We can now see how a galaxy will look 10,000 years in the future.

“It takes high-speed, sophisticated computer programs to measure the tiny shifts in the positions of the stars that occur in only four years’ time,” said astronomer Jay Anderson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., who conducted the study with fellow STScI astronomer Roeland van der Marel. “Ultimately, though, it is Hubble’s razor-sharp vision that is the key to our ability to measure stellar motions in this cluster.”

That is awesome.

[Space]

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town. Wednesday we learned how one man created his own lake monster sham.

Maybe it’s because we’re at a century’s distance with only selective research sources left to go by, but I feel like there’s respectable, genteel nobility behind both the Hodag hoax and the Lake George Monster prank. I say this in light of the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco, which mirrored modern film and record promotion campaigns far more than it did the homegrown ingenuity of yesteryear’s cryptid shenanigans. At the same token, it’s difficult, in the case of the Sasquatch carcass thimblerig, to figure out exactly where the wild dream logic and delightful homespun madness ended and where the frustrating dishonesty and grubby-handed cash pawing began.

It’s easy to point fingers at Carmine Thomas Biscardi, the Las Vegas promoter and notorious Bigfoot hoaxer, who teamed up with the two Georgia pranksters after they had already set their small-scale practical joke in motion… easy because he’s obviously guilty, and by far the least sympathetic party involved. In 2005, Biscardi went on Coast to Coast AM to brag about a live Bigfoot specimen that everybody could watch and enjoy via live webcam feed… for a subscription fee of $14. The surprise here isn’t that there wasn’t actually a captive Sasquatch pacing circles in front of the camera lens, but rather that there was nothing pacing anything anywhere; Biscardi didn’t even try to fake a spectacle. After announcing that there was never a live specimen and claiming that he, too, had been ripped off by the people in possession of the non-existent Bigfoot, Biscardi took the webcam money and ran. (To his dubious credit, he did refund all post-prank-revelation subscription orders.) The refusal to present even the drunkest of vagrants in the nattiest of Gorilla Grodd costumes clearly crosses the line between hoax and scam.

So after Biscardi jumped on the bandwagon-cum-Yeti-hearse of the Georgian sheriff’s deputy and his used car salesman buddy, it was really tempting to cite him as the reason that the hoax felt less like a harmless, misguided jape than a carefully orchestrated deception. After all, Biscardi’s the one who called down the media frenzy, and who organized the ridiculous live press conference, and who, at the outset, before pictures of the so-called corpse were released on the Internet, charged folks $2 a pop for cadaver photos. On the other hand, Biscardi didn’t start the hoax. He didn’t author the boys’ tale of hiking through the woods and finding the 7’ 7” fur-covered body amid a gathering of three similar living creatures. He even joined up after the first YouTube video was filmed. Biscardi is just a savvy, opportunistic mooch, the crooked conductor of a runaway train built by Deputy Matthew Whiton and Rick Dyer.

Get the rest of the story AFTER THE JUMP…

Dyer and Whiton are harder to pin down. It takes very specific sort of f***-all enthusiasm to dash out into the world claiming to have found the bloating corpse of a monster. Still, a century before, Eugene Shepard ran into Rhinelander, Wisconsin with not only the faked corpse of a monster, but also an epic tale detailing how he and a lumberjack posse had killed the beast with dynamite. In both cases a false cadaver was created, and advertised as the genuine artifact. I haven’t found anything to indicate that Shepard charged anyone to take a look-see at the immolated Hodag, but neither is it clear what sort of monetary designs Dyer and Whiton did or didn’t have before Biscardi joined up (though the ease with which the Vegas promoter convinced them that their bizarre animal was, in actuality, a cash cow doesn’t speak well of their intentions). “But,” you point out, “Shepard did charge people a dime to see the supposed live Hodag at the County Fair.” And here, again, we are walking the high wire between hoax and scam.

Even disregarding the fact that’s Shepard’s Hodag wasn’t presented in a cultural vacuum – patrons were almost certainly familiar with sideshows and similar humbugs that offered creative, entertaining, but generally obvious, deceptions for a minimal fee – the lurching automaton voiced by Shepard’s son and accompanied by Shepard’s own manic, silver-tongued narration provided enough of a spectacle to justify the minimal price of admission. And it’s hard to tell whether or not Dyer and Whiton possess whatever unnamable compulsion drives people to rig up robot monsters or add a set of blue ears to a painted, pulley-rigged stick. They certainly aren’t like Biscardi, who uses big talk and empty promises to pocket fat stacks of money for nothing. At the same time, they seemed to lack the joyfulness and enthusiasm that both Shepard and Watrous felt for their respective creations. Despite their commitment to creating an ad hoc monster body, they seemed more obsessed with the publicity and cultural caché than with the actual source of attention – Bigfoot remains. Seriously low rent Bigfoot remains.
And for me, that was what ultimately made the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco seem so disingenuous. Initially, the whole business had me really excited – not because I believed the body was real, but because I wanted to see how far they would take it. How much effort they would put into the spectacle. Whether or not, like Shepard and Watrous, they would show us something that, while false according to its supposed identity, was real in its creativity and craftsmanship. I was hoping for a fully autopsy-ready body, with layers of correctly placed viscera, a stomach rife with clues pointing to the identity of its last meal, and maybe even a couple ridiculous, but no less entertaining, physiological revelations (Bigfoot has two hearts! Bigfoot has an artificial hip, indicating that Sasquatches have surprisingly advanced medical capabilities!) So when word came out that it was just an ape suit stuffed with hotdog ingredients, I was more than a little chagrined.

I don’t know where this leaves us. It’s seems reductive to blame Dyer and Whiton’s misguided bottom-shelf prankery on new media and a reality show culture that promise fame to the commoner and increasingly value the frenzied swapping of digital information over a tangible engagement with a physical product, though I’m sure once Biscardi was involved he convinced the boys that, these days, a ridiculously low investment often yields high temporary returns. After all, the hoax was never meant to go undetected forever… just long enough for the three yeti coroners to fill their coffers through the exploitation of Bigfoot enthusiasts and cryptid research groups. Then again, in this day and age, even a well-intentioned prankster with boundless integrity would be remiss to entirely forego a Web presence in favor of some falsely idealized “old fashioned” route.

No, I think the problem with all of this – the thing that made Dyer and Whiton’s Bigfoot prank feel dire and witless – was the pranksters seeming lack of fun. Imagine a grinning Eugene Shepard storming out of the woods with his carbonized Hodag, or a giggling Harry Watrous hiding in some shrubs, waiting to loose his hippogriff upon a hapless boater. These locally performed stunts were just that – performed, with the jerry-rigged monsters taking center stage as their creators MC’d or crouched behind an azalea bush. A snarling Hodag. A blue-eared hippogriff. A hypothetical surgically enhanced dual-hearted Bigfoot. These pranks are attractive because they seek to knit our dreams and nightmares from the mundane yarn of the everyday – to bring us as close as we’ll ever come to actual monsters. What the Dyer and Whiton did was mug for the camera, all the while taunting us with a shi**y cat’s cradle strung between 10 middle fingers.

It’s happening again… again. Give it up for Bloody Mary.

You have already been acquainted with the drill: I look up a popular American cryptid/folktale (e.g., Bloody Mary) on three foreign language Wikipedia pages and summarize the results (including the requisite [sic]-implied Google Translate nuggets).

You try to match each of the three versions to the Wikipedia site on which you believe it have originated.

If you want to. Otherwise, proceed straight to the answers. There’s no reward for right answers, creative problem solving techniques or subtle attempts at blackmail. And if there were, it would be something plagued by poorly welded corner seams and filled with molten lava, and nobody would want it.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the general ghost-in-the-mirror slumber party exploits of Bloody Mary, read this English-language Wikipedia article

As David Bowie once crooned, “Let’s dance!”:

Your Language Choices:
a.) Italian
b.) Japanese
c.) German

Bloody Mary:

1. This language’s Bloody Mary entry is little more than a single-paragraph blurb that identifies the ritual as a courage test, mentions the optional use of candles and explains that the ghost is often summoned via the “rearview mirror of a car where there was associated in his lifetime, in which case at least one person has walked up it turned out to talk with her, but once.” The related links, however, guide readers to a page about a different legend – the legend of “Anne toilet.” According to the story, Anne was a young woman who was killed in the bathroom of her school and subsequently began haunting other school bathrooms. Supposedly, “in a certain school toilets should not everyone in a certain way and call Anne [ reply comes back from the shot. ‘ Wearing a red skirt , the most famous figure of the girl bobbed hair.”

2. On this language’s Wikipedia, the legend behind the familiar sleepover game goes thusly: there was a girl of 14 who died in an unspecified, but almost certainly tragic, accident. Her mother went so insane in the grief-coping center of her membrane that she “attacked on his arm a wire connected to a bell outside the coffin and the ground.” Mary’s mother swore she could hear the bell jingling, over and over again, resounding in her skull like some horrific parody of Christmas. Finally, she persuaded her already devestated husband to dig up their daughter’s coffin. “As soon as it was opened in horror as their parents saw that Mary had tried to open the coffin and had pulled all the nails against the wall to exit. But now Mary had died and the parents went mad with grief that he killed their daughter.” The page goes on to explain that in America, Bloody Mary is usually described as a girl killed in a car accident or “a girl buried alive by his own beliefs are so many parents.”

3. This language’s Wikipedia site doesn’t even have a page for Bloody Mary, but instead, after automatically sending users to a page about the cocktail, redirects folklore researchers to a catch-all page about Bogey figures throughout the world. Aside from an easily missed nod to Bloody M., the page features descriptions of Hakemann, “A hybrid of man and fish. Attracts swimmers children drown in water with a hook to it and be eaten by him,“ Schneider with the Shear, “which cuts the disobedient child,“ and Stranger, “a bright green pants and a black coat in appearance.“

Answers:

Description 1.) was found on b.), the Japanese Wikipedia
Description 2.) was found on a.), the Italian Wikipedia
Description 3.) was, therefore, found on c.), the German Wikipedia

Thanks for playing. Let’s do this again some time! I think I almost learned something.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town.

