One movie. Five people, living or dead, at the screening. Who and why?
Today’s screening: “Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn”

This sequel (or remake – debate rages on) to his revelatory debut feature “The Evil Dead” finds Sam Raimi revisiting a rustic cabin where dark forces are accidentally unleashed after an archaeologist’s taped readings from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis are played aloud, invoking evil spirits that protagonist Ash must fight off. The film continues the original’s cartoonish approach to violence, while upping the quantity of slapstick and one-liners.

• Buster Keaton (1895-1966), Actor
Though one may be straight faced and the other manic, Buster Keaton and Bruce Campbell share a workmanlike dedication to slapstick, flinging their bodies into the blind peril of exploding china and collapsing buildings. I’d love watching Keaton marvel at Campbell’s blood-smeared antics. Supposedly, there’s a lost scene from “The General” where Keaton gets curbed by his own severed foot.

• Garrett Brown (1943- ), Cinematographer
Brown, best known for inventing the Steadicam, may have already seen Evil Dead 2, which is infamous for featuring some of the most ridiculously over the top Steadicam shots ever. Still, I’d like to watch every tree-dodging, Campbell-flinging moment of footage with him. It’d be like taking flashlight-inventor David Missel to watch cops beat winos with Maglites.

• H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), Author
Known for his dour, madness-tinged tales of the dread elder gods, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft created the now-standard macabre MacGuffin, the Necronomicon. I’d like to show him Evil Dead 2 in hopes of putting a smile on his sad, tired face. Plan B: introduce him to a real elder god… The Tickle Monster.

• Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), Archaeologist
Travelling everywhere from Jerusalem to Hungary, Bell investigated ancient ruins and hidden cities all across Europe and Asia. While I can foresee her response to my post-screening question, “So, has that ever happened to you?,” I can’t predict her asnswer to my follow-up, “So, like, what would you do if it did?”

• Pat Graham (?), Film Critic
Now, I don’t need everyone to enjoy everything I like, but critic Pat Graham panned “Evil Dead 2”, “Predator” and “The Fly.” “Evil Dead 2” doesn’t really need more praise, but I still want this guy to re-experience it. And while he’s at the screening, the cops can raid his house to make sure he isn’t planning to rag on “Re-Animator” or murder Santa.

After travelling the colonized world in the dark cargo hold of British superstition, and eventually arriving in America only to be unpacked amidst the rabble and row of the antebellum South, black dog sightings began to taper off. Though Britain still has its fair share of them gnashing and panting their way through narrative fiction, most recently in children’s books by authors like J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman, the animals themselves, be they ghostly protectors or feral, storm-conjured assailants, seem to have faded in the wake of UFOs, lake monsters and yetis. But while these flesh and blood anomalies howl through people’s nightmares and rattle the windows of their dreams, the shadow of a black dog looms silently over the culture.

It was Winston Churchill who famously described his depression as “his black dog.” This analogy of oppressive emotional darkness to a ghostly, dynamic animal, restless and possessed of cold, raw strength, a sinewy beast that snarls, howls and collapses between states of dreadful kineticism and crushing inertness, has become an increasingly popular image for both sufferers and researchers of the disorder. An Internet search for “black dog depression” yields links to multiple books, organizations and blogs, some of which, most notably an American non-profit and an Australian institute, even employ the phrase “black dog” in their names or titles. Churchill’s eloquent repurposing of the legend reconstituted the beast as something more terrifying than an irritable ghost – the black inner lining of human desperation.

Meanwhile, various animal shelters and kennels are still trying to find ways to overcome what’s known as “black dog syndrome,” which is the term associated with the national dearth of black dog adoptions, leading, unfortunately, to a wealth of black dog euthanizations. Obviously, there are several non-supernatural factors that contribute to the problem, including potential adopters’ perception that black dogs are overly common and the very real issue that, due to their color, some darker animals do overheat more easily, but, when surveyed, dog owners have also expressed a real and enduring superstition linking black canines to misfortune and injury.

