of vengeance! I hail ye--fa' whare ye may!"

Does the weird woman address Fate--"fa'"--when she cries, "I hail ye--fa' whare ye may!"?

• The Weird Woman of the Wraagh, or, Burton and le Moore by Henry Coates (1830).

• From Ralph Wilton's Weird by Mrs. Alexander (Annie French Hector, an Irish/British author, 1871):

"Ah ha, lad!" said Moncrief, in his unmistakable Scotch tones, "you must just 'dree your weird.'"

The meaning of this traditional Scottish expression is to accept and surrender to one's fate.

• Wyllard's Weird, a Novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1885). 

The concept of weird fiction as a type, category, or recognizable literary genre seems to have developed in the 1870s or 1880s, certainly by the end of the 1880s. For example:

"Nothing in real life has equalled these Whitechapel murders, the only approach to them is to be found in the weird fiction of Edgar Allan Poe." From "The Whitechapel Murders" in the Spokane Morning Review, October 3, 1888, page 2.

and:

"We have received from the publishers [Vizetelly & Co.] the latest additions to this library of weird fiction--The Golden Tress and Thieving Fingers." (By Fortuné du Boisgobey.) From the Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle, April 9, 1887, page 9.

So, weird fiction as a category or genre predated science fiction by four decades or more. And of course the first weird fiction magazine, Weird Tales, came before the first science fiction magazine.

* * *

You must have noticed by now three patterns in the use of the expressions weird tales, weird tale, weird fiction, and weird or the weird as a noun:

First, there is without a doubt a connection of weird and the weird to Scotland. That is to be expected, as weird is a word that fell out of use in English but persisted in the Scots tongue, most likely, it seems to me, because it persisted in the Scottish psyche or worldview. Weird returned to English, first by way of Shakespeare's Scottish Play, afterwards--though not exclusively--by its use by Scottish authors or in reference to Scottish authors and their works. The Irish may have saved civilization, but the Scottish saved weird.

Second, and perhaps with some real significance, women authors--Mrs. Gaskell (1851-1853), Alice Fay (1856), Mrs. Brooks (1859), Cecilia M. Blake (1867), the pseudonymous Hagar (1868), Mrs. Alexander (1871), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1885)--were early users of these expressions in print. That makes me wonder: Is there something in the female psyche or the female experience that is more open to the idea that weird, or fate, is active in human affairs? Or is there a simpler explanation, for Alice Fay and Mrs. Brooks at least, namely, that they picked up on the term weird tale by reading Cranford? As for Mrs. Blake, she was a native Scotswoman born in the country of Macbeth and of the original Weird Sisters. Maybe weird never left her consciousness, just as it never left that of her countrywomen and countrymen, as it did in the rest of the English-speaking world. As for Mary Elizabeth Braddon, her novel is set in Cornwall, another of the Celtic regions of the British Isles and the European Continent. In any case, weird was saved and we have it today.

Third, related to the second, there is more than one "weird woman" in the works I have catalogued here. These may be descended from Shakespeare's Weird Sisters. More likely, the Weird Sisters are descended from an older type, personified in the Fates but also in the more common and familiar type of soothsayer or fortuneteller. The weird woman goes beyond the soothsayer or fortuneteller, though. She seems to be a type that has been lost. We should bring her back. There is a movie called Weird Woman, by the way. Based on the story "Conjure Wife" by Fritz Leiber, Jr. (Unknown Worlds, Apr. 1943), it was released in 1944 as a part of the Inner Sanctum series of movies.

To be continued . . .

English artist Sybil Tawse (1886-1971) illustrated a later edition of Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. Those illustrations led me to this one, entitled "The Sirens of Anthemovsa." Once again, the women are in threes. They are reminiscent of the Fates.

Sybil Tawse is not in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. That seems like an oversight that should be corrected. I had not heard of her before finding her illustrations on line in my preparation of this series. An Irish blogger and artist named Dara Theodora featured her on her Wordpress blog on June 20, 2018. You can see what she posted by clicking here.