The Lake George Monster never saved a town. It didn’t herald a tourism boom or lure swarms of industrialists to the shores of Hague Bay. It doesn’t funky chicken around the sidelines of any public school basketball courts. And Lake George isn’t known as “Home of the Lake George Monster,” but rather as “Gateway to the Adirondacks.” Credit where credit is due, though, the Lake George Monster is probably the most extreme point (short of boat murder) to which a friendly fishing contest has ever escalated.
In 1904, Harry Watrous, a professional painter, made a bet with his friend, Colonel William Mann, the editor of an infamous gossip rag, over who could reel in a larger trout. And so it began. The men fished on the lake, often in sight of each other, each one determined to fish better, harder, faster than the other. In retrospect, that Mann decided to cheat shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

The paper the Colonel edited, “Town Topics,” once a respectable arts and leisure magazine, had, under Mann, become an inky mire of high society gossip and scandal-mongering. Mann’s ploy to avoid libel charges? Print standard, sometimes even complimentary, articles about known New York society members on the front of a page, then, on the flip side, directly lined up with the corresponding fluff pieces, run scandalous news about the same individuals, sans identification. Anyone who knew how to read the paper – and anyone who was anyone did – could easily match the public figures to the defaming rumors. “Town Topics,” of course, stayed in business by collecting bribes from guilty parties who wished to keep their faux pas private. Still, when Watrous finally identified the hulking monster of a trout that Mann casually held up from inside his own fishing craft, and later, in a ridiculous display of bravado, exhibited in his house, as a sculpted and painted hunk of wood, he swore revenge.

Like the Rhinelander Hodag, the Lake George Monster began life as a chunk of wood (specifically, a cedar log). Using bits of glass, metal and wood, Watrous affixed eyes, ears and a toothy snout to the 10-foot-long log, which he then painted in alternating yellow and black stripes. Also, white teeth, red mouth, red nostrils, and blue (yes, blue) ears. (Later, Watrous would repeatedly refer to his creation as a “Hippogriff”- the mythical offspring of a griffin and a mare, and noble companion to the Boy Who Lived – but I’m not seeing it.) He rowed out to an area of the lake frequented by his friend and nemesis, and rigged up the creature to a simple pulley system – a 100-foot-rope anchored to a rock on the shore.

Then he waited.

MUCH MORE… AFTER THE JUMP

Mann, who floated by sometime later, was accompanied by several guests, including one Mr. Davies and one Mrs. Bates. Watrous loosed his Hippogriff. I’ll let the monster’s creator describe the ensuing scene as he related it years later to the New York “Evening Sun”:
“Mr. Davies, who had a rather high pitched voice, uttered a scream that must have been heard as far away as Burlington, Vt. Mrs. Bates, a very intrepid lady, of Milesian extraction, stood on a seat in the boat and beat the water with her parasol, shouting indistinguishable sentences in her native tongue. Col. Mann shouted, ‘Good God, what is it?’ through his whiskers and kept repeating his query as long as the boat was in sight.”
Soon, rumors of the Lake George Monster began spreading throughout the town. Needless to say, Watrous was overjoyed. Ecstatic. So entirely freaking jazzed that he proceeded to systematically move his wood beast around the lake, setting it up near dock- and shore-side attractions, including the Lake View Restaurant and the Island Harbour House hotel, so that he could confound and terrify locals and tourists alike. It’s not known exactly how long Watrous kept up this game, but season after season, talk of a strange monster trolling the waters of Hague Bay persisted. While Eugene Shepard’s outsized promotion of his captive Rhinelander Hodag attracted scads of curious out-of-towners, Watrous’ unrestrained hippogriff had little effect on the Lake George Area (though some hotel owners supposedly feared that tales of a ferocious, unpredictable lake beast might actually hurt the tourist industry), and soon, the inventor of the world’s first functioning blue-eared DIY hippogriff packed away his hobby and moved on with his life.

30 years after the fearsome Lake George Monster delivered the winning punch in a rousing, street-rules fishing contest, Harry Watrous, who by this time was known locally as the master of the bygone beast, was asked to resurrect his monster one last time for a surprise cameo at a local Independence Day festival. During one of the day’s many aquatic events, Watrous pulled the rope and, to the shock and delight of the celebrating crowds, gave his creation life.

Despite the fact that Lake George never immortalized its monster in statue form nor baptized an amateur sports team “The Hague Bay Hippogriffs,” one can still see Watrous’ original monster at the Lake George Historical Association Museum. It’s a bit banged up, missing its marvelous blue ears and layered with the chipping evidence of repeated repaintings, but research done by Joe Nickell, an investigator for the “Skeptical Inquirer,” confirms that it is most likely the authentic object.

After basking in the triumph of the Hodag, it’s almost disheartening to read about the Lake George Monster, which, outside a small community of hoax groupies and cryptid enthusiasts has been nearly forgotten. But put it into perspective – the hostage Hodag was created to save a town, while the hippogriff was built to win a derailed fishing contest. And then there’s the joy the creature brought to its creator: “I spoofed the world once with the horrendous beast; and I spoofed it again this afternoon.” These were the words spoken by George Watrous after he loosed his creation upon a lake full of revelers on July 4th, 1934, and they speak a wonderful truth – inauthentic though it might be, any successful hoax is a marvelous falsehood joined on either end by evident creativity and unfeigned triumph.

I finally watched “The Poughkeepsie Tapes.” And I say Booo! I’m not gonna dress this post up in some florid over-long introduction and frilly poetical conclusion just so I can puke up all over it after the dance. The movie is no good.

For those of you who don’t obsessively track the misadventures of distributionless horror movies: “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” is a 2007 serial killer flick, filmed documentary style, about a mass murderer in Poughkeepsie, New York, who videotaped his numerous hellacious homicides. Written, produced and directed by the Brothers Dowdle, the film kicked around the festival circuit, got bought by MGM, was scheduled for a tentative, ultimately cancelled, 2009 theatrical release, and then just sort of faded away. (You can dig it up online in all of the places you’re already thinking to check.)

Dance time.

AFTER THE JUMP…
The movie cuts between two different formats – talking head-style interviews with cops, FBI agents, members of the victim’s families, etc., and grainy footage from the titular video cassettes made by the killer.

As for the interviews, even the ones that aren’t poorly acted feel overly scripted, making the characters about as believable as the sultry, coifed astrophysicist of every-action-movie fame. I know. The problem with my critique, at least in terms of the “overly scripted” allegation, is that it hinges on the essential notion that the filmmakers’ goal was either to fool the viewer into watching the film as an actual journalistic document, or to deconstruct the broader nature of documentary film via seamless facsimile. “The Poughkeepsie Tapes,” however, seems happy to use “documentary” as a broad structural guide to aid in crafting a budget-conscious, requisitely twisty Hollywood serial killer romp.

So, fine, I can’t rightfully bitch about the part where an FBI film analyst tells a story about how his wife saw a half-hour of one tape and was so traumatized that she wouldn’t let him touch her for a year. But my acting gripe stands. Even if the performer doesn’t have to convince me that he’s an actual FBI forensic technician in real life, he at least has to be a convincing FBI forensic technician in the film’s internal reality. And that shouldn’t be too hard… it’s a reality where a murderer amasses hundreds upon hundreds of videotapes detailing his crimes, and none of the police ever think to hit up local electronic stores for security footage that might reveal one creepy dude, perhaps even with a camera (I mean f***, the guy seems to record everything else he does) consistently purchasing blank tapes.

That’s another thing – ignoring all the procedural gaffs committed by the police and g-men who the killer manages to outsmart at every turn, the killer’s procedures are ludicrous. He constantly switches up his murder weapons, his victim profiles and his body disposal methods. He holds one random victim hostage for years, but kills everyone else. From quick and easy to horrifically slow and muffled by animal feces, this guy does it all. To the cops in the film, this unpredictable versatility makes him the most brilliant serial killer ever in the entire history of wild, blood-drenched maniacs. Every character goes on ad nauseam about how smart and savvy he is, and each promising forensic lead gives way to another complex and nefarious psyche out orchestrated by a man who we’re meant to believe is sadistic, emotionally disturbed, misogynistic, bloodthirsty, violent… and somehow also completely capable and sane. Again, one could argue that the movie is no less realistic than a movie like “Se7en,” and that I’m allowing the film’s superficial usage of documentary techniques to cloud my assessment – which is true – but maybe that points to a larger truth. Maybe documentary – a style deeply immersed in the notion of authenticity or the subversion thereof – wasn’t the most efficient medium through which to narrate this boilerplate cat-and-mouse gore thriller.

The early introduction of the tapes into the film isn’t bad. Short clips are shown in the context of expert commentary and the testimony of victims’ acquaintances. We catch blurry glimpses of gruesome dismemberments and see a few longer sequences in which the killer captures victims, all the while letting the camera roll. As the film moves on, though, the talking head testimonies and tape commentaries become sparser, and long segments of tape are just allowed to roll, uninterrupted. The masked killer takes his aforementioned hostage. We watch as he dominates and abuses her. More bodies pile up. Plot twists get increasingly nutty. Soon, it almost feels as if the filmmakers settled on the documentary style as a compromise after realizing the infeasibility of shooting an entire killer-centric first-person, Blair Witch-style venture without finding some way to show things from the perspective of the law enforcement officers who their brilliant antagonist is repeatedly punking (note that the Brothers Dowdle did, in fact, go on to make a first-person POV horror film – “Quarantine,” the inferior American remake of the brilliant Spanish movie, “[REC]”).
In the end, the worst use of the “found footage” also offers one of the film’s most uniquely creepy images: a terrified, lingerie-clad woman being ordered from off camera to inflate and bounce atop a giant balloon. The scene escalates into a twisted nightmare of Lynchian proportions as the still-off-camera killer begins screaming “Now pop it! Pop it!” Out of context, it’s a fittingly creepy scene, but in the film, it’s squandered. The FBI video analyst explains that there’s over 100 hours of weird balloon footage, but we’re only shown the single minute-long sequence before the movie lopes away into familiar hack-and-slash territory. Balloons are never mentioned again.

Cinematical’s review of “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” briefly suggests that, through the footage, which represents the killer’s own voyeuristic fetishization of his murders, the film engages viewers to consider their own voyeuristic fascination with violent cinematic imagery. And maybe for some folks it does. Me? I just wondered why even America’s independent horror directors are content to recycle the same violent imagery, repackaged though it might be.

BARF!

I can only go so many consecutive weeks ascribing deep cultural significance to the folkloric capers of cryptozoological second stringers before I start getting a bit antsy. Sure, it’s interesting to think about that aspect of the human condition that abets our collective addiction to narrative and ordered fictions by sticking its fingers in its ears and humming away every time Bigfoot or Nessie or fear Liath is heartily debunked… to think about the way we happily allow stories to fool us. But what are stories? They’re motiveless, elusory things.

