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…

(more…)

You, me and the rest of the school. Run home, grab any knife you can and meet at the cemetery. We are looking for someone seven feet tall with iron teeth. He already kidnapped and ate two kids, so be careful.

Let’s go kill us a vampire.

Or so was the logic for 400 Scottish kids in late September 1954 when a local constable had to break up the armed youth mob repeatedly after word got out that a massive vampire was picking off students one by one. Of course now it’s just a(n awesome) story that aged schoolmates can tell each other but while it was happening, it caused quite a stir in Glasgow and beyond.

“I think somebody saw someone wandering about and the cry went up: ‘There’s the vampire!’

“That was it – that was the word to get off that wall quick and get away from it.

“I just remember scampering home to my mother: ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ‘I’ve seen a vampire!’ and I got a clout round the ear for my trouble. I didn’t really know what a vampire was.”

There were no records of any missing children in Glasgow at the time, and media reports of the incident began to search for the origins of the urban myth that had gripped the city.

Unfortunately, outside forces seized on the story as a rallying cry to push through legislation regulating comic book content sold to minors. Instead of, I don’t know, lauding and rewarding these brave kids for knowing that brutal mob violence was the safest most efficient way to take down a child-murdering denizen of the undead.

[BBC via Conspiracy Journal]

So how does the story of the first vampire to set foot on American shores begin – like the most frightening episode of Deadliest Catch ever. An excerpt from a New York Time archive article circa 1892:

Twenty-five years ago he was charged with being a vampire and living on human blood. He was a Portuguese sailor, and shipped on a fishing-smack from Boston up the coast in 1867. During this trip two of the crew were missing, and an investigation made. Brown was found one day, in the hold of the ship, sucking the blood from the body of one of the sailors. The other body was found at the same place, and had been served in a similar manner.

It’s a hard life at sea. Even harder with a vampire on your boat.

Few people on Earth have watched as many vampire films over the past few weeks as the hard-working staff of the 2009 Vampire Film Festival. While they prepare to descend onto New Orleans October 23rd for a four day celebration of vampire-centric film, music and celebration they were nice enough to send Weird Things their 10 biggest pet peeves with the vamp genre.

The search for a long-dead lover. It always ends in finding some poor girl who is the dead amours dead ringer, literally. That plot device had been overused to the point of being clichéd.

One bite transforms you into a vampire. Sorry, this would mean we’d be up to our eyebrows in the pesky things world-wide in about six months.

Vampires must kill regularly to feed. Anne Rice does this, but consider — three vampires in New Orleans killing at least once a night for sixty years. That is over sixty thousand corpses! In a city with a population of less than a quarter of a million! The Civil War was less devastating to the city!

Killer sun exposure. This device is not in vampire lore or Dracula but from the film Nosferatu. Vampires are depicted as an all-powerful, eternal beings but their Achilles’ heel is the sun. How can you be all-powerful if you can be bumped off by a suntan?

Sloppy eaters. I love cioppino, for example. Love it. But when I eat it, only a few drops might end up on my lips and shirt. Why would vampires be any different? Or if you use the analogy of addiction — do addicts spill cocaine? Not deliberately they don’t! In fact they’ll go to great lengths not to!

Flight. No offense but I’m a bit bored by vampires who can fly a la Superman. Or are associated with bats for some reason. Neither has any basis in folklore (well, some Asian vampires can fly…)

Secret vampire societies. Another overworked device that is a bit lame but takes care of one issue with vampires…how the hell do they make a living?

Vampire males who mope about being vampires. Okay we get it, you don’t like biting people for your next meal but please don’t push undead angst to the limit

Ancient juvenile delinquents. You have centuries to grow, to learn, to experience things. And in all that time all you end up becoming is a bully? Frankly, that is hard to believe. Some might atrophy, might go subtly mad as they coped less and less well with change, or become focused on individual obsessions, but wouldn’t others–given the time and the opportunities huge amounts of time provides–evolve into more interesting persons?