What began centuries ago as tales of foul, hungry beasts piloting giant forks of lightening down into churches has evolved into potent metaphor and residual superstition, creating something less striking, but far more solid, than the ethereal manifestations that once prowled the graveyards of England.

While many of North America’s early black dog tales come verbatim from those of Europe, centering around phantasmal hounds pacing Anglican graveyards, the story gained new cultural life in the wake of the civil war as white Southerners began reporting the appearance of strange, spectral canines, some of which were missing legs or heads, around various slave cemeteries.

It’s unclear as to when these reports began, but it seems fair to suggest that the sightings partially emerged out of burgeoning latent guilt at the concordant institutions of slavery and systemic racism in America. The guardian canines, then, represented a post-mortem sentry protecting the remains of disenfranchised people who had found freedom in death. It’s a nice explanation, but a bit too pat. The ragged, mutilated appearance of these spirits hints at an underlying ignorant fear that, just as whites have sleek, pure-bred animals watching their graves, the blacks must have ragged, mangy beasts guarding theirs.

Unlike European cemeteries, with their regimented lines of headstones and kempt vastness, slave cemeteries were usually small, out of the way and devoid of permanent grave markers. Many were started by white land owners who neither regarded the slaves as people nor wanted to lose valuable tracts of land to non-mercantile ritual. Even after slavery ended, and blacks were able to claim many of these burial grounds, the minimalist interment procedures continued. Rather than fetishize death, like Europeans did, through the construction of stone markers and statuary, many former slave families chose instead to craft markers from wood or local flora as a means of embracing the naturalness of death and the basic humanity, rather than socio-cultural personhood (which slaves weren’t granted anyway), of the deceased (many slave cemeteries also lack the formal grid structure of Western burial grounds, conserving space and allowing loved ones to be buried together in the same plot).

It’s reasonable to suggest that some dog sightings came out of this cultural difference, refracted through the lens of racism, which led some White visitors to interpret the floral grave markers not as memorials, but rather as hoodoo charms placed carefully by vengeful hands – dark folk magic, in the form of a ghoulish hound, protecting the sacred earth from disruption.

This variation on the black dog legend perfectly reflects the way in which folklore adapts to address perpetually changing cultural fears and concerns, legitimate or not.

Friday: Black dogs today

An eerie weather vane depicting a dog riding a bolt of lightning still stands atop the Suffolk church where, in 1577, an electrical storm propelled the specter of a black canine down into the holy sanctum. The apparition killed two praying supplicants and badly burned another before sublimating back into the amethyst sky and the roar of thunder.

From Hades’ babysitter Cerberus to the hound of the Baskervilles, dark canines have loyally heeled alongside European folklore and literature for centuries; the British Isles are uniquely overstocked with tales of sinister black dogs. Direct instruments of death, omens of misfortune and sentinels of the netherworld are among the most common vocations foist upon these ubiquitous ebon heck puppies (also called Hell Hounds or Grims), which are most often encountered during electrical storms or at places of transition – a dark silhouette at a crossroads, a black, starlit ghost in a cemetery or a pacing shadow, immune to moonlight, circling a hanging tree.

Dogs are natural scavengers with a heightened olfactory sense. Even in the wake of domestication, they are drawn to the blood and the meat of dead or dying animals, and pursue odors far too subtle for the human nose to detect. That this natural predilection toward, and ability to sense, the smell of the wounded and deceased – the very scent of death – could neither be trained nor bred out of them partially explains why they’ve historically been linked to supposed crossover spaces where the world of the living and the world of the dead bleed into each other like the soft-edged tendrils of colliding fog banks.