If you can identify authorship, though, you can find the meat and bone and beating heart behind the ghostly, transient words. Demystifying? Yeah. But there are more than enough legends packed with mystique. The Jersey Devil. Black dogs. Bloody Mary. One reason they’re so effective, evocative and widespread is that, though they’re myths, they’re dressed in the guise of collective knowledge. Unsourcable, voiceless echoes resounding through time
But what about a fiction that has an identifiable and outspoken (some might even say over-spoken) author? A story that’s obviously invented – that everyone knows is invented – but that’s embraced anyway. What about the story of the Rhinelander Hodag?

When rifles, hunting dogs and poison-filled water guns all failed to fell the fearsome Hodag, Eugene Shepard and his posse of Wisconsinite lumberjacks were forced to resort to sticks of dynamite, which they bravely lobbed at the slavering beast. The Hodag was 200 odd pounds of flame-spewing, black-furred muscle and lizard skin, complete with various spikes, claws and horns. The ever-quotable Shepard described the animal as smelling like “a combination of buzzard meat and skunk perfume.” Even as the creature’s crispy remains were triumphantly carted back to Rhinelander to be put on display, Shepard was bemoaning his inability to capture the Hodag alive.

In name, the Hodag already existed as a fixture of local folklore – a vengeful spirit that rose from the ashes of cremated lumber oxen. Though a popular bedtime story among the loggers and woodsmen who collectively shouldered the economy of the rural Wisconsin town, Shepard was the first man to see, describe and kill one of these ferocious monsters. (Later, Shepard imbued his Hodag with a less industry-specific back story – as a “remnant of the rehistoric dinasaures.”) And three years later, during the fall of 1896, he would become, along with another band of artillery-laden locals, the first – and, to this day, only – man to trap a live specimen. This triumph for humanity, which was immortalized in the aptly-titled photograph “The Hodag Capture” (in reality, taken three years after the “actual” event), found Shepard and his men equipped with both standard-issue angry mob accessories (pitchforks, shotguns, etc.) and long wooden sticks topped with chloroform-soaked rags. Needless to say, the still-breathing Hodag timbered like a Douglas Fir.

The twitching, growling monster that Shepard subsequently displayed for 10 cents a gander at the first-ever Oneida County Fair was actually a carved-out stump, covered in ox hide and cattle bones, and brought to marvelous, shuttering life by a simple electrical system. The coup de grace – it’s ferocious, inhuman roar – was provided by Shepard’s young son. Accounts vary as to whether a majority of fairgoers actually believed the hoax, or simply appreciated it as a harmless, clever caprice, but, either way, the dimes poured in and people from all over the state flocked to the exhibit in order to lay eyes on the hostage monstrosity.
But the Hodag is remembered as more than just a money-grubbing prank perpetrated by a known practical jokester (even before Hodag-mania, Eugene Shepard was infamous for organizing entertaining shenanigans). At the time of the county fair, Rhinelander was a dying town. In less than two decades, the booming logging industry had sawed and chopped its way through a majority of the surrounding pine forests (which might account for all the downtime Shepard had to rig up mechanical dinasaures). While other local communities flourished via long-standing livestock and farming businesses, Rhinelander struggled to gain a foothold in either industry. In fact, the Oneida County Fair was conceived as a means by which to promote Northern Wisconsin, and bring tourism and industry to the struggling region. Without an impressive gallery of crops and livestock to display, the Hodag tent was actually born out of a request by city officials, who asked Eugene Shepard, showman that he was, to find some way to draw in out-of-towners. One almost has to wonder if they were implicitly begging him to revisit his Hodag antics.

Though Shepard’s modest bid to save his town – a bundle of skin, bones and wires – was ultimately destroyed in a fire, both the memory of the Hodag, and the city of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, now unofficially known as Hodag City, live on. A giant fiberglass Hodag adorns the lawn of Rhinelander’s Chamber of Commerce. The local high school’s mascot is a roof-raising Hodag. Even the town’s website proudly identifies Rhinelander as the Home of the Hodag.
It would be reductive to claim that Eugene Shepard single-hodaggedly saved his town, but even Shepard himself wasn’t shy about acknowledging that he’d played a part: “Not only hundreds but thousands of people came to view the Hodag… and not one of them went away without having learned a little more about northern Wisconsin…”

Whether by luck or by skill, Shepard managed to author a tale that was remembered as much for the story as it was for the story of the story. The Hodag, as imagined and built by Eugene Shepard, became as important as the details of the hoax itself. Other merry pranksters haven’t fared nearly as well…

Wednesday: The Lake George Monster

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Monday we looked at the origin story, Wednesday we explored the byzantine rules that come along with the curse.

We’ve heard almost too many stories of white colonists co-opting and literalizing indigenous folklore. Starting with Lake Champlain’s Champ and moving westward, plenty of the classic American lake monster tales started when some eager fishermen heard about, or saw a native drawing of, a serpentine lake spirit and took it as a warning of tangible aquatic horror. Aboriginal bunyip legends found British interlopers tramping through the Australian brush, rifles raised and taxidermists on call. More recently, American Indian Skinwalker legends were dumped into the boiling, paranoid slurry of UFOs, portals, cryptoeverythingology and government conspiracy theories. So it’s kinda nice to know that the Rougarou legend cross-pollinated in the opposite direction.
The Rugaru of Chippewa and Ojibwa legend isn’t the wolf-headed antagonist that bullied the French, nor does it adhere to that monster’s seasonal schedule or incomprehensible 101-day statute of limitations. So what is it? That, my buddies, is a source of some contention. While scholars know for a fact that the word “Rugaru” isn’t derived from any Native American language – meaning it’s almost certainly a bastardized version of either the Cajun term “Rougarou” or the French “Loup Garou” – it’s not entirely clear as to how various tribes and groups applied the word to their established mythologies.

It’s clear that the native Rugaru was a mysterious hairy humanoid who lived out in the forest. Some researchers suggest that tribes began using the term “Rugaru” in relation to their already-extant Sasquatch equivalents (not actually Sasquatch, but rather a physically similar entity with the same Type B personality). And that makes sense. If you aren’t Catholic, haven’t been raised in constant aural proximity to European werewolf stories and can already account for your own packed pantheon of culturally loaded monstrosities, it jibes that, when French traders start going off about some sort of animal guy hiding out in the wilderness, your mind turns immediately to the one animal guy hiding out in the wilderness that you’re already hip to. In this way, this native Rugaru is loosely comparable to our modern Bigfoot – a lumbering mascot for the enduring connection between nature and man, and an animal that couldn’t give two bunyips whether or not you eat a cheeseburger on Good Friday.

(Interestingly, the only other version of the Rougarou legend that portrays the monster in a positive light is that of the uber-devout Catholics, who saw him as a wolf-headed murderer, but regarded the murders as a form of holy cleansing. To them, the Rougarou was protecting the salvation of mankind by eviscerating those who undermined the divine word.)

The other native re-contextualization of the Rougarou isn’t as favorable. Remember the Wendigo? It was that voraciously hungry human-eating monster that the snowed-in Algonquian chapter of Cannibals Anonymous used to deter their people from eating their people, claiming that a man who eats the flesh of another man becomes a wandering, insatiable beast? Well, most tribes had a Wendigo figure, but, as not all tribes faced the harsh meteorological conditions that had occasionally found the Algonquians seeing each other as giant, storytelling turkey legs, not all Wendigo transformation stories hinged on an act of cannibalism. The Wendigo itself was always eatin’ folks and snarfing down children like so many mini-quiches, but the mechanism for transformation differed. Many groups in the Dakota Territory – the area where the Ojibwa and Chippewa tribes most likely picked up the Rougarou story from French traders and missionaries – for example, believed that a man who so much as looked upon a Wendigo subsequently became one. It’s these rules and conventions that were sometimes synonymously applied to the Ruguru.

This understanding of the French bogeyman not only takes into account the hairy, forest-dwelling monster, but also that monster’s former identity as a human who was cruelly transfigured. The Indians most likely heard the tale and, ignoring the leaden complexities of the French version, immediately related it to their own Wendigo story. (I’d be curious to know if the Rugaru legend served to strengthen tribal belief in the Wendigo, as it seems to provide corroborating evidence of the creature’s existence, or if the existence of said creature was already taken as a given and the French tale merely resulted in a minor, if striking, lexicographical addition to the oral tradition.)

Interestingly, it was a variation of this second version that appeared on the CW’s “Supernatural” – in the fourth-season episode “metamorphosis, the brawny, homophobic Winchester boys go up against a Rougarou, which, according to the show’s mythology, is a person who turns into a voracious cannibalistic monstrosity due to a rare genetic disorder.

So the Europeans took indigenous tales of sacred beings and phantasmagoric threats and recontextualized them to fit the demon-haunted landscape of the Western theology; the Native Americans took the evil grotesqueries of the guilt-stricken Christian world and built them into broader figures that prowled outside the boundaries of culture, working their teeth into the most basic, elemental foundations of both nature and humanity. “Supernatural” demonstrates that, even today, we continue to borrow from borrowed legends, copying copies of copies. The Rougarou was born of the Loup Garou and the Rugaru was born of the Rougarou. And all of them want nothing more than to remind us of the hungry, lonely animal inside us all.

I’ve been reading the 1980 Arkham House anthology “New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos,” in which 9 Lovecraft-lovin’ fiction authors were given the opportunity to trifle in the late horror master’s occult, cosmic sandbox, and it’s made me realize how easy it is to reduce Lovecraft’s time- and dimension-spanning vision to a stock set of props. That’s not a shot at the book, the contributors to which are, generally speaking, immensely imaginative in their takes on all things eldritch, stygian and squamish (if you can find it online, check out Basil Copper’s moody and frightening entry, “Shaft Number 247”).

Aside from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lovecraft is probably the inspiration behind the largest quantity of published fanfic. It just occurs to me that, given the current uptick in Lovecraft’s cultural stock value – Cthulhu plush dolls consorting among the superhero maquettes in so many comic stores, the continuous rumors surrounding Guillermo Del Toro’s never-gonna-happen “At The Mountains of Madness” adaptation, the recent DVD release of the documentary “Strange Tales – The Weird Life of H. P. Lovecraft” – it’s easy to get caught up in the physical landmarks of the author’s fiction while still ignoring their path, and that path’s downward trajectory into an insanity that transcends the clichéd jabbering symptoms of the stock lunatic, and defies the single crisp snap of the mind that is too often ascribed to the boundary between lucidity and madness.