Universal Pictures released Weird Woman in 1944. I haven't seen this movie, but descriptions indicate that the title character is considered a witch. That may be based on an interpretation of Shakespeare's Weird Sisters as witches. In doing the research for this article, however, I have found that the original "weird woman" seems not to be a witch at all. Instead, she seems to be a teller of the weird, or fate, of a given person or persons. The word weird was once almost lost. Now it seems the original meaning of the word has been lost instead. And because of that, the weird woman as a type has been lost. Like I said, we should bring her back. First, though, we need to understand the original Anglo-Saxon or Celtic or Scottish concept of weird or the weird. If we can reach that kind of understanding, then maybe we can bring back the weird woman, not as a stock character or stereotype but as a fuller character. Before that can happen, I guess, we have to back away from our current worship of materialism, atheism, and Scientism. We also have to learn once again to respect women. And before we can do that, we have to acknowledge that there is only one, inviolable definition of woman, only one category woman--and you don't have to be a biologist to know what they are. All of that seems like a pretty tall order at this late date.

In thinking and writing about all of this, I am reminded that Weird Tales had an especial appeal to women--authors, poets, artists, readers, and fans. Editor Dorothy McIlwraith served longer than anyone but Farnsworth Wright as editor of the magazine. That seems fitting. Maybe the unseen host of Weird Tales should have been a woman all along. As for Dorothy McIlwraith: she worked in the United States and was born and educated in Canada, but her family was originally from Scotland. Her associate editor Lamont Buchanan was also from a Scottish family. They, the Buchanans, had at least one weird tale in their Scottish past.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fires Before Easter

For the second time in less than a year, a great work of culture, art, and history has burned. First it was the the National Museum of Brazil in September of last year. This time, of course, it was the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Things look better today than they did last night, but it's hard to see the fire at Notre-Dame as anything less than a disaster.

I wish to speak, and I might use any tenuous connection there might be between the cathedral and Weird Tales or weird fiction as a pretext, but the things I wish to say have little to do with the magazine or the genre. As it stands now, the fire is supposed to have been caused by an accident. Risking their lives, Parisian firefighters finally extinguished it several hours after it began. Other Parisians rescued relics and works of art from the interior as the fire raged, including the Crown of Thorns, saved by a heroic Catholic priest. (The Crown of Thorns, the flames, and the Cross--which at Notre-Dame survived--are among the elements of the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.) We can't take anything from these and the many millions of people of Paris and of France, and we can't exploit the incalculable loss experienced by them in this tragedy. But we also can't overlook the symbolism of the event, or a possible interpretation of it as something more than a mere fire in a centuries-old building. We are now in Holy Week and we will soon have the holiest day in the Christian calendar. It seems needless to point out that Western civilization in general and Europe in particular were built upon a Judeo-Christian foundation. The cathedral of Notre-Dame was constructed at the height of an age of faith, but in a later age of reason, after having been seized by the State, it was abused, plundered, and converted to the house of an atheistic cult. Soon returned to the Roman Catholic Church, the cathedral was again taken over by the State in 1905, and it is under the ownership of the State that Notre-Dame burned. For eight and a half centuries Notre-Dame stood, and now it burns.

I don't think it's any stretch to say that the current European State--and Western culture in general, at least among the élite--is secular, materialist, and anti-Christian, even radically and viciously anti-Christian. I don't think anyone in the French State has anything to gain and much to lose in the burning of a cathedral. Notre-Dame and places like it have become secular symbols of the cities or countries in which they are located. Even adherents to anti-Christian and post-Christian religions have their uses for things made by the Church and its members. The Hagia Sophia comes to mind as an example. It's curious to me, though, that the current president of France should ask for help from other nations to rebuild Notre-Dame. I guess his France is fiercely independent except when it's not. More to the point, people of faith built the cathedral to begin with. Are there not enough now in France to rebuild it? I'm certain there are in fact. Despite the best efforts of the State in that nation and elsewhere, Christianity lives and thrives, as do faith, hope, love, and charity in the hearts of Christians everywhere. And who has stepped forward to offer funds for the rebuilding? None other than the wealthy of France, the same kind of people who are ceaselessly vilified by the leftist and socialist State and its true believers, the same who are looked at as an endless source for legalized plunder. As always, though, that same State and its adherents survive on other people's money, and as always they bite the hand that feeds them. In any case, I believe that Notre-Dame will be rebuilt. I also believe that some people will see this as a symbolic event--"a wakeup call" as people say after there has been a terrorist attack. Some will even see it as an intervention or as a kind of miracle, as an act of God, not in the mundane, actuarial sense, but in the real, literal sense. In 1944, Adolf Hitler demanded to know: Is Paris burning? The German commander there stayed his hand and did not set the city afire. Yesterday a symbol of the city, of France, of Christendom itself burned. Are we paying attention? And if so, how will we respond, not just to the fire in the cathedral but to the flames that threaten to burn down Western civilization? With post-Christian lassitude and ennui? Or with vigor and confidence charged by belief? In the choice between fire and ice, we seem to have chosen ice. We are in trouble, perhaps without even realizing how seriously we are in trouble. Is this then a fire that might thaw us, that might warm us, warn us, and wake us?

