While I may be too scared to dare hock horror with the likes of the ghoulish
Leppek-Isler duo, I am compelled to add my two cents (and valueless sense) to
this bloodthirsty blog. As a horror novice and a virgin blogger, I find myself
settling in an Aristotelian middle ground and concurring with both halves of
this demon-duet: Atmosphere and all those secrets we silently store in the
subconscious go together like rigor and mortis.
I can’t think of an eerier atmosphere than Rosemary Woodhouse’s
apartment, furnished with a struggling actor husband (come on, what’s scarier
than that?); elderly neighbors who push homemade sweets and unsolicited advice
with the oomph of a Bubbe; and, oh yes, the devil lurking somewhere around your
kneecaps.
I jest, but not indelicately: The first time I watched Rosemary’s Baby was with
a friend in
our evening classes, scrounging around for take-out fit for the grad-school
budget, and visiting the local video-house (Casa Video, the film-lover’s answer
to the intellectual desertification creeping across
loved horror … and my weak knees matched my weak will. Thus, horror it was.
I can’t begin to rattle off all that we saw, for I watched most through the gaps
of my fingers or simply sneaked off to play with the cats in the kitchen. But
with Rosemary’s Baby, I couldn’t look away. And after Rosemary (and my psyche)
had survived an evening of violation, I hesitantly headed home through the unlit
are distant and cold. And where ghouls and fiends and devils lie in wait on
dark desert nights.
Mia as Rosemary — an evening of violation.
It didn’t help, of course, that I was taking a course on Ethnomedicine that
semester, and I spent my days entranced by witches and sorcerers and the evil
eye. Mani asks if there is “really such a thing as demonic possession,” and the
answer is, clearly, yes. (Find any ethnography on the bottom shelf of a
library, and demons will rise through the dust.) Culture is a powerful thing,
and although I as a “modern” (or perhaps “postmodern”) can scoff at such
things, were I a young woman in rural north
A. Freed and Ruth S. Freed) or the southern
Mandari by Jean Buxton), possession might be par for the course.
Possession requires a mix of atmosphere and individual susceptibility, and so I
submit that all that’s fit to be feared is intimately connected to culture.
What scares us always contains an element of the possible, even if only
symbolically.
I never needed those terrifying Tuesdays in
addict – there’s plenty I fear every day. Even sending one’s thoughts into the
vast reaches of the Intertubes isn’t without it risks. (Nothing embodies
“chaos” more than the World Wide Web – that postmodern
and all can espouse opinions at any time of the day.)
As Mani states, “Can you imagine speaking to a total stranger (and a non-human
one at that) who knows your deepest, darkest secrets?”
This is why I don’t socialize with my doctor …