Devil’s advocate, though – if you’re intent on adding to the bevy of lazy Lovecraft-inspired tales that, together, read like the Taco Bell menu, with each uniquely named product comprising the same dependable set of tired ingredients, here’s what you might want to include:

Giant, Really, Really Old Books of the Occult

The tomes are always heavy and dusty, with brittle, yellowed pages and a voluminous quantity of forbidden information regarding alchemy and the summoning of ancient powers. Sometimes they are written in archaic, forgotten languages, but, for the multilingual late bloomer, the library at Miskatonic University usually has the last existing translation. Someone’s always searching for these volumes so they can discover wild, pseudo-scientific secrets, but then they just end up summoning Nyarlathotep or a bunch of Shoggoths. Note to Hollywood: Please make a “NeverEnding Story” remake in which the kindly book dealer gives Bastian the Necronomicon. Lots of times, these books are owned by…

Find out AFTER THE JUMP!

Nutty Cult Members

These guys are crazy, but also crazy dedicated to one of the Elder Gods. Sometimes they’re bookish, lonely, quietly sinister and waiting patiently for the inevitable return of their sacred destroyer. These ones are usually old white guys. Other times, they’re crazy, and naked and killing people and actively trying to call an Old One down out of the void. These ones are usually young, black guys. (I would like to note that, despite Lovecraft’s well-documented racial prejudices, it hardly seems offensive to suggest that black people are proactive.) Either they’ll meet a main character and pull him into their twisted sacrificial and/or library-smelling web, or just sort of wander through the background, serving as silent portents of the Old One-fueled madness to come. Some of these cult guys have…

Ancient Stones/Statuettes/Obelisks/Pendants Covered with Frightening, Cryptic, Yet Macabrely Curious, Etchings/Pictographs/Runes

Lovecraft’s works are replete with bizarre monoliths, mysterious carved stones and horrific figurines, all of which tend to be rendered from some indestructible, unearthly and usually kinda green rock substance. Generally, they hold dark sway over the mind of their owners and, as such, lead hapless beachcombers, archaeologists, artists and everymen to dark, mind destroying dreams and revelations about the Old Ones and the ultimate fate of humanity. A great way to start even the palest Lovecraft imitation is to have someone find one of these objects. Ancient cave, ocean floor, paleontological dig, a bowl of Wendy’s chili (actually, that’d be a good idea for a combo corporate lawsuit drama, cosmic horror epic)… it doesn’t really matter where a character finds the evil chunk of crazy, just so long as it perverts mortal souls and molests reader expectations. Usually, these relics depict the Old Ones, which are…

Crazy, Indescribable Monsters That Make You Go Insane If You Even Just Look At Them

This is the easiest element to execute poorly because you don’t actually have to describe them. Just talk about tentacles and giant eyes and lobster claws and snouts, maybe a hoof here or a creepy ear way over there, all glanced fleetingly through black fog, a patina of fear and the swiftly descending venetian blind of insanity. Personally, I like to picture a half-zebra, two-thirds praying mantis with an anus where its everything should be. These guys appear around…

Cosmic/Dimensional Thin Spots

The Elder Gods are like the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park.” They’re testing our universe systematically for weakness. They remember. There are places where the border between the horrific parallel cosmos of the Old Ones and our Team Edward-rooting home sweet home is rubbing thin, and where, at times, the two co-mingle. This device is always a great way to explain why the nutty cult members are sacrificing folks at [remote location], or to explain why [miscellaneous creepiness] is occurring in [otherwise peaceful small town]. Probably a main character ends up travelling along the borders of two realities. Familiar things become monstrous. The sky darkens. The streets fill with unrecognizable refuse and eerie biological waste. Crazy, giant cathedrals appear in the distance. McDonald’s is called G’trn-ekny’s. One mark of the Old Things’ world is…

Wild, Geometrically Impossible Architecture

Like the creatures themselves, this Lovecraftian standby is great for the amateur scribe because, by definition, one can’t describe the indescribable. Ultimately, you probably just end up talking about how all the angles are impossible and how the sky is a color that isn’t actually a color. Probably also the sun is black and there are staircases set at impossible angles and the buildings have an infinite number of sides. Maybe the toilet seats are square. Definitely there aren’t any wheelchair ramps.

I’m going to shimmy out to the end of a limb and guess that most of you aren’t chomping your nails to the quick in fearful expectation of Lent 2011 and its supernatural enforcer, the Rougarou. Maybe it’s because you aren’t Catholic, you don’t live in Louisiana or you own an elephant gun. Maybe it’s because you are the Rougarou (in which case, stop Googling yourself). The point is, a monster that’s only on duty for 1/11 of the year and only kills people of one religion in one state doesn’t have the scare potential of, say, Bloody Mary, who only requires a mirror and mood lighting.

Fortunately, as Cajun culture began expanding to include not only those of Acadian decent, but also miscellaneous immigrants who fully embraced the local lifestyle, the Rougarou legend expanded as well, metastasizing into an equal opportunity nightmare.

Many believe the Rougarou to be a transfigured human, cursed or infected, double-crossed in a deal with the devil or otherwise debased by some catch-all evil contagion. Louisiana’s Caribbean population even threw some voodoo witch doctor malpractice into the mix. Aside from the standard threat to children –eat your greens, take your bath, go to bed or get Rougaroued – the most prevalent of these stories holds that a person, once transformed into the wolf-headed monster, hungers for human meat treats and stalks the bayous and swamps. In some versions, he seeks out victims and attacks without mercy; in others, he hides in the shadows, travels by night and invests all his energy in resisting the urge to draw blood.
Additionally, there’s a 101-day clause that appears consistently throughout these stories, though the specifics of it differ.

A few of the rules to Rougarou-ship AFTER THE JUMP…

Wikipedia claims that the Rougarou is a blood sucker, and that the creature is “under the spell for 101 days. After that time, the curse is transferred from person to person when the rougarou draws another human’s blood.” This information is suspect and unhelpful for two reasons:

1.) Worded as it is, it’s kinda confusing. Is the Rougarou a monster for 101 days, but doesn’t draw blood until the 101st, at which point the next unwitting sap is grandmonstered in? Does it mean that every person he drinks from becomes a Rougarou, but only after the attacking Rougarou’s 101-day contract ends? Shrugs all around. The article does, at least, confirm that, once re-humanized after 101 days, the former Rougarou retains full memory of his horrific misdeeds.

2.) Every other popular Rougarou article simply cut and pasted this inane phrase (sometimes with hilariously lackluster edits straight out of the Lazy High School Plagiarist’s Handbook – “Afterwards, the spell was passed on to another person when the Rougarou drank the new victim’s blood”). Of course, this means that, even if it wasn’t a legitimately popular version of legend before, it definitely is now. Presumably, the Rougarou understands it.
After some poking around, I came up with a separate version of the 101-day itch, this one being far more coherent and a tad more interesting:

So, you’re walking through a swamp, going like, “doo doo doo,” minding your own beeswax, when all of a sudden, a wolf-headed maniac comes rushing out of the trees, eyes like aerial views down active volcanoes and clawed hands snicker-snacking like dual Vorpal blades. Fortunately, you’re awesome and you stomp the end of a fallen branch so that it flips up into your hand, and you just totally wail the ad hoc cudgel across the wolfman’s goofy face. It draws blood. Suddenly, the Rougarou transforms back to human form. It’s your high school history teacher, Mr. Shoner. You used to sing a song about him, and how he was stupid and bald. And how he can’t get a boner. He looks up at you with those big, watery, Unit-3-The-Phoenicians eyes. When you get back to town, Do you tell everyone that Mr. Shoner (smells like an armpit / can’t get a boner) is a Rougarou? Perhaps this will inform your decision – legend has it that a person who unmasks a Rougarou must wait at least 101 days before publicly revealing the monster’s identity (presumably to give the former killer time to process his crimes, take a shower and make his own confession). If the witness does not wait to gab, he or she becomes a Rougarou. Many Louisianan suicides, it is said, are a result of a chatty Cathy’s inability to deal with the gossip-initiated transformation from blabbermouth to wolf face.
I like this version. It doesn’t indict the Rougarou for being a beast, but rather the man for not taking responsibility for his actions (supernaturally motivated though they were) and the victim for prematurely robbing someone of his rightful shot at redemption. Incidentally, I also read that the Rougarou can be killed by jamming a wooden stick through its chest, so if you’d been just a tad more aggressive in fending off Mr. Shoner (gut like a beach ball / butt plug owner), you wouldn’t have had to worry about any of this.

Now, if you’ve been thinking, “blood sucking? Sharp hunk of wood through the chest? Sounds kinda vampirey, no?” I’m right there with you. A huge vampire scare swept Europe (including France) during the 1700s. French theologian Dom Augustine Calmet even penned one of the era’s seminal works on the existence (or, perhaps, non-existence – his studies were inconclusive) of vampires. It’s possible that, while the French colonists and criminals who settled Louisiana and built New Orleans were familiar with stories of the walking, seducing, violin-playing undead, the emigrating Acadians were more accustomed to the older Loup Garou legends. Perhaps, as the Rougarou stories evolved throughout the Cajun community, they came to incorporate aspects of popular European vampire tales.

Friday: Rougarou, Injuns and the CW

Walk it Off – an abridged compendium of ye olde folk remedies and archaic antidotes culled from UCLA’s Archive of American Folk Medicine

Today’s ailment: Fever

Zeus’ Toolbox

You will need: 1 THUNDER AXE (Symmetrical Double-Headed Axe)
Instructions: Use THUNDER AXE
Note: Use caution when operating THUNDER AXE

From The Country That Gave You The Blood Of Kali…

You will need: Water; Dirt Collected From Tomb Of St. Thomas In Chennai, India
Instructions: Mix water and holy grave dirt; Drink

Neptune’s Formalwear Accessory

You will need: 1 Seahorse (fresh or dried)
Instructions: Fasten seahorse to left arm
Note: If you think it looks weird having a seahorse attached to only one of you arms, use THUNDER AXE to remove other arm

Sweet, Merciful Oats

You will need: 1 Pious Neighbor; 1 Dish; Grain
Instructions: Place grain in dish; Instruct pious neighbor to pray over grain
Note: Works best for fevers caused by “ill wishers”

The Cure Is Worse Than The Disease (9 End Pieces Worse)

You will need: 9 Loaves of Bread
Instructions: Eat first slice from each loaf

Repentance Of The Drunken Steel (Preventative)

You will need: 1 Wine-Soaked Sword Formerly Used To Decapitate A Man
Instructions: Touch sword
Note: If you don’t have such a sword, make one! All you need is a regular sword, a man, a steady arm and wine

Audubon’s Last Resort

You will need: 1 Bag; 1 String; 1 Tub of Cold Water; 1 Live Eagle
Instructions: Clip nails; Place clippings in bag; Tie bag around eagle’s neck; Hold eagle in tub of water; When eagle becomes sick, fever will dissipate

3k Exorcism Dash

You will need: 1 Garter; 1 Koorsboom Tree
Instructions: Compel fever spirits to leave body and enter garter;
Tie garter around Koorsboom tree; run from Koorsboom tree without once looking back
Note: fever can also be driven into a Fedora, which should then be placed on a baby bear

Woah! Shell Shock!