* * *

From the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, selected titles containing the phrase "Notre Dame":

• "The Fools' Pope," an excerpt from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo (1831) in The Monster Book of Monsters, Michael O'Shaughnessy, ed. (1988)
• "Notre Dame des Eaux" by Ralph Adams Cram in Black Spirits and White: A Book of Ghost Stories (1895)   
• "The Juggler of Notre Dame" by Anatole France in Tales from a Mother-of-Pearl Casket (1896) 
• "The Specter of Notre Dame" by Lloyd Owen in Ghost Stories (May 1931)

I have written before about Weird Tales from France, but neither Victor Hugo (1802-1885) nor Anatole France (1844-1924) had bylines in "The Unique Magazine," even if Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame is recognizably a Gothic work (and his title character was an Aurora monster model of the 1960s). Today is Anatole France's birthday by the way, so Happy Birthday, Anatole!

Notre-Dame converted into an airbus station, from Le Vingtième Siècle (1883) by the French artist and writer Albert Robida (1848-1926), reproduced in Science Fiction: An Illustrated History by Sam J. Lundwall (1977). As I have written before, the artist is a canary in the coal mine of culture and history. In this case, the artist foresaw that a cathedral might one day be used for worldly purposes. At least these people are having fun: perhaps Robida and visionaries like him could not have equally foreseen the funlessness of our world today. (We may be hedonistic but there doesn't seem to be much fun and certainly no love or warmth in any of it. In America at least, that funlessness seems to come from a certain Protestant, more specifically Puritan, worldview that--even if they have thrown off Christianity as the most hateful of things--infects progressives like a disease. The creation of Utopia-on-Earth is, after all, a deadly serious business, partly because it must be done NOW, for there is no after.) Anyway, all of this makes me think of the opening sequence in La Dolce Vita (1960) in which a statue of Christ, dangling from a helicopter, shows religion in our age to be merely a worldly spectacle to distract and momentarily entertain bored and jaded people.

The box lid for the 1960s Aurora monster model of Quasimodo, from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1923), the screenplay for which was cowritten by Perley Poore Sheehan (1875-1943), who was, as it turns out, a teller of weird tales.

Text and captions copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Shape of an Oscar-Part Two

I didn't mean for there to be a part two to this article, but I read something on Friday night, after I had written part one, that fits so perfectly with this topic and this title that I have to tell you about it.

I found last week a book called Seeing Is Believing, or How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the 50s by Peter Biskind (1983, 2001). In my reading, I skipped to Chapter 3, "Pods and Blobs," about science fiction and monster movies of the 1950s. Here is an excerpt from the author's discussion of the Creature from the Black Lagoon trilogy of 1954-1956:

In the first film . . . the Creature was mildly appealing, more sinned against than sinning, almost but not quite a noble savage tormented beyond endurance by the arrogant scientists who mucked about in his lagoon, and driven into a frenzy by the proximity of Julia Adams in a one-piece bathing suit. . . . In the second and third films the Creature gets increasingly put upon. In [John] Sherwood's 1956 version [The Creature Walks Among Us], "he" has been taken out of his natural habitat entirely, removed in chains to a cage on land. Here, he's unambiguously sympathetic . . . . But he's unable to protect himself from the mad scientists who perform all sorts of grim experiments upon his body while prattling about "reality and facts." They transplant this, amputate that, move a fin here, a gill there, until his own mother wouldn't recognize him. One of the scientists even tries to frame him for murder, and in the end, the creature is killed. (Bloomsbury, 2001, p. 121)

That sounds a lot like The Shape of Water. There's a difference, though, and it's a significant one if you look at this movie of today in the context of the science fiction movies and monster movies of the 1950s. In those movies, there is a dichotomy between the military man of action and the scientific man of words and ideas. Sometimes the moviemakers were on one side of the dichotomy, and sometimes they were on the other. I can think of no better example than The Thing from Another World vs. The Day the Earth Stood Still, both from 1951. In The Thing, the military men are the heroes. It is by their action that an invasion (or infestation) of Earth is prevented. The scientist on the other hand, Dr. Arthur Carrington, wants to understand and communicate with the alien creature. He even goes so far as to propagate it by feeding it blood, including his own blood. He very nearly wrecks the whole operation, thereby threatening Earth with destruction. In contrast, in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the military men are the tormenters of the alien. They even shoot and kill him, only to see him resurrected. (The Gill-man in The Shape of Water is shot, killed, and resurrected, too. Earlier, he is tormented by electric shock, like the giant carrot in The Thing.) By their actions, the whole of Earth is threatened with destruction. It is the scientists who sympathize with the alien and to whom he appeals. If the planet is to be saved, it will be by their ideas rather than by militaristic action.