The idea of domestication itself, when paired with the already fevered imaginings of pre-enlightenment, Satan-phobic Western society, could have easily catalyzed tales devil dogs. When a blindly obedient animal can be taught to hone, focus and direct its strength, cunning and ferocity, it becomes an extension of its owner’s will. As man has always charged the devil and his minions with using man’s own free will, intellect and cunning against him, it’s no surprise that creatures like Cerberus and black dogs were imagined. After all, what’s more malevolent than co-opting the loyalty of man’s best friend and siccing the beast upon him?

The Britons’ nightmare of a loveable-mutt-turned-Beelzebub’s-PA proved indelible enough to survive the tumbling trek across the mighty Atlantic…

Wednesday: Black dogs and the American South

The Devil has earned many place names. Devils Island, Kill Devil Hills, Devils Den, and Devils Lake come easily to mind. But there is one place name that has some history with an actual devil, and that is Devils Hole in the Armargosa (bitter) Desert of Nevada, just East of the appropriately named Death Valley.  Unlike other legends, there actually is something really weird here.

The devil in this case was Charles Manson. It is said that he would wander the desert for days looking for a hole to the underworld where he would take his “family” when the inevitable global race war started. When he found Devils Hole, he thought he was on to something.

The hole itself is in a rock outcropping. It doesn’t look like much, but it is filled with salt water heated by a geothermal spring (miners have used it for bathing). The water isn’t quite as hot as hell, but the hole’s depth and temperature in this bleak environment certain call up images of purgatory. And it’s not rainwater – it very rarely rains in the desert. This water is “fossil” ground water, thousands of years old.

Manson found the presence of water perplexing. He believed it was a barrier, like a gate, and he was determined to find a way to drain it. He supposedly sat by the hole meditating for three days trying to figure out hole’s mysteries.

And it is quite mysterious. It is, for all intents and purposes, bottomless. Two divers died there in 1967, their bodies never recovered. The hole is filled with caves that apparently connect to other sources of water in the valley, and it may be possible to travel from one to the other, though it would be a foolish journey. So foolish, the hole is now fenced off completely.

Manson might get his wish. Since the 90’s, the water level in the hole has been dropping. Pumping in the desert to supply Las Vegas’s endless thirst may be to blame, but no one is sure. However, there are other Devils in Devils Hole, Cyprinodon diabolis, or the Devils Hole pupfish that are at extreme risk.

Devils Hole is the only place this particular species of small blue minnows is found. They’re fascinating to watch – with blue flashes shining the desert sun – but their entire food supply is found on an algae covered shelf of rock. If the water drops too much, no food , and no pupfish. They are among the most endangered animals in the United States today, and it’s estimated that they’ve been in the hole for over 10,000 years.

Another strange fact about the pupfish… they may depend on owls. Roosting barn owls in the cave over Devils Hole vomit pellets into the water that may add nutrients needed by the algae.

At the age of 74, Manson may yet outlive the pupfish, but it’s very unlikely that the parole board will ever let him be a direct threat to the pupfish. And if he chose to return to his desert hideout known as Barker Ranch, he’d find only burned ruins thanks to the work of arsonists in May, 2009.

photo credit: ?Lady M?

Santa Maria Stella Maris church in Fiumicino, Italy has decided to stop offering holy water for members of the public to bless with, amid fears that the water may be being stolen for satanic purposes. Walter Palombi, Parish Priest told Italian Newspapers that:

“We have motives to believe that these are used for a ‘black mass’ (satanic mass). Usually the person who carries out these practices needs items that are ‘blessed’ as well as holy water.”

So no more holy water for the faithful Italians of Fiumicino. Satanic ritual scares became popular in Italy during the 1980’s and 90’s, more recently in 2004, fears of satanic ritual cults have sprung up again.

What you see above is The Devil’s Millhopper, a genuine hellmouth (according to local legend) which has been the centuries-old site of sacrifice and kidnapping for Beelzebub’s benefit. It also looks like a Northwest Florida hole in the ground.

Weird Things investigated the sinkhole for itself this weekend. What we found were tales of princesses, lavender people, tears and glory-thieving aliens.

Read it all… AFTER THE JUMP.

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