You will need: 1 Live Turtle; Pepper; Incense
Instructions: Cut open live turtle; Rub insides with pepper and incense; Apply to feet
Note: Cure is most likely to work if selected turtle’s demeanor is cool, but also rude

Larva THIS, Buttface! (Preventative)

You will need: 1 Righteous Loogie; 1 Hairy Caterpillar
Instructions: Spit on caterpillar; Say, “Take that!” (optional)

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Rougarou. Come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

The Protestants have always seemed happy with limiting the fate of sinners to eternal suffering in a big torture cave filled with fire and basically every type of snake. Leave it to the Catholics to throw an Earth-dwelling, flesh-eating mutant into the mix.

The French emigrates of the Cajun community had it pretty lousy even before the bloodthirsty, wolf-headed Rougarou shambled out of the swamps all parched and grumpy. A cultural casualty of the French and Indian War, the Cajuns (then known as Acadians, Acadia being the ye olde moniker for the eastern coast of Canada and northern tip of Maine) were ousted by the British. Some were returned to sender on French-bound ships, while others found themselves scurrying southward in search of a replacement home. French-speaking and accustomed to a maritime lifestyle, the Canada-forsaken exiles headed southward through the states, wending their way to the coast of Louisiana, where they could comfortably re-settle along the waters of the Gulf, in a region owned and operated by the French government. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the wandering Acadians, France had recently signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which, among other things, ceded control and ownership of Louisiana to the Spanish government. Sácre bleu!

Fortunately, both the newly empowered Spaniards and the hang-dog former French Canadians were fervent Roman Catholics, and got along well enough that the Cajuns were allowed to hang out and roll how they rolled. After the Revolutionary War (in which many land-snatching-limey-despising Acadians fought with gusto), thousands of Cajuns returned to New Orleans and Southern Louisiana, some arriving haggard and powder-stained from the battlefront, and others showing up nauseous and gaunt after government-authorized emigrations from France. Resettled and reunited, the former Acadians started a new life amid the swamps, bayous and prairies of Louisiana, where, every spring, the Rougarou lifts his nose and sniffs the air, canvassing the ether for the acrid hint of sin. Upon finding it, he narrows his eyes and bounds onward toward the smell, goaded onward by the promise of struggling, guilty meat, and the colorful warning mess it will leave on the ground.

Click AFTER THE JUMP to find out how even you could become a Rougarou!
Similar to “Wodewose,” the word “Rougarou” is but one of the linguistic variations used to encapsulate this chomp-happy lupine monster man, whose other dialect-variant labels include Roux-Ga-Roux, Rugeroo, Rugaru and, occasionally, Loup-garou. That latter term – “Loup-garou” – is, in all probability, the word from which all of the other spellings and pronunciations derive. Also, it’s French for “werewolf.” And in the same way that the word “Rougarou” riffs on the term “Loup-garou,” so too does the Rougarou legend use European werewolf lore as the pentatonic scale for its terrifying, Catholic jazz variations.

For example: the Rougarou is part man and part wolf, but the parts aren’t all mashed up together in a bipedal hairball of teeth and halitosis – Human body. Wolf head.

The Rougarou isn’t erratic or wild. It doesn’t commit the kinds of savage, random assaults in which traditional werewolves (rooted as their lore was in stories of serial murderers, rapists and the rabid) specialized. The Rougarou kills sinners, especially those who fail to observe the traditions of Lent – a 40-day period, ending with Easter, during which many Christians sects, including the Catholics, pray a whole bunch and give up various Earthly indulgences (alcohol, coffee, drunken barista pornography, etc.) in order to prepare for the anniversary of Christ’s death and resurrection.

The notion of a religiously sponsored werewolf isn’t entirely unique to the Rougarou, either. Back in France, some Catholics had already popularized a version of the secular (a loaded word when used in this decidedly supernatural context) Loup-garou legend in which transformation from human sinner to murderous beast occurred automatically after an individual’s seventh consecutive unobserved lent (still, the resulting monster killed in typical indiscriminate rampage fashion).

Having been raised Catholic myself, I’m all too familiar with the sometimes antic lengths to which the religion’s pedagogues will go to guilt kids into ritualistic piousness. I specify kids because I’m assuming it’s largely these hyperactive, overly curious, free-thinking wastrels that constitute the Rougarou’s key demo. Adults – directly bound to their mortality by sick relatives, dying acquaintances and their own creeping physical ailments – have hell to fear. It’s the children – optimistic, unselfconscious rascals who bask in a false sense of immortality as tragedy after tragedy roll off them like a boulder down a chute trying to kill Indiana Jones – who need a more immediate reason to mind their Ps and sacred religious traditions.
At the same time, the Rougarou doesn’t limit itself to Catholic killings and Lenten justice. That would be inefficient.

Wednesday: Non-Denominational Werewolf

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast. Wednesday, we investigated claims that it is the missing link.

Fear Liath and Science.

After writing that tantalizing gem of a teaser for today’s column, I looked at it for a moment and considered whether I should maybe put some qualifying quotation marks around the word science. And I decided not to. The concepts to be discussed herein are definitive scientific realities… it just happens that we’re going to talk about them as they relate to a 7-foot-tall man-ape descended from the wood spirits of ancient Europe.

Plenty of yella-bellied hikers and goose-pimpled mountaineers have attributed Mount Ben Macdui’s pervasive atmosphere of dread to the mystical aura of the mysterious Greyman; lots of Cryptozoologists blame Fear Liath, too. But not because it has magical fright-throwing abilities. It turns out that, apparently, all Sasquatches, from Bigfoot to Wampas, use powerful pheromones to elude capture by preemptively instilling panic in their would-be pursuers. That’s right. Fear Liath squats down and blows out a mess of chemical fear that drifts through the mist and infects human trespassers.
I can follow this line of thought. Sure, it’s scribbled and erratic and leads off the paper and onto the nice tablecloth, but I can follow it. A threatened aphid, for instance, will blast out a haze of alarm pheromones, thereby, warning any nearby companions to flee the scene. Frightened termites and bees can also pinch off a cloud of fear, though, in their case, it usually psyches up the chest-bumping former half of the fight-or-flight instinct. Likewise, dogs, bears, et al, have all been shown to deploy and perceive an intraspecies “scent of fear” – “intra” being the key prefix here. Based on all existing scientific evidence, the pheromones of any given species are detectable only to members of that species, meaning that even if all the mist clinging to Ben Macdui were one massive pheromone cloud squirted out by cowardly Fear Liath, it wouldn’t elicit even the slightest of pant pees in area humans. Furthermore, considering the termites and bees, if humans were affected, it’s just as likely that they’d pick up a giant rock and charge hulk style toward the jelly-spined source of the panic fog. (Although, if the pheromone did work correctly, Scarecrow would be poaching the hell out of these things.)

Much more scientific justification for the Fear Liath AFTER THE JUMP…Somewhere, a cryptozoologist just threw up his hands in frustration and said, “Duh! He’s the missing link… his pheromones have some shared human biological stuff. Idiot.” – a rejoinder that, I admit, would present the most sensible zany retort if studies hadn’t already demonstrated that the human ability to perceive or otherwise act on another human’s wafting panic stink is nil. If people can’t sense pure human fear, it’s ridiculous to think that they might respond to some horrific, ape-tainted knockoff.
Another theory? Infrasound.

Infrasound refers to any sound below 20 Hz, which, in terms of the low-end of the auditory spectrum, is considered the cutoff for normal human hearing. The reason excited cryptozoologists have pointed to this particular phenomenon as a possible candidate for Sasquatch’s scare-sharing mechanism is that various experiments have shown that almost a quarter of all human beings, when exposed to infrasound or near-infrasonic frequencies (17 Hz was the frequency used by a 700-subject UK study), have displayed peculiar physical reactions, such as feelings of fear, anxiety and revulsion. Additionally, Vic Tandy, a researcher at Coventry University, has suggested that sounds at around 19 Hz may be responsible for a butt load of ghost sightings. Morrow made this discovery while working in a supposedly haunted lab, where he and other researchers experienced strange sensations of dread, and where Morrow himself witnessed a gray blob drifting through his periphery. Turns out, an extraction fan vibrating at 18.98 Hz was not only inspiring his feelings of anxiety, but also generating an optical hallucination by vibrating his eyes (the natural resonant frequency of the human eye is about 18 Hz).

So far, it’s a pretty thin case: Travelers of regions known to be inhabited by sasquatches are often plagued by strange, unaccountable feelings of dread. Infrasound has been known to cause such feelings. Sasquatches, therefore, must be terrifying people away by generating some sort of infrasound.

Still, writers on Bigfoot-manic message boards and crypto-crazed blogs love to point out that African elephants have been proven to communicate using nasally generated infrasound vocalizations, a zoological revelation that wasn’t even theorized until 1984. The low frequency calls, which are probably used to, among other things, deliver herd movement updates and initiate mating rituals, range between 15 and 35 Hz – well within the limits that can, in some instances, cause less than pleasant sensations within the human body. Some suggest that sasquatches, like elephants, have the capacity to generate these types of ether-rattling ululations. (To be fair, one of the message boarders did pragmatically point out that, “Even if sasquatches use infrasound, we need a video of the species making these sounds as solid evidence.”) Elephants are big animals. It’s not difficult to look at an elephant’s head and understand how a sound beyond the realm of human perception could bellow out of it. Now, I’m not a scientist or anything, but wouldn’t Bigfoot essentially need nasal cavities with the anomalous spatial properties of the Tardis in order to raise such a (inaudible) ruckus?

Look, I know that this isn’t a debunking site, where stories are hunted and vivisected for inaccuracies. I’m way more interested in chasing down the legends, tagging their ears and sending them back to frolic through the collective imagination. If folks want to say that Fear Liath, beautifully monstrous fiction that it is, can, from a distance, raise hackles and roil up visceral fear, I’m totally on board. But pheromones? Infrasound? Maybe Bigfoot, contemporary American icon that he is, might need to resort to the modern narrative contrivance of overwrought, unnecessary, straw-grasping explanation (why bigfoot needs any sort of emotion-finagling superpower is beyond me), in the same way that every modern Hollywood villain gets a tired tragic past to justify his ultimate treachery and every good-hearted hero gets a backlog of clichéd vestigial guilt to explain his eventual honor, but Fear Liath comes readymade with a back story of primitive thaumaturgy and ancient races. Of Wodewoses and of Pagan nightmares. Of the high shrieks, the bite marks on flesh, the cold water shaken from course fur, the electric smell of blood on the wind and all the other things that would one day clatter together into a human being. Save your science for the urban legends and the contemporary myths. The “are they really extinct?” case studies and desperate EVP analyses.

Sometimes it’s better if a villain is just bad. Sometimes it’s better if a hero is just good. And sometimes it’s better if a sasquatch is just magic.

Find the Fiend

Below are descriptions of three grotesque monsters. Two of them are merely the fictional creations of popular artists; one is a creature that has actually been reported. Can you Find the Fiend?

a.) This gray gelatinous creature, which, like a slug, is rumored to favor warm beer, is sometimes blamed for abducting both pets and people from neighborhoods in Eastern Maine.

b.) Similar to genies, these small monsters supposedly possess the ability to realize the fantasies of their victims, though, once realized, the dreams are said to turn deadly.

c.) These winged monsters allegedly kidnap children, fly the children to the peak of a dormant volcano and then devour the children.

Answer AFTER THE JUMP…

The correct answer is c.)

The basic story of the Orang-bati – a story that originated in, and remains local to, the Indonesian island of Seram – asserts that crazy flying simian-type monsters (see how the name is kinda like Orangubat?) live on the slopes of Mount Kairatu and periodically storm villages in search of their favorite Indonesian take-out – kids. Indonesian folklore tells of repeated child-stealing raids performed by the young-hungry sky apes. Tyson Hughes, an English missionary living in Indonesia during the 1400s, even claimed to have encountered one of the beasts.

Modern Orang-bati enthusiasts theorize that the monsters are actually bats of Batsquatch proportions that naturally prey upon small monkeys, which are common on many Indonesian islands. Unfortunately, Seram lacks a notable monkey population, so, according to the theory, peckish monster bats looking for a nearby nibble will resort (by mistake or on purpose) to noshing on the nearest child. Meanwhile, skeptics assert that the Orang-bati are clearly just a fictional invention of myth and that if there’s anything eating the children of Seram, it’s probably the last living pterodactyl, or a confused bear.

Statement a.) described Richie Grenadine’s father, a drunken layabout who, in Stephen King’s short story “Gray Matter,” pounds some tainted beers and inexplicably transforms into a lager-slurping carnivorous blob monster. The story first appeared in a 1973 issue of the men’s magazine “Cavalier,” and was later reprinted in “Night Shift,” King’s first published anthology of short stories. The latter publication features a ridiculous number of stories that would eventually get optioned for the screen, including “Children of the Corn,” “Sometimes They Come Back,” “The Mangler,” “Quitters, Inc.,” and “Trucks,” which became the basis for King’s directorial debut, “Maximum Overdrive”… or, as I like it to call it, “Minimum Under…Reverse!” Am I right guys? Am I right?!?!

Statement b.) described the hobgoblins from Rick Sloane’s 1988 cheesebomb “The Hobgoblins.” Ripping off the sly, mischievous comedy of “Gremlins,” the outer space back story that “Gremlins” rip off “Critters” used to make it look like it wasn’t just ripping off “Gremlins,” and the “careful-what-you-wish-for” moral of 60% of all “Twilight Zone” episodes, “The Hobgoblins” tells the tale of a bunch of nasty, pint-sized aliens that, after escaping from a locked vault, use their magic alien powers to fulfill people’s dreams, which inevitably turn ugly, resulting in death. Like, one guy wants to be a rock star, and then he is a rock star, and he’s rocking out on stage, and then he dies. The Criterion Collection release features two alternate endings and a rare BBC radio interview with the director.

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. On Monday, we heard about the origins of the beast.

Wudewas. Wodwos. Wodewoses. Woodwoses. Variants of the word are as numerous as the trees in the forests inhabited by the feral possessors of these ancient names. The wild men. The tidiest accounts of Scotland’s Fear Liath would have you believe that the giant grey creature’s closest relative is Bigfoot – that noble missing link who hides deep within America’s dwindling native woods, and in whom hides lost vestiges of man… scattered dust from genetic corners that were sanded down into curves during the civilizing renovation of the primal human spirit, the process itself an exciting necessity of the social evolution that created both the modern world and the most basic, aching nostalgia found therein. This nostalgia takes the form of a chromosomal muscle memory, a scuffed shoebox, brimming with relics, tucked beneath the bed of the collective id.

It’s more than just the bare carnal reasoning of the reptilian brain – the eat, kill or screw impulse that any cynical 16-year-old can tell you is as alive today in the forests of laminate boardroom furnishings as it was millennia ago amid the dark tangles of forgotten jungles. No. This is about an understanding of place, an unselfconscious symbiosis between man and topography, man and biology. The unvoiceable knowledge that, if dropped in the woods – any woods – one could navigate the soil, elude danger, secure shelter, procure food and still find time to gaze up in wonderment at the twinkling panorama of space.

It’s also probably an illusion. After all, humans still have these senses and abilities. Modern man has just repurposed them for urban environs, so that if dropped in a city – any city – one could navigate pavement, listen for sirens, and recognize chain hotel logos and the trademark color schemes of a half-dozen burger chains.

Get the rest of the story… AFTER THE JUMP

Put simply, missing links represent, among other things, a false notion that it was only post fire and after the wheel that man’s trip from ape to commuter lapsed into a bumbling process of trial and error. That people were born with knowledge to efficiently take down an elk, to strip the meat off its bones and, when preparing the side dish, to use non-poisonous mushrooms. It’s this misplaced (a less generous person might say, “B.S.”) sentimentality that makes a brief glimpse of Bigfoot so magical; it’s as if we’ve been afforded a peek at an organized era before flatware and firearms came along and mucked everything up. It’s why a fog-shrouded encounter with the Fear Liath is so terrifying (besides, of course, the monster’s mystical fear conjuring ability) – we are on his turf now, and he is living a life we abandoned. A life that, try is we might, by camping, hiking, etc., we can never fully reclaim – a sad fact that finds us physically and mentally vulnerable to that bygone lifestyle’s dangers and obstacles, among them the hulking Greyman.

Wodewoses – mythic wild men of ancient Europe – represented something similar to the modern Bigfoot. They possessed the same sort of preternatural, pre-civilized bond with nature (some of them could even see years into the future, evincing a sense that, in giving up its primal beginnings, mankind likewise sacrificed some broad and mysterious link to the larger universe), and represented a similar understanding of man’s anti-domestic roots… but they also had a bit more personality. Whereas Sasquatch represents an iconic image of a missing link as recalibrated by modern science to include overwhelmingly ape-like features, Wodewoses had human physiques (swathed though they were in a carpet of fur) and demonstrably human faces. Most of them measured in well below the slam dunk-ready height of most modern man-apes. Many boasted leonine hair and wild beards. Some were part goat. Some, part elf. Some descended from elementals or dark spirits. Others carried clubs. Some even had hairless, feminine chins and tig ol’ bitties.
Essentially, Wodewoses hopelessly blurred the lines between fairy tale creatures, missing links and hirsute madmen. The parenthetically aforementioned prophetic wild men, for example, were generally portrayed as contemporary humans driven mad by ancient and powerful forces. Even outside the bounds of the mythic and supernatural, rumors of feral tribes prowling the landscapes of unexplored continents ran rampant. Early Christians believed that Wodewoses had supernatural powers of seduction, and feared their ability to coerce virtuous women into debased and vile sex acts (which at the time, probably constituted, like, gentle reverse cowgirl). The church no doubt viewed the mischievous perverts, drunk as they were on animal lusts and the howling winds that stir the leaves, as horny, impish mascots of Paganism.

Meanwhile, French monarch King Charles VI saw the Wodewoses as a limitless source of amusement. During a 1393 masquerade ball held in the honor of the Queen Mother, Chuck and five of his courtiers donned hemp wild man costumes, chained themselves together and trudged out into the ballroom, where the amusement quickly assumed a very real limit – embers from a torch ignited the flammable costumes, resulting in the horrible, fiery deaths of at least three of the King’s companions.

In Germany, club wielding wild men, buxom wild women and even whole wild clans were fixtures of family seals and coats of arms, offering the suggestion that each family’s roots were both deep-set and brawny. This usage highlights the sense of primitive strength and wild power evoked by Wodewoses. In short, even before humans had any coherent sense of the mechanisms of evolution, there existed inside people an understanding that man had fought his way out of the wooded darkness and into the light of civilization, but that that emergence was bittersweet, held as it was in the receding presence of things left behind.

Misleading notions that earlier times were simpler, truer, better, etc. are attractive shadows under which to toil through this modern life. Our ancestors dreamt up the wild men to keep an imagined ideal alive, even if it sometimes led to irrational fear or catching on fire. Sure, modern science has re-shaped the wild men – grown them and aped out their faces and robbed them of supernatural powers – but the ideal remains. We retain that strange nostalgia.

Ancient Scotland was host to an uncountable number of feral elves, dark spirits, vengeful ghosts and hirsute wild men. There’s no doubt that today’s simian Fear Liath is a direct descendent of the Wodewoses of yesteryear. The proof is in the supernatural power that the creature displays – its ability to covertly project feelings of panic and fear into the hearts of hikers and mountaineers.

Crypytozoologists, however, have a different theory about this “magic” power.

Friday: Fear Liath and Science

Sure, the monsters that stalk through horror films aren’t great guys but they aren’t all bad. Matt Finley investigates the Upside Of Evil…

I didn’t write a tribute to the late Dennis Hopper. I wanted to. But what I could add to the conversation? Yeah, I saw “Speed” in the theatre, but I didn’t feel as though that qualified me to pen an adoring elegy to Easy Rider himself. The director of “Colors.” King of the Koopas.

Then, last night, I watched “Blue Velvet.” I gotta say, the movie gets more rewarding with every consecutive viewing, and it’s largely due to Hopper’s unfailingly disturbing portrayal of Frank Booth, a monster twice as grotesque as the latex-bound, corn syrup-smeared atrocities I usually address in these posts. Just like how every rose has its thorn, every thorn has its dreams (Or, you know, its overly cautious bee that has a crush on it but doesn’t want to get stabbed, or to jump-start the rumor mill). It would be arrogant to assume that, just because Frank Booth is a psychotic, gas-huffing, misogynistic sadist with a longshoreman’s tongue and a wolverine’s temper, we can’t learn something from him.

So, Mr. Hopper – Here’s to your f*ck:

The lessons begin AFTER THE JUMP. Also, if you haven’t seen Blue Velvet, consider yourself spoiler warned.