So, in The Creature Walks Among Us, the scientists--"mad scientists," Peter Biskind calls them--torment and mutilate the Creature. They are, then, scientists of the first type, i.e., bad scientists. This, I think, is the more conservative version of the military man/man of science dichotomy. (Not conservative in the contemporary political sense but in an older, non-political or anti-political sense.) In The Shape of Water, there is an inversion. The military men or quasi-military men are now the tormenters of the Creature, and it is the scientist who sympathizes with him. (Significantly, the antagonist is the only character in The Shape of Water to quote from the Bible.) Instead of the conservative version of the dichotomy, we have the more liberal or leftwing version. (The scientist in The Shape of Water is a Soviet spy. I think his humanity and sympathy for the Creature are more to the point than his nationality or political affiliation.)

In any case, I haven't seen The Creature Walks Among Us in a long, long time. There may be more similarities between it and The Shape of Water. But as I wrote the other day, The Shape of Water is basically a sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. I think that's okay. Universal Pictures doesn't have exclusive rights to the idea of a lizardman, nor to the idea that a monster or beast might love a woman, a story as old as humanity. (The Creature of the Black Lagoon is essentially the same story as King Kong.) But in any movie a person might make, art should trump politics. More essential than that, bad storytelling should always be banished in favor of good storytelling. Like I told a friend, a good story is what counts. Nothing else in storytelling matters very much.

Finally, I mentioned how I found something in my reading that pertains to the title of this article. Well, the second series of ellipses in the quote above are in place of the following parenthetical statement:

(The Creature's distinctive costume was reputedly derived from a sketch of the Oscar statuette.) (1)

I didn't know that when I wrote the first part of this article, but by a bit of serendipity, my title closes a circle.

Notes

(1) According to the blog Psychobabble: "Millicent Patrick, who designed the Gill Man, was a television and film actress and had been the first female animator at Disney Studios. She was also responsible for the Mutant alien in This Island Earth." (July 25, 2010.)

(2) According to Wikipedia: "Producer William Alland was attending a 1941 dinner party during the filming of Citizen Kane (in which he played the reporter Thompson) when Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa told him about the myth of a race of half-fish, half-human creatures in the Amazon River. Alland wrote story notes titled 'The Sea Monster' 10 years later. His inspiration was Beauty and the Beast." And so another circle is closed in that a Mexican moviemaker, Guillermo del Toro, has made a movie based on a story told by another Mexican moviemaker more than three-quarters of a century ago.

The Gill-man and swimmer from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). You could write more than a few sentences about this image: about the Creature's superior position vs. the woman's inferior position; the fact that his hand is positioned just right to cover a part of his anatomy not intended for display; about her passiveness, fear, and averted gaze. But look at the background. Note the series of symmetries. Is this an unaltered image? Or did the original rocky background, in all of its symmetries, look like a view through a kaleidoscope? Where is Richard Shaver when you need him? He could tell us what these things mean.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Shape of an Oscar

We saw The Shape of Water a few weeks back. I was going to let it slide without comment, but then the thing won Oscars for best picture and best director this past Sunday, so here I am with my two cents' worth.

I read a long time ago that in a decadent culture, everything is reduced to allusion. I would add a remake or an outright swipe to the end of that sentence. Avatar (2009) is really just Ferngully in space (or Dances with Smurfs). The recent Star Trek and Star Wars movies are simply retreads of previous entries in those series. And The Shape of Water (2017) could easily be called E.T. from the Black Lagoon, or The Splash of Water (you know, the movie with Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah), or The Little Mermaid in Reverse. There is still some originality, creativity, and imagination in movies today, but these things are becoming increasingly rare. The Shape of Water may be a nice movie in some ways, but it has some really debilitating flaws, too, and in my little opinion, it should never have won an Oscar for best picture. You could take its winning as a bad sign in creative or artistic terms because it's such a step down from previous winners. But I think there's actually something different at work here. It may be something that will blow over. But if our culture keeps going in this direction, it won't blow over. It could actually be the thing that blows other things over, and people will stop going to movies as a result.

I wrote sometime back about the idea that politics ruins everything it touches. Put another way, politics is sewage, art is wine. Pour a cup of wine into a barrel of sewage and you still have a barrel of sewage. Pour a cup of sewage into a barrel of wine and you have just another barrel of sewage. This year at the Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences poured sewage into the art of moviemaking. Many of the major awards and probably some of the minor awards were tainted, either in actuality or by association with politics. They mean comparatively little because of it. The Shape of Water won an Oscar not for its artistic merits but because it checked so many boxes on the scorecard of political correctness. The members of the Academy see themselves as part of the so-called "Resistance" to the current presidential administration, which they deem as horribly and atrociously racist, sexist, and xenophobic or anti-immigrant. And so, seeing their chance to stick their finger in the eye of our current president and to do some conspicuous moral preening before the world, the members of the Academy handed out awards based on something other than merit. They chose sewage over wine. I have not seen Coco, but I don't think it's any coincidence at all that movies made by and/or about people from Mexico won Oscars for best picture in their respective categories this year. I don't know about you, but as an artist, I would not want to receive an award tainted by political considerations: I would want instead to have my work judged solely on its artistic merits. If I were Guillermo del Toro, I would always have to doubt the integrity of an award given with a political asterisk attached to it.

So what are the problems with The Shape of Water? Let me count them. Actually, let me not count them, as I don't want to spend too much time on this topic. I guess I'll start by saying that a person should not make a movie using a sledgehammer. That's how this movie was made. Okay, yes, we know by now that you, being a Hollywood-ite, believe that pre-Beatles America was a horrible, terrible, unlivable place. It was also horrible and terrible. We know that. Quit reminding us. Quit hitting us with this sledgehammer. (Never mind that Saint John F. Kennedy was president when The Shape of Water is set.) We also know that heterosexual white men attached to the American military-industrial complex are the worst villains the world has ever known and ever will know. This villain is even worse, though. He's got it all covered: he lives in the suburbs with his 2.5 squeaky-clean whitebread (and white-bred) children. He has a Stepford Wives wife who whips out her lovely breast the second his children are out the door and submits to sex in the starfish/missionary position with his disgusting gangrenous hand over her mouth so that she'll shut up while he's going about his bidness. He calls black people "you people" (signifying his racism), sexually harasses the protagonist (signifying his misogyny), makes fun of her disability (signifying his making fun of people with disabilities), torments and tortures the Gill-man (signifying not only his xenophobia but also his mindless and motiveless cruelty and psychopathy), and packs a pistol (signifying his inherent violence and probably also his unnatural feelings for the Second Amendment). He is also former military, and as we know from watching Avatar and other films made by James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro, and their co-religionists, anybody who has served in the military is necessarily a mindless, stupid, aggressive, insensitive, racist, misogynistic, violent, psycho knucklehead.

So the villain in The Shape of Water is a twofer, threefer, fourfer, or morefer. The other characters are twofers or morefers, too. The protagonist is not only a woman and disabled, she's also Hispanic, an orphan, and working class. Her co-worker is not only a woman, she's also black and working class. The protagonist's friend may be white, but he's also homosexual, and we're led to think that he lost his job because of his homosexuality (signifying the homophobia of pre-Stonewall America). (If he's white but gay, he's okay. If he's white but straight, we gotta hate.) There's a twofer in the restaurant where he likes to eat, too: not only does the man at the counter refuse his advances (signifying the man's homophobia), he also refuses service to a young black couple who are looking for what we're all looking for in this life: a good piece of pie. This of course signifies the counterman's racism and the general overall racism of pre-Civil Rights America. In short, this is moviemaking with a sledgehammer. And so much of it is gratuitous--gratuitous, that is, unless moviemaking with a sledgehammer is your purpose: unless politics rather than art is your guiding inspiration.

So if you disregard all of that (not an easy thing to do), you arrive at a love story in the form of a magical-realistic/contemporary urban fantasy/weird-fiction/fairy tale. It's hard to accept the idea of love, specifically physical love, between a human being and a reptile, amphibian, or fish. After all, we have an atavistic revulsion towards these creeping, crawling, swimming creatures, those made on the fifth day of Creation rather than the sixth. (It's much easier and more natural to believe in the love of Beauty for the Beast, as he is at least soft and furry, i.e., mammalian.) But for an hour or so, you can set that aside, too. The protagonist is, after all, very lonely, and we can all identify with loneliness, even extreme loneliness. In our loneliness, we might even envision love with a toad.