Bug-eating servants. Renfield was innovative in his day. Devouring live insects is no longer edgy, but cliche.

Other pet peeves include:

Weird Vampire Sounds. What’s Up with the hissing sounds the vampires make in films.

Letting it All Hang Out. The stupid face they make when they bare their fangs, is that really necessary?

Over stating the Myth. Garlic, stakes, crosses sunlight-one of these usually doesn’t work on vampires. Which ones varies. Usually it is accompanied by ” X doesn’t work!”

All Vampires Are Evil. How would that work, precisely? Even on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where a person’s soul is replaced by a demon’s when turned undead, vampires ended up with a wide variety of behaviors, including Spike (starting before the chip) and Harmony. I’m less displeased if some kind of justification is given, but usually there isn’t even a hint.

Oversexed vampire tarts. They are always played by played by big-breasted, no-talented actresses and the whole thing is tired…at least to the women in the audience.

If you are in the New Orleans area or just really love the idea of those dapper undead scamps please take the time to check out the Vampire Film Festival website. The fest begins October 23rd and runs for four days. We thank them for helping us out and would like to editorially note that we are quite fond of the oversexed vampire tart concept.

No one is all bad. Weird Things Cultural Researcher Matt Finley takes a look at the silver lining in famous fictional monsters.

Two weeks ago, Weird Things took a look at the cooler-than-you clique of vampiric adolescent rapscallions in “The Lost Boys” and flirted with the possibility that they were, you know, from like a socio-political standpoint, maybe not all that bad. Today, the site looks at a group of gainfully employed, adult vampires from the 1996 film “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn,” and the positive ramifications of their self-made debauched corner of Mexican heaven, the Titty Twister.

A Boon to the Trucking Industry

More than just a vampire strip club, the Titty Twister is essentially the corporate headquarters of a consulting firm that evaluates the work ethic, morality and efficacy of big rig truckers. No trucking company wants its employees delaying shipments and spending their company allowances drinking bottom-shelf tequila off vampires’ feet while jabber-jawing with Danny Trejo. The staff of the Titty Twister weeds out los huevos malos to ensure that North America’s economy isn’t further damaged by shipping delays, and, in doing so, creates the legend of a vampire strip club, which subsequently terrifies other potential slackers while popularizing new CB radio warnings, such as “fanged beaver” and “drac muff.”

Preservation of an Historic Landmark

By ensuring that the ancient, evil pyramid that the Titty Twister is constructed upon stays in the hands of the grotesque, undead monsters that it was presumably built to honor, it’s guaranteed that one of Mexico’s most impressive and sinister National landmarks doesn’t get demolished to make way for a just-over-the-border human cloning facility or a just-over-the-border human cloning facility that also sells fireworks.

A Boon to Tourism

Imagine that the Titty Twister didn’t exist and all the vampire strippers, musicians and bar tenders had to fan out across the country, finding employment at various different taverns and strip clubs, and then murdering patrons indiscriminately at all of them. College spring breakers and middle-aged resort hoppers would pack up their Spanglish and alcoholism and take them somewhere that didn’t boast a blood-drinking killer in every pub. The Titty Twister ensures that blue collar vampires with experience in the service industry can find gainful employment and a healthy quantity of unwitting victims without disrupting the influx of binge-drinking Americans that Mexico depends on to keep their hospitals open.

Sitting around waiting to hear whatever bleating bit of electro melancholy Thom Yorke cooks up for the soundtrack of that there Twilight sequel? In the meantime, enjoy today’s vampire-themed cryptid playlist – five randomly ordered tuneful ditties about blood-slurping, dirt-napping albino nightwalkers.

• Outkast – Dracula’s Wedding

It’s unclear exactly what Andre 3000 was shooting for with this harpsichord-drenched ode to unholy nuptials, Van Helsing and PB&J… but if it was sheer, unadulterated awesomeness, he succeeded admirably.