F*ck Heineken! PABST BLUE RIBBON!

Jeffrey Beaumont – Kyle MacLachlan’s character – comes home from college with a fancy red convertible, a cooler than thou smile and an affected craving for imported beer. Let the story run on past the ending and I’m sure he’d be mail ordering limited run EPs by inscrutably named psych rock revival bands and waving around a dog-eared copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Frank Booth is honest, simple and, more importantly, patriotic. All he needs is gas to snort, a woman to punch and a tall cold glass of classic American beer. It’s no surprise, then, that when the two finally meet up, Booth is revolted by Beaumont’s transatlantic booze preference. Say what you want about Jeffrey’s empathy, compassion and quietly seductive haircut – at least Frank Booth wouldn’t allow America’s drinking habit to get outsourced to Europe in the name of a high school trim hunt.
Revenge is a dish best served hot, with a side of lipstick
When fancy-beer Beaumont gives Booth a chivalrous pop in the jaw, Booth could have easily slit his throat and left him for dead. Instead, he puts on a Roy Orbison song, smothers Beaumont’s face in sloppy kisses, threateningly recites the song’s lyrics (“in dreams… I walk with you…”) and tops it all off with a low- to medium-strength pummeling. Now I certainly don’t condone the latter bit of violence, but if we just focus on that first bit – a song, some aggressive kissing and some cold-eyed speakalong intimidation – I think we could drastically improve the situation in Iraq.

Probably don’t do this on a date…

I rarely fall back on mining for virtue in the negative space of an inexcusable atrocity, but, seriously, I’m one winkingly enthusiastic interpretation of Frank Booth’s inexcusable behavior away from actually fight-kissing Kyle MacLachlan. Besides, token Dennis Hopper tribute aside, it’s just about the only honest-to-goodness goodness that can come from watching his character in “Blue Velvet.” Guys – probably don’t do this on a date – DON’T kidnap your date’s doting husband and adorable son. DON’T limit your vocabulary to phrases co-opted from David Mamet plays and Phillies fans. DON’T tell her that “Daddy wants to f*ck!” DON’T make light of your frustrated impotence by shotgunning liquor, snorting amyl nitrate and violently dry humping her while tonguing her robe. Also, maybe DON’T beat her up. That part where he tears up listening to her sing, though… DO that… just without all the psycho-sexual baggage and rapey punch shenanigans.

RIP Dennis Hopper. With any luck, your clocking an angel in the jaw, and telling her to “spread it.” Hopper to God: “Don’t f*cking look at me!”

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. Come back Monday and Wednesday for the rest of the story.

Leave it to Scotland’s Fear Liath to meet any (or all!) of your horrifying cryptozoological encounter needs. A sudden sense of creeping psychic dread followed by inexplicable panic and unprovoked activation of your fight-or-flight response? Leave it to the Liath! A more traditional, rampage-style assault, up to and including wild pursuit of a moving car? He’s on it! Or maybe a subtler, mysterious encounter – a huge, lumbering figure glanced through the fog… a giant footprint in the mud… a stolen picanic basket? Greyman’s got it!

“What is the Fear Liath?” you ask.

Some folks refer to it as Scotland’s Bigfoot, and in some ways that’s accurate. Hiker’s who have seen the Fear Liath (also known as “The Greyman”) have described it as a burly giant with a strikingly inhuman face and a head-to-toe coating of thick, ash-colored fur. What makes the Fear Liath a taxonomical oddity, however, is the effect it’s said to have over people in its vicinity. Supposedly, travelers of the Cairngorm Mountains, and especially visitors to Ben Macdui, the range’s highest peak and suspected site of the Greyman’s lair, have experienced bizarre sensations of terror that come out of nowhere and, often, send the suddenly stricken mountaineers screaming into the mist.
John Norman Collie, an experienced British mountaineer famous for performing pioneering climbing feats in the Himalayas and the Canadian Rockies, authored the most famous account of this strange phenomenon.

In 1895, while hiking near Ben Macdui’s peak, Collie sensed that he was not alone. After listening for several moments, he discerned a distinct and frightening crunching sound trailing him up the mountain: “For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.” Collie desperately struggled to identify his stalker through the thick curtains of mist that shrouded the rock formations, but perceived nothing but drifting fog and the slow, crunching persistence of the phantom interloper’s progress. Eventually, consumed by fear, Collie took off running, scrambling up and around an estimated five miles of boulders and out-cropping rocks.

Other hikers and adventurers have descended Ben Macdui with similarly eerie tales. Some report finding giant footprints stamped into the mountainside. Many claim to have seen a giant grey figure, plowing through the fog or, sometimes, looming behind them as their strange sense of terror reached a crescendo. In the ‘90s, one guy even called out Fear Liath for chasing his car through a nearby forest.

From a logical standpoint, it’s fairly easy to explain away all the varied symptoms of a standard Fear Liath encounter. For example, scientists have suggested an easy explanation for the towering silhouette sighted skulking up the mountain – the same blankets of fog that make the mountain look like the set of gothic melodrama on closing night, when all the leftover dry ice gets poured into the bucket, create perfect conditions for the Broken Spectre effect; angled sunlight casts a trail-weary hiker’s shadow onto a nearby fog bank and ACH! Giant grey figure. That combined with the standard cast of cryptid rationalization factors – the natural anxiety provoked by lonely, fog-draped surroundings; exhaustion; cultural memory of the entire gamut of cryptid encounters as dutifully recounted in books, by television and on this website, etc. – make the Greyman shrug-offable as any other hirsute missing link.

From a folkloric standpoint though, there’s a lot more here than just a tam-topped, haggis-devouring Sasquatch. There’s a reason that the Fear Liath seems to share traits of both classically simple ape-men (like Yetis and Skunk Apes) and creepy, sense-meddling phantasms (like maybe a magic ghost or something). It turns out that “Scotland’s Bigfoot” has a history that pre-dates all Bigfoots, dating back to a time when men were men, and furry ape-men were, like, feral elf spirit monster things.

Wednesday: Fear Liath, Wudewas and other words guaranteed to be useless in Scrabble

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Wednesday we look at how the legend survived the digital age.

Babysitter. Killer. Telephone. We’ve taken a neatly assembled story and plucked off the buttons, ripped the stitching and unloaded fistfuls of stuffing. Might as well see it the rest of the way through. Parents. Children. Let’s add them to this strewn mess of analog technology, gender stereotyping, Aquarian culture wars and artificial maternity.

I had briefly mentioned that, in many versions of the Babysitter and the Stranger Upstairs, at least one of the sitter’s employers is a doctor. In almost every version, the parents, doctorate holding or not, are wealthy. On the surface, this seems a mere plot device – the teenaged kid-herding neophyte is lured into the job by the promise of healthy dividends while, at the same time, the couple’s sizeable home fulfills certain narrative logistics. In other words, it would be difficult for the killer to call the babysitter from inside a single-phone apartment, or sneak unnoticed through a ranch-style house. And that makes enough sense. But let’s say we take a moment to get cynical:
Even if we accept many folklorists’ assertions that, when deconstructed, this urban legend takes on gender oppression and warns girls away from fast-tracking themselves toward some sort of patriarchically enforced homemakership and oppressive motherhood – that it’s a GRRL power ballad played in the key of independent womanhood – we need to consider the story’s intended demographic. After all, “gala-bound rich couple seeking responsible teen for one-night babysitting job $$$” rarely bypass the nearby middle-class McMansions and make a beeline for the barrio. Likewise, many blue collar families comprise two working parents who are beholden to shift work, and older children who are busy enough looking after each other, or working themselves. (Obviously, these are gross generalizations, but remember, we’re applying them to a story in which the main characters are Rich Couple, Attractive Teenage Girl, Sleeping Children, and Anonymous, Motivationless Killer.)

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…

That the story is geared toward young women seems sensible. What’s offensive (or if we’re keeping with the whole cold, removed cynicism thing, wholly predictable, given the ongoing undermining of the American working class), is that the story, in engaging with the tropes and situations that it does, seems to disqualify an entire social strata of adolescent girls. Perhaps these ladies are assumed to be beholden to a hard-scrabble life of early pregnancy, working motherhood or looking after their existing immediate family members. Or, even worse, maybe, on a subconscious level, independent poor women, who are perhaps deprived the educational opportunities of their moneyed sisters (many of whom were only able to burn their bras because, once the message was sent, they could afford to buy new ones), don’t represent the type of spokespeople that the political side of the feminist movement are looking for.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that whatever cadre of feminists ideologues may or may not have perpetuated this story in the name of a positive social movement purposefully approached it with an agenda of class discrimination, but rather that even the most idealistic among us are not immune to underlying culture biases that lay hidden, like live black widows inside the smallest nesting dolls, within otherwise socially conscious and progressive narratives.

Just something to think about.

On a lighter note… The Children. I only mention the kids because there’s a sanitized, Cub Scout-ready version of the tale in which there is no killer and, in fact, the frightening phone calls coming from inside the house are made by the children themselves, who have amalgamated all of their bratiness and initiated a prank call campaign against the babysitter. I only mention it because in all the other versions, the kids are little more than bug-snug snoozing cutlets awaiting the fall of the knife. Here, though, the children have the power and use it to terrify and ultimately embarrass the ad hoc adult, thereby, revealing the man-behind-the-curtain quality of the so-called power and responsibility wielded by authority figures. And what kid doesn’t want to hear about that? If I were 8 years old, listening to this story would probably be almost as fun as harassing an actual, live babysitter.

So, if any of you folks are spending tonight at a high-paying babysitting gig at a secluded mansion near the back-up perimeter fence of the asylum for the criminally wigged out, remember: you had some calls traced, they were coming from inside the house, you fled on foot. Clearly, the murderer upstairs killed the single-malt scotch.

I don’t know what to say about “Splice.” On the one hand, it does exactly what a thoughtful sci-fi story should: uses genre trappings to raise socio-culturally relevant, real-world questions without being so presumptuous as to provide pat, definitive answers. The story of a self-assured couple who literally have the equipment to create life, but lack the foresight and self-knowledge to responsibly care for it is essentially presented as the larger, catch-all story of modern parenting. The movie then painstakingly breaks down a variety of parental concerns – from education to discipline to gender imprinting to sexuality – all within a fast-paced and suitably creepy 103 minute runtime.

