From Solstice to Equinox

Frank Bonner (1942-2021) has died. Most people remember him as Herb Tarlek from the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-1982), but he got his start on screen more than a decade earlier in a completely different kind of role and in a completely different kind of film.

You may have seen Equinox (1970). If you haven't, you should. It's not a great movie, but it's a fun and interesting one. Originally filmed in 1967 the summers of 1965 and 1966 (see the comments below) as a short subject called The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural, Equinox was expanded and reworked for theatrical release in 1970. (That explains the anachronistic clothing worn by the young people in the film.) Billed as Frank Boers, Jr., the late Mr. Bonner was one of the two male leads in a group that included two young actresses as well. It occurs to me now that the plot device of two young couples encountering the supernatural in a remote location has some similarities to the first Mothman sighting, which took place in November 1966, only a few short months before not long after the original version of Equinox was made. (Again, see the comments below.)

Equinox became a cult classic. It played at the drive-in and in cheap theaters and was on late-night television. That's where we saw it when we were kids, all as a family, including my dad, who didn't like fantasy or science fiction movies at all. According to the Internet Movie Database, "The story combines numerous elements of various novellas by H.P. Lovecraft." That may be true, but a thing isn't true just because a source on the Internet says that it's true. If you're going to make an assertion, you have to back it up with evidence. Let's have the evidence.

There may have been an influence of H.P. Lovecraft on the making of Equinox. Any researcher looking into that question could extend his or her work into the influence of both Lovecraft and Equinox on Sam Raimi's film The Evil Dead (1981). Mr. Raimi is said not to have seen Equinox before making his film, but the similarities are apparent. It seems to me, though, that both he and the makers of Equinox were working from the same general idea, one that nobody really invented but that is useful when you're creating a horror film. The idea begins with the intended audience: young people, more specifically young couples, who are out at night, in their cars, in the dark, away from home and the safety of home. Once you get a bunch of young people into an isolated place, cut off from everything safe and familiar to them, the horror-story ball starts rolling. See The Blair Witch Project (1999) for another example, one more overtly influenced by Lovecraft and his creations. See also The Blob (1958), which was based on a story by Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990), "Slime," from from Weird Tales, March 1953. (Click here and here for images.) Both Equinox and The Blob were produced by Jack H. Harris (1918-2017).

You might search here and there and come up empty, but there are in fact easy connections to be made between Equinox and the Lovecraftian oeuvre of old. One of the actors in the film is Fritz Leiber, Jr. (1910-1992), who was of course a teller of weird tales and a Lovecraft associate. Leiber had acted in movies from time to time since his young adulthood. His father, Fritz Leiber (1882-1949), was also an actor and a famous one at that. Leiber the elder was in movies from 1916 to his death, including the genre films Cry of the Werewolf and Cobra Woman, both from 1944. Forrest J Ackerman (1916-2008) was also in Equinox, but only his voice. Always the performer, Ackerman had appeared in movies as early as 1944 and would continue to appear as late as 2017, after his death. He and Leiber the younger shared billing in the 1957 short subject The Genie. Oddly enough, writer, artist, and future Star Trek savior Bjo Trimble (b. 1933) was also in The Genie.

We offer our condolences to the family and friends of Frank Bonner, who died on June 16, 2021, at age seventy-nine.

Updated on April 21, 2026.
Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Les Baxter (1922-1996)

I wrote the other day about Gustav Holst (1874-1934) and his suite The Planets from more than a century ago. Listening to his music and looking into the covers of recordings of his music made me think of two topics related to genre fiction. Both involve Les Baxter. If you haven't listened to Les Baxter's music, I would urge you to as soon as you can. There is so much there for fans of popular culture, especially Exotica and what I think of as one of its progenitors, the genre of Lost Worlds.

Leslie Thompson Baxter, called "the Godfather of Exotica," was born on March 14, 1922, in Mexia, a small city in east-central Texas. His parents were Jesse Elliott Baxter (1890-1955) and Leta Thompson Baxter (1890-1964). Both were native Texans and the families of both originated in the Upper South. Les Baxter had one brother, James Edward "Jim" Baxter (1913-1964), an author, playwright, composer, and lyricist who worked with Les in the 1950s and '60s. Les Baxter married just once, in 1953. He and his wife, Patricia C. Baxter, had two children together. Tragically, she died at age thirty-four, after they had been together for just seven years. Les Baxter raised their children on his own after that. So, at the height of his musical career in the 1950s and '60s, Les Baxter lost his parents, his brother, and his wife. Some things are given while others are taken away.

Les Baxter's father, Jesse Baxter, worked as a stenographer, bookkeeper, and realtor, but his family included more than one prominent preacher. His brother, Batsell Baxter (1886-1956), was a preacher, writer, and college president. (More on that below.) Batsell Baxter was the father of Batsell Barrett Baxter (1916-1982), also a preacher, writer, and educator. