The Mumpsimus

When God commanded this hand to write In the studious hours of deep midnight He told me the writing I wrote should prove The Bane of all that on Earth I lovd —William Blake, "The Grey Monk" Over the last month or two, I've started and stopped reading dozens of books, many of them clearly quite good, even excellent, but none of them able to hold my interest in amidst busy days of work, life, etc. And then I found myself reading a lot of Clive Barker for the first time in many years. (I don't seem to be alone — see this excellent Weird Studies podcast episode from last last month with Conner Habib discussing The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser .) Barker's short stories and novels have captured my reading with their wild commitment to imagination and their seriousness of intent within popular forms. Sacrament is both a summation of the first 15 years or so of Barker's concerns and a departure from the overtly horrific and then phantasmagoric work. Some supernatu...

At the end of an interesting episode of the Hermitix podcast, Jesuit priest and professor of theology Ryan Duns says that he has been thinking about how to write his next book, one built partly from his course at Marquette University on “Evil, Horror, and Theology”, and that he has struggled with a focus for it as well as a title. His original idea for a title was The Dark Transcendent: The Metaphysics and Theology of Horror , but because that makes the topic so large, he is now inclined to call the book Horror: A Theology . I would eagerly read a book with that title, especially one written by someone with as deep an understanding of theology as Duns, because most of what I’ve read on the topic of how horror intersects with theology feels superficial or reductive. Yet horror is the mode of storytelling most reliant on systems of belief and unbelief, both as subject of its stories and as tool for its effects — thus horror is the mode most inclined to exploration of how belief matter...

Anthony DiBlasi's movie Dread may be compelling for folks who haven't read the Clive Barker story that inspired it, but anyone who admires the grand guignol audacity of that story will likely be disappointed by the film. There's plenty to praise in the movie, though, and before I detail why I think Diblasi's screenplay tames the story and saps it of any interesting meaning, I do want to make it clear that my objection is primarily to the screenplay. The cinematography and production design are often excellent, sometimes strikingly so -- every wall in this film seems rich with texture, the colors and lighting are frequently more evocative than anything going on in the plot, and some of the framing of shots is gorgeous (what's in the frame is often grimy or grotesque, fitting the events of the story, but the image composition is nonetheless beautiful). And there's some good gore, too. The acting isn't as bad as it could be, either, especially given...