• Blue Oyster Cult – Nosferatu

While their ode to Japan’s reptilian nemesis Godzilla has captured the hearts of cinephiles and guitar heroes alike, Blue Oyster Cult also wrote an equally rocking tribute to bloodthirsty 1920s film vampire Nosferatu. Less a paean to the undead than an IMDB synopsis set to music, the song is equal parts plot outline and elegy, but in the best possible way.

• The Misfits – Vampira

From The Misfit’s 1982 debut full-length, Walk Among Us, this lo-fi bit of crypt-storming horror punk is a minute and twenty seconds worth of fevered graveyard make-out time with sultry, nocturnal 1950s horror movie host Maila Nurmi, AKA Vampira.

• The Magnetic Fields – I Have The Moon

Magnetic Fields’ front man Stephin Merritt writes and performs in four separate bands, each of which has at least one song that breathes a whiff of vampirism (his synth-pop band Future Bible Heroes has an entire album on the topic). This song, from The Magnetic Fields’ country album The Charm of the Highway Strip, is told from the perspective of a vampire airplane pilot pursuing a human pilot around the globe. As the human flies time zone to time zone, ensuring herself eternal daylight, the vampire is forever trapped just behind her, condemned to endless darkness and the silent taunts of a stoic moon.

• The Birthday Party – Release the Bats

Before Nick Cave hollered, stomped, crooned and purred with the Bad Seeds, he hollered and stomped with The Birthday Party, a glorious post-punk/hardcore/art rock outfit that defies simple categorization. “Release the Bats” finds Cave in rare form, yelping about undead eroticism before gasping out “Sex bat horror vampire sex / Cool machine” – perfect for all your creepy S&M redneck True Blood cosplay.

No one is all bad. Weird Things Cultural Researcher Matt Finley takes a look at the silver lining in famous fictional monsters.

While the pesky teenaged vamps in the 1987 classic The Lost Boys did commit their fair share of wholly gratuitous, unprovoked murders, their methodology and social niche both belie a devotion to the greater good that should not go overlooked. Here are just a few of the cultural problem areas that their motorcycle-revving, trestle-jumping Jim Morrison worship competently addressed:

Adolescent Conduct

That’s right, druggies and vandals, the barometer for delinquency has been completely re-calibrated. Before the undead showed up in Santa Clara, a “good kid” was one who studied hard, kept away from drugs and avoided the sweaty, half-naked saxophonists that troll the amusement pier. After the vampires came? As long as that bong doesn’t have anyone’s blood in it, the “My Kid Isn’t a Vampire…Yet” bumper sticker is staying on the mini-van. Nothing puts booty shorts, whip-its and concealed birth control into perspective like the exsanguinated corpse of a child.

Obesity

Teaching kids about maintaining a healthful diet is imperative, but it’s hard to enforce, especially when they see you requesting extra salami on your Italian BMT like the bloated sausage casing you’ve become. Fortunately, all the kids are hanging out with totally righteous vampires, who are really keen on playing dinnertime mind control jokes, like making people see noodles as worms, rice as maggots and delicious Wendy’s hamburgers as Burger King hamburgers. While the trim, attractive kids live in constant fear that their food will morph into a hellscape of writhing insects, parents live in tranquil contentment knowing that their gluttonous kids won’t morph into swinish gut lumps.

Comic Book Sales

What would comic book publishers have done in the ‘80s if they hadn’t had the Frog brothers hocking superhero titles alongside the requisite vampire survival comics that are so crucial to life in Southern California? With every issue of “Vampires Everywhere!” that Edgar and Alan helpfully dispensed to their clientele, they ensured that yet another loyal customer knew enough about garlic and hell hounds to survive until the next issue of Spiderman’s crazy wedding storyline was released.

Image credit: miss_blackbutterfly

Rumors were flying late last month at the Historic Latin School in Boston that a female vampire, an unnamed student, had cut someone’s neck and sucked blood, also that police officers had been summoned to the school to apprehend the vampire.

(more…)