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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 18, 2011 15:02:20 GMT
I feel I have overdosed on "weird menace" recently, and will shortly take a break, but I know you are anxious to know what Black Dog Books's Zagat collection, said to be the first ever, is like.
"Cargo for Hell" (Spicy Mystery Stories, February 1936). Zagat is what you might call a "sensual" writer: "Alma's small hand cupped the swelling, soft round of her virginal breast to feel beneath it the flutter of her heart like the struggles of a captured bird." That is from the story's first paragraph. Later on we learn more about Alma's "nubile half-globes whose pearly, almost iridescent hemispheres were netted by a faint blue tracery of threadlike veins." Alma is newly-wed and cannot wait to have sex with her husband for the first time. But the fact that a version of the last voyage of the Demeter from DRACULA is playing out on their sailboat gets in the way. It all has a rational explanation, however, and Alma finally gets what she so desperately wants. Oh, and there are whippings, of course.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 19, 2011 6:29:14 GMT
Thanks for doing this one, JoJo. Zagat kind of took over our Shudder Pulp Links once James had encountered his The House Of Living Death and friend Doug was wondering if Man From Hell was worth getting (I'd say you've answered that!). If we forget all about the trademark whips for a moment, do you think there are any later, even contemporary authors who write in the 'sensual' weird menace tradition? |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 19, 2011 11:05:00 GMT
do you think there are any later, even contemporary authors who write in the 'sensual' weird menace tradition? Richard Laymon? But it has occurred to me that one aspect of the "weird menace" formula, the rational explanation for seemingly supernatural phenomena, is completely and utterly dead. Nobody writes stories like that any more. I think we are nowadays somehow conditioned to find them silly. Yet the general approach was very popular until quite recently. If someone has any ideas about what happened, I am very interested. |
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Post by Dr Strange on Mar 19, 2011 12:46:00 GMT
But it has occurred to me that one aspect of the "weird menace" formula, the rational explanation for seemingly supernatural phenomena, is completely and utterly dead. Nobody writes stories like that any more. I think we are nowadays somehow conditioned to find them silly. Yet the general approach was very popular until quite recently. If someone has any ideas about what happened, I am very interested. It may seem facile... but the fact that this is so often referred to as a "Scooby Doo ending" might suggest the cartoon actually had quite a lot to do with it? It still turns up in the occassional film though - the Les Diaboliques scenario is a bit of a favourite of mine. But it's bound to lose its impact if you are a writer who finishes every story that way, no matter how inventive the explanation is. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 19, 2011 12:58:27 GMT
the Les Diaboliques scenario is a bit of a favourite of mine. Yes, and "gaslighting" is another variation that is still popular, I think. Remember that in the "shudder pulps" every story by every writer would end that way, and the readers knew this. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 19, 2011 13:16:43 GMT
"Graveyard Honeymoon" (Spicy Mystery Stories, April 1936). This tale of cross-dressing and live burial hints at all sorts of kinkiness: "No man, no boy, had flesh as soft as this, as palpitantly resilient to one's fevered touch." I am, of course, making this sound more exciting than it is. Originality of plot---this one concerns moonshiners dressing up as ghosts in order to stop a dam from being built---was not Zagat's strong suit. But his style is intensely lurid, and he seems to have had access to a more comprehensive thesaurus than some others in the genre---sort of like a poor man's Clark Ashton Smith.