You can also accept impossibilities, like the bathroom filling up with bathwater so that the two new lovers can enjoy a kind of sexual aquacade, like the contrastingly chaste underwater scenes in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) in which the Gill-man spies on and soon abducts Ginger Stanley, standing in for Julia Adams. (The Shape of Water is basically a sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon. Screwy, but a sequel.) What you can't accept is the ignorance and lack of imagination on the part of the moviemaker when it comes to storytelling. I'll give just one example of each. I think each one of these is pretty disastrous. 

First, one of the badguys in the movie is U.S. Army General Frank Hoyt. We already know he's bad because he serves in the military. He's worse because he's in command of this whole operation in which the Gill-man is supposed to be used for some kind of nefarious secret government conspiratorial plot, just like all government operations were until our most recent ex-president got into office. (If we ever know what the plot is in The Shape of Water, we have forgotten by the end of the film. This reminds me of a Squatcher I know who thinks the U.S. Army is hiding evidence of Bigfoot. Why? Who knows.) Anyway, Hoyt is not just a general. He's a five-star general. I guess in Mr. del Toro's stunted imagination, the U.S. Army hands out stars the way you hand out candy at Halloween. Never mind that there have been exactly four five-star army generals in American history (and five previous generals-of-the-army). Hoyt might as well have been called a Super-Duper General. That would have made just as much sense. Mr. del Toro's gaffe is reflective not only of the hostility moviemakers have towards the military but also of their breathtaking ignorance when it comes to military matters. Somebody should have stopped him before he made his mistake.

Second and more serious is that when the Gill-man is brought into the military-scientific facility for study, he arrives inside a tank with a window. Any Joe (or Jane) Blow standing around picking his nose or mopping the floor can see what's inside--and she does, the protagonist that is. For a place that's supposed to be about secrecy and security, there is astonishing incompetence when it comes to actually keeping anything secret and secure. The cleaning ladies wander around on their own, going wherever they want, seeing whatever they want, talking to the Gill-man, playing him records and feeding him hardboiled eggs, like the cheapest date there has ever been. (What does he know? He lives in a river. And what about the eggs? They're her eggs, aren't they, meaning her own symbolic ova? She of course prepares them by the egg timer she uses every morning for another purpose.) The screenwriter should have thought of a better way of telling his story. Instead he took the easy way out, and so we have a whole movie based on an entirely unbelievable premise. This may be a fantasy, but even a fantasy has to follow basic rules, one of which is that people must act like real people instead of like incompetent morons when the moviemaker requires them to because he's too stupid or lazy to figure out how to tell his story otherwise.

Now see what has happened? I have written way more than I was planning to, and I'm not even done yet. This will be the last, though, I promise. I have written before about the idea that fantasy and weird fiction tend to be conservative genres and generally about the past, while science fiction tends to be progressive and generally about the future. The Shape of Water is not science fiction, despite any science-fictional elements it might have. It is obviously a fantasy, but it's a progressive fantasy. Is that a self-contradictory thing? Can there really be a progressive fantasy? Maybe. But The Shape of Water is a progressive fantasy not in that it imagines how things might be in a progressive world. Instead, it's a fantasy imagined by a progressive moviemaker. In other words, it's not the movie itself but the moviemaker who is progressive. Guillermo del Toro has told a story from a progressive point of view. In so doing, he has relied on extreme and unrealistic stereotypes*, gratuitous episodes and gratuitous story elements, implausible or impossible situations, ignorance as to history and human nature, and extreme laziness or incompetence in his storytelling. Despite the opinion of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, his movie is middling in its accomplishments. So if this is an example of a progressive fantasy, it falls pretty flat. I would argue that any progressive fantasy is likely to fall flat, as: a) fantasy is an artistic genre; b) art is about the nature of human beings, life, and reality; and c) progressivism is basically out of touch with these very subjects. If anyone can come up with a progressive fantasy that can stand on its own two legs, I'm willing to listen to your case. Just make sure it's a strong one.

*Speaking of stereotypes, did anyone in the Academy or the media notice the stereotype of the black man as weak, cowardly, unreliable, lazy, or afraid in The Shape of Water? I suppose in this age, stereotypes of men are permitted, no matter what color they are, especially if the stereotype is being peddled by another person of color (although Guillermo del Toro is a pasty-faced white dude with brown hair and blue eyes), and especially if that person is of a higher caste in the hierarchy of political correctness.

Copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales and the Inner Sanctum

The Red Right Hand (1945) by Joel Townsley Rogers was first issued in hardback by Simon and Schuster as part of its Inner Sanctum Mystery series. As Mike Tuz pointed out in his recent comment, that was at about the same time that Universal Pictures was releasing a series of horror movies under the same name. If you listened to the radio in 1945, you were likely to hear a sardonic voice and the sound of a creaking door in the introduction to a weekly show called Inner Sanctum Mystery (more popularly known as Inner Sanctum Mysteries). A decade later, you could have watched Inner Sanctum on television, if only for a season. So how were these series related? Where did the Inner Sanctum brand begin? And what did it all have to do with Weird Tales? That's what I'll write about today.

First, I should say that there doesn't seem to be much of a connection between Weird Tales and Inner Sanctum Mystery. In beginning my research, I was hoping to find more. So maybe the title of this article is a little misleading. On the other hand, there are some pretty big gaps in the online history of the brand. For example, a list of radio episodes on Wikipedia includes the names of only a few scriptwriters. Likewise, The Internet Movie Database includes the titles and casts of all forty episodes of the TV series, but the writers' names are mostly missing. And good luck finding a comprehensive list of the titles in Simon and Schuster's hardbound Inner Sanctum Mystery series. So maybe there are still connections awaiting discovery. Weird Tales and the Inner Sanctum had this much in common at least: both began in the 1920s as the creations of enterprising young publishers.

In the case of Simon and Schuster, those enterprising young publishers were Richard L. "Dick" Simon (1899-1960), a piano salesman, and M. Lincoln "Max" Schuster (1897-1970), an editor of a trade magazine. (1) According to Wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge, "Simon's aunt, a crossword puzzle devotee, asked Simon whether there was a book of these puzzles that she could give to a friend. Simon discovered that none had been published, and, with Schuster, launched a company to exploit the opportunity." The year was 1924, plumb in the middle of a decade of fads and other wonderful nonsense. Crossword puzzles became the latest, and Simon and Schuster was off and running.

Almost from the beginning--or at least as early as 1927--Simon and Schuster ran a regular advertising column called "The Inner Sanctum" in the New York Times and Publishing Weekly. Readers may or may not have known it, but "the Inner Sanctum" is the name the two publishers gave to an office within their own suite of offices on 57th Street, just off Fifth Avenue. The Inner Sanctum was in fact a room situated between the respective offices of Dick Simon and Max Schuster. Here is a playful map from 1927, drawn by C. Vernon Farrow:

The legend reads, in part, "The Sun Never Sets on The Inner Sanctum of Simon and Schuster." Before going on, I would like to show another map drawn by the artist Charles Vernon Farrow (1896-1936):

This one is entitled "A Map of the Wondrous Isle of Manhattan" and is dated 1926. The isle was and is wondrous to be sure, and the cartographer Farrow made a wondrous map to match it. This map in particular makes me think of Dell's famous line of map-back paperbacks of the 1940s. Dell was the second major publisher of paperback books in America. Simon and Schuster, publishers of Pocket Books, was the first.

So "the Inner Sanctum" originally referred to the house of Simon and Schuster, then to series of books published by that house. Not all of the Inner Sanctum books were mysteries, at least at the outset. There is, for example, an Inner Sanctum edition of War and Peace, published in 1942. According to Martin Grams Blog (here), the Inner Sanctum series, published monthly, were color coded: blue binding for "serious drama," red for "lighter fare" and/or romance, and green for "detective stories." (Mr. Gram's wording is a little ambiguous. I hope I interpret it correctly.) Later, once the radio show became popular, the Inner Sanctum series were strictly mysteries.

The first Inner Sanctum Mystery was I Am Jonathan Scrivener by Charles Houghton, published in 1930. In 1935, a young woman named Lee Wright (1904-1986) began working at Simon and Schuster as a secretary. The following year, she became editor of the Inner Sanctum Mystery series, and in 1944, senior editor. It was Lee Wright who was so effusive about Joel Townsley Rogers' story and novel The Red Right Hand, and it was she who saw it into print in 1945.