On the other hand, and I don’t really know how else to put this… the movie is kinda goofy. And I should love that, right? There are melodramatic lab sequences, crazy camera angles, lurid sex scenes, and a glut of increasingly nutty creature effects. Add in the thoughtful deconstructions of parenthood and the insight into genetic evolution and I should be a happy camper, right? A fun genre flick that’s comfortable enough in its own thematic depth to throw in some wild gore and zany action sequences. Why am I not obsessed with this movie?

(Before I get any more involved in my own personal struggle, I want to say now that if you haven’t seen “Splice,” go. Go watch it. I totally recommend it. Believe me I wouldn’t drag you through a post full of neurotic ambivalence just to tell you not to see a movie.)

Get the rest… AFTER THE JUMP

So, why am I not obsessed with this movie? I think, for some reason, I’m annoyed that it’s as goofy and fun as it is. A casual moviegoer walking into “Splice” (especially after the ridiculously unrepresentative ad campaign that pitched it as, at worst, an anemic monster-on-the-loose actioner and at best, a bit of hunt-and-hump “Species” redux) probably isn’t going to think about the central conceits of the film. The brilliant conundrums the movie presents – Has modern American culture’s influence over, and obsession with, the mechanisms of parenthood wholly overwhelmed our animal parenting instincts?; What seperates a culturally productive organism from a naturally effective one, and where do the two overlap and/or diverge?; As a society so morally obsessed with enforcing bio-ethics in laboratory settings, shouldn’t we be equally concerned with, and self-aware of, our own intentions and mental states when we create life in a domestic setting; etc. – are likely to be overshadowed by the soapy dialogue, titillating sexual intrigue and off-the-wall third act.

I know this because when I watched the film on opening day, the people around me were either giggling and shaking their heads, as if the film represented the same ironic entertainment as any bottom-shelf straight-to-DVD slasher deal, or sighing with boredom, clearly waiting for the Blackhawks to swoop in bearing jarheads and hollow points. (During the film’s final scene, when a character naively intoned, “What’s the worst that could happen?” the burly man behind me gruffly declared, “They could make a sequel.”) Meanwhile, all the supposed sci-fi fans populating website message boards are bemoaning how silly and stupid the film is because they hate fun and, apparently, were expecting “The Squid and the Whale” by way of Cronenberg and Henenlotter.

I don’t know what to say about “Splice.” I can make fervent indictments against the marketing for a minor dishonesty committed in the name of maximizing the number of people who choose to see a fun movie that I like, and that I want people to see. I can rail against the haters whose distaste of the film stems more from their own unmet expectations and subsequent lack of self-awareness regarding those expectations than from anything actually on the screen. But we’re here to talk about a movie.

And, I gotta say, I have very little beef with “Splice.” It’s at once funny, unsettling, violent and sad. It may be that I’m not used to my cynical, pinched-faced speculative fiction movies having this much fun, or, for that matter, to my gore-smeared T&A monster flicks containing this much lasting insight. Or maybe I was one of those aforementioned dour genre enthusiasts expecting “The Fly” by way of Noah Baumbach.

I don’t want to make some “Time” magazine-caliber bon mot about “Splice” recombining the DNA of sci-fi movies past to make a fascinating hybrid, so just accept this: The mother/step-father/child relationship hits all the right notes (maybe sometimes a bit to boisterously, but that’s part of the fun), the creature design is superlative (whereas Cameron’s Na’avi fail miserably in the alien-but-effable category, Berger and Nicotero’s Dren succeeds almost too well) and, despite its predictability, the ending, you know, works.

In other words – best darkly funny independent sci-fi film backed by pedigreed writer/director and given major summer release since “District 9.”

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Come back Friday for the conclusion.

I don’t know how the story of the intercourse-interloping hook murderer plays out these days – the inset latch that adorns most modern car doors doesn’t seem especially conducive to bloody-hook dangling. Likewise, “hitchhiker” is a distinctly 20th century identifier. Vanishing or not, a trail-schlepping wayfarer with a hopefully extended thumb would confound even the hippest wagoneer or pony express messenger. So that whole police- or phone company-traced call coming from inside the house thing? Nothing to worry about, right? The legend is quarantined in the 1960s, a primitive ape of a horror story, thwacking an analog phone receiver against a monolithic switchboard to the swelling soundtrack of a droning dial tone.

Well, no. Not exactly.

It’s true that the initial story was rooted firmly in the days of land lines and ancient analog phone hook-ups, when a few patient taps to the receiver button could make intra-house Jerky Boying possible, but unlike the aforementioned door handles, which made it increasingly difficult for murderers to lose their deadly prostheses to inadvertent chastity warnings (though probably much easier for murderers to simply click open the door and bury their tines into the writhing flanks of the intertwining lovers), technology kept pace with the psychos. Despite the death of the veritable Cro-Magnon phones of the (club) swinging 60s, in-house murderers were quickly afforded new means of telephonic harassment in the form of multi-line phone systems (note that in many versions of the babysitter v. homicidal stranger story, one of said babysitter’s employers is a doctor, a fact that lends veracity to the presence of a second phone line in the house). Then, of course, everyone got cell phones, which put every babysitter (not to mention every babysitter-employing landline-reliant household) just ten digits away from the hungry fingers of the merciless sadist upstairs. Give it a few months and the stab-happy psychotics will be Skypeing their victims from portable media devices.

Do the evolution… AFTER THE JUMP

Say what you want about horror re-makes (or say nothing and feel free to leave the middle finger-assisted vitriol to me), but the two versions of “When a Stranger Calls” – the first, a loveably schlocky Carol Kane vehicle circa 1979; the second, an achingly hollow shadow thereof, produced in 2006 – demonstrate the ease with which the story can be believably transplanted into the modern milieu without sacrificing the most imperative aspects of its plausibility. Landlines to cell phones and still the babysitters remain in season.

If you’re taking this time to balk at the legal ramifications that, especially in the privatized modern age, plague the police department’s (or phone company’s) ability to perform same-night traces, understand both that the bureaucratic rigmarole is well outside the bounds of concise discussion, and that, well, it doesn’t really matter – how’d a frenzied killer manage to both retrieve his confiscated hook appendage and escape a guarded psychiatric facility? Urban legends’ cultural currency exists in wild stories told with reckless abandon… “reckless,” here, implying a certain practiced ambivalence to the laws of both man and nature (hitchhiking ghosts?).

Beyond the practicality of the telephone as medium for Nutty’s threatening monologues, there are certain related social stereotypes as well. Look no further than Milton Bradley’s 1991 board game “Electronic Talking Dream Phone” – girls love to continuously and indiscriminately spray their feelings into the talk holes on phone receivers. In this way, the killer’s use of a telephone – the very device that the babysitter was no-doubt using to learn that her secret admirer was not wearing a hat – serves as a sort of pseudo-ironic and grotesquely generalized gender comeuppance. Or so say some folklorist interpretations of the legend. It’s unclear whether these are the same folks who like to suggest that the tale plays out like a fear-inspiring intro to GRRL power posturing, in which case the phone-based antagonism serves as a warning to young girls who might be considering succumbing to the Chatty Cathy stereotype. Still, I suspect that this may just be interpretation-happy nit-pickery, as I can only see this fact being relevant if the story established that the sitter was eschewing her supervisory responsibilities in order to blab at a BFF, and I have yet to find that version (the 2006 “When a Stranger Calls” film veers perilously close – the main character is forced to take the babysitting job after she exceeds the cell minutes allotted by her parentally funded phone plan). Still, it’s worth noting that the telephone in the story can be viewed as more than a narrative means to an end. If the babysitter were a guy, I’m sure the killer would contact him through Call of Duty 4’s private chat function.

“We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!”

I have a feeling that “house” will be replaced by either “bunker,” “tube” or “habidome” before “call” changes nomenclature.

It’s happening again. This time, though, it’s all about the Mothman.

You have already been acquainted, albeit briefly, with the drill: I look up a popular American cryptid (e.g., the Mothman) on three foreign language Wikipedia pages and summarize the results (including the requisite [sic]-implied Google Translate nuggets). You try to match each of the three versions to the Wikipedia site on which you believe it originated.

If you want to. Otherwise, proceed straight to the answers. There’s no reward for right answers, good effort or savvy investment advice. And if there were, it would be something packed with asbestos and covered in blood, and nobody would want it.

(If you’re unfamiliar with the standard American telling of the Mothman, read this English-language Wikipedia article.

As a jazz-dancing midget in a Twin Peaks dream sequence once said, “Let’s rock!”:

Your Language Choices:

a.) Russian
b.) Japanese
c.) German

Mothman:

1. After repeatedly referring to Point Pleasant’s red-eyed antagonist as “man-moth,” this brief account of the flying humanoid’s spooky spree ends with several possible real-world explanations, including the popular notion that the man-moth was a misidentified bird and a theory that “in the 60-s test of a new type of weapon that causes hallucinations in humans.” The page’s final hypothesis, titled “hypothesis of genetic errors,” makes the lofty suggestion that the man-moth “appeared during the experiment in a secret lab, and ran all three of these creatures, which then allegedly capture.” The page also cites a supposed 1980 “New York Times” article that described three New Yorkers’ encounter with a creature similar to the man-moth. “Witnesses said that he had a hard face.”

2. This Wikipedia’s Mothman page admits there’s a possibility that, given the creature’s occasional linkage to cattle-mutilating aliens, the Mothman “may be a Vampire To act or he would be a Rite been invoked with animal blood.“ The page also recounts a thrilling Illinoisan Mothman encounter: “1951 being the correct description of the Mothman, was allegedly seen on Chicago, and this flying.“ One day later? The Chicago Earthquake. Coincidence? This Wikipedia article says, “No way!“ – “Allegedly wanted the Mothman help people to get out of their houses to safer outside.“ Chief among this page‘s rational explanations for the winged, bird-taloned monstrosity? Some kind of bear.

3. Chock full of familiar Mothman history and wholly unfamiliar possible explanations, this site lovingly refers to the creature as the “Mossman” (occasionally, “Mosman”) and explains that “Many of the witnesses, but did not see a moment Mossman, Mossman was face to remember is not much more, with glaring red eyes shine.” The page’s subsequent list of Mothman theories includes the “Curse of indigenous theory,” which claims that there’s an “interesting and conformity” between legends of the Thunderbird and Point Pleasant’s “area onceIndian, Shawnee TribeCurse”; and the “Pet Alien Theory,” which identifies the Mossman as “the idea of animals for experiments on Earth.”

ANSWERS AFTER THE JUMP!
Answers:

Description 1.) was found on a..), the Russian Wikipedia
Description 2.) was found on c.), the German Wikipedia
Description 3.) was, therefore, found on b.), the Japanese Wikipedia

Thanks for playing. Let’s do this again some time! I think I almost learned something.