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Post by Dr Strange on Mar 19, 2011 13:58:02 GMT
moonshiners dressing up as ghosts in order to stop a dam from being built Is Scrappy in that one? Just remembered one of the worst film examples of a Scooby Doo-esque plot I've seen - M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 19, 2011 14:50:19 GMT
Just remembered one of the worst film examples of a Scooby Doo-esque plot I've seen - M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. Thanks for reminding me of that one! I have never seen it, although, being an educated man, I am, of course, familiar with its plot. I shall watch it immediately. I am afraid I have been neglecting Shyamalan. I hated his second film---what was it called? UNBEARABLE?---so much I have never seen another one. |
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Post by andydecker on Mar 19, 2011 14:58:12 GMT
do you think there are any later, even contemporary authors who write in the 'sensual' weird menace tradition? Richard Laymon? But it has occurred to me that one aspect of the "weird menace" formula, the rational explanation for seemingly supernatural phenomena, is completely and utterly dead. Nobody writes stories like that any more. I think we are nowadays somehow conditioned to find them silly. Yet the general approach was very popular until quite recently. If someone has any ideas about what happened, I am very interested. I think this fell out of favour after the war. Movies like Abott and Costello put the last nail into the coffin. And the then "realistic" new horrormovies changed public tastes. From every Jack Arnold movie to the Excorcist, it was always the "real" thing. It is only kept in Romances and YA (which wanted to eat their cake and keep it, having "horror" but also kiddie compatible). And with the advent of the vampire as an all purpose character even the YA have no problem going with the supernatural. (Public battles like the witchcraft nonsense about Harry Potter are flukes) Personally I can´t take this approach serious. Not because I saw too much Scooby Doo - which I did -, but because it is so f***ing stupid. But on another note it is astonishing how much a basically cheaply made cartoon with a weak animation has seeped into the public consciousness. (I like it though, seing the original series as an adult for its first time. It is constantly re-run, and now and then I watch an old episode of its first seasons - before they made it cringeworthy with Scrappy). What was the starting point of this? Was it Buffy or the X-Files who made it poplar again? Or the desperate need of more tv-stations to fill the early hours with old crap which introduced it to new generations? |
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Post by ramseycampbell on Mar 19, 2011 15:03:08 GMT
[Personally I can´t take this approach serious. Not because I saw too much Scooby Doo - which I did -, but because it is so f***ing stupid. I think it reached its nadir in the late eighties, in the truly terrible film Revenge of the Living Dead Girls. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 19, 2011 17:15:06 GMT
Ok, I just watched THE VILLAGE. I rather liked it. It is pretentious, silly, and remarkably wrong-headed (people who thought it was intended as satire on organized religion cannot have been paying much attention), but it is still interesting. It is unfair to accuse it of Scooby-Dooism, as that aspect only plays a minor role.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 19, 2011 18:41:24 GMT
"Her Demon Lover" (Spicy Mystery Stories, July 1936). This passage could be straight out of Laymon: "This dress was tight enough to mold itself over the seductive curves of her slim, young body. She could feel it against the long arc of her thighs, against the incurve of her waist and her stomach. She could feel the firm thrust of her breasts against it---the nuzzle of their elastic curves." Maylinn should really have known better than to wear that dress to town! Her moonshining husband gives her a sound whipping as punishment. A passing witch treats her wounds and gives her a strange drink. Before you know it Maylinn is dancing naked in the moonlit forest and mating with an elemental. It all has a rational explanation, however, and ends happily.
I am not sure I can take much more of this stuff. For one thing, it is becoming clear that these are really thinly disguised romance stories of a kind a red-blooded male such as myself should not really be reading. What were Zagat and Spicy Mystery Stories thinking?
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Post by dem bones on Mar 19, 2011 21:09:10 GMT
It may seem facile... but the fact that this is so often referred to as a "Scooby Doo ending" might suggest the cartoon actually had quite a lot to do with it? I was also going to blame Scooby Doo and still think there's some truth in it, but then I remembered that the early 'sixties weird menace revivalists Web Terror Stories and the second incarnation of Shock also dispensed with the it-was-the-mayor-dressed-up-all-along endings, so could be that the horror comedies had already put them off. I'm with you on Laymon, JoJo. In what passes for my brain, I'd argue that Laurence James was the Russell Gray of his generation and the Hamlyn nasty crowd inherited the Terror Tales/ Horror Stories/ Dime Mystery mantle, though whether they were conscious of those magazines is another matter. Relaxed censorship laws meant they could replace the flagellation frenzies with a variety of explicit sex scenes (the gore was always there), but a novel like Cliff Twemlow's outrageous The Pike is as trad weird menace as The Mole Men Want Their Eyes. Guy N. Smith's early work - the Crabs series, The Slime Beast and Bats Out Of Hell come to mind - likewise share several of the WM traits. In the first of the Sabat novels, the cowled necromancer might have stepped straight from one of John Newton Howitt's cover paintings. Spicy Mystery Stories: I'd have to say that if the Tom Mason selection is at all representative, then the magazine was pretty sanitized weird menace and Spicy Western is an offence against the trade descriptions act. That said, should I spot a copy of Zagat's book on my travels and have enough cash, it won't stay unclaimed for long. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 20, 2011 19:32:13 GMT
"Goat Girl of Lussac" (Spicy Mystery Stories, December 1936). Thankfully, this one is a bit of a change of pace. The narrator reminisces about an old army buddy: "I recalled the clean lines of his bronzed torso, the crisp triangle made by his broad shoulders and his waist that two hands could almost span." Ahem. It turns out that in France during the war he bravely saved his beloved friend from ending up a druidic sacrifice, but do you think he got any gratitude for that? This sub-Algernon Blackwood tale breaks with the "weird menace" formula and is almost a legitimate horror story.
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Post by ramseycampbell on Mar 21, 2011 8:50:19 GMT
It may seem facile... but the fact that this is so often referred to as a "Scooby Doo ending" might suggest the cartoon actually had quite a lot to do with it? It was originally known as Radcliffism, wasn't it? Doesn't the term show up in one of Jane Austen's early drafts? |
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