Another Simon and Schuster employee figures pretty prominently in the story of Inner Sanctum Mystery as well. His name was Leon Shimkin (1907-1988), and in 1924, at age seventeen, he signed on with the firm as a $25-a-week bookkeeper. Described by the New York Times as "[t]ireless and hard-driving," Shimkin soon worked his way up to be business manager and eventually to chairman of the board and owner of the company. He was in on the founding of Pocket Books, the first line of mass-market paperback books in America, in 1939. (Shimkin was treasurer of the venture.) "While critics scoffed at the notion of selling 25-cent paperback books in supermarkets and similar outlets," wrote the Times, "Pocket Books was an immediate success." It also spawned myriads of paperback book publishers, many of which lived on the pulp genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, detective, and mystery stories. Paperbacks also helped bring pulp magazines to an end after World War II. Hardbound books survived of course, and the Inner Sanctum Mystery series carried on at least until the 1960s. I have titles for 1960--The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch--and 1966--The Incredible Schlock Homes by Robert L. Fish. I don't know when the last title in the series was published.

In the early 1940s, Leon Shimkin sold the rights to Inner Sanctum Mystery to Universal Pictures. By the time the first movie came out in 1943, Inner Sanctum Mystery, also called Inner Sanctum Mysteries or just Inner Sanctum, had been on the radio for a couple of years. I suspect that Shimkin helped orchestrate that deal, too. In any case, the radio show, which began on January 7, 1941, was a hit. Under producer Himan "Hi" Brown (1910-2010), Inner Sanctum Mystery ran for more than eleven years and a total of 526 broadcasts. The last came on October 5, 1952. (2) As I said, the writers' credits are mostly missing. Stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, both of whom were in Weird Tales, were adapted for the show.

From 1943 to 1945, Universal released six movies in the Inner Sanctum Mystery series starring Lon Chaney, Jr. These are supposed to have been based on the radio show. The titles are:

• Calling Dr. Death (1943)
• Weird Woman (1944)
• Dead Man's Eyes (1944)
• The Frozen Ghost (1945)
• Strange Confession (1945)
• Pillow of Death (1945)

Weird Woman was based on the story "Conjure Wife" by Fritz Leiber, Jr., and although "Conjure Wife" wasn't in Weird Tales (it was in the rival title Unknown Worlds in April 1943), its author was. The movie title of course echoes that of Weird Tales. By the way, Leiber's father, Fritz Leiber, was in the non-Universal movie Inner Sanctum from 1948. He played a character called Dr. Valonius.

Finally, Hi Brown produced the television adaptation of Inner Sanctum in his studios in New York City. The show ran for forty half-hour episodes from January to October 1954. (The show ended a month after Weird Tales did.) As an early anthology series, it gave a lot of young actors and actresses--Warren Stevens, Jack Klugman, Jack Albertson, Betsy Palmer--a chance to appear on television. It very likely helped pave the way for other anthology series as well, particularly The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), which, like the original radio series, had, in its host, the series' only regular character. The host of The Twilight Zone was of course played by Rod Serling, a most worthy successor to the Weird Tales mantle.

Notes
(1) Simon seems to have been the principle partner. There is comparatively little on the Internet about Schuster. Find A Grave has him, but his birth date--March 2, 1897--and birthplace--Austria--are missing. Schuster's father was a U.S. citizen at the time of Schuster's birth. According to Schuster's World War I draft card, "[the] child came to the U.S. when [he was] 6 weeks old." Max L. Schuster died on December 20, 1970, at his home in Manhattan.
(2) Like pulp magazines, radio drama and comedy were casualties of the post-war world. All survived in one way or another, however. Pulps didn't die so much as simply change form. They became paperback books, digest-sized magazines, and standard-sized magazines. The last true pulp magazine was Ranch Romances and Adventure, which came to an end in 1971 or thereabouts. Radio shows didn't exactly die, either. They simply became TV shows, and most of the old radio stars made the switch to television. Some, like Jack Benny, were successful. Others weren't. Incidentally, Hi Brown produced a later radio show called CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974-1982), more or less as a reprise of Inner Sanctum Mystery, complete with the sardonic host and the creaking door. I am happy to say that we listened to that show when we were kids, and so we got in on the very tail end of radio drama in America.

Here are some sources:

Simon and Schuster

Wikipedia

Richard L. Simon

Wikipedia

Lee Wright

http://www.threeinvestigatorsbooks.com/LeeWrightEditor.html

"Leon Shimkin, a Guiding Force At Simon & Schuster, Dies at 81" by Edwin McDowell, New York Times, May 26, 1988

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/26/obituaries/leon-shimkin-a-guiding-force-at-simon-schuster-dies-at-81.html

Inner Sanctum Mystery

Wikipedia

"Debunking the Myth . . ."

http://martingrams.blogspot.com/2013/10/debunking-myths-of-inner-sanctum.html

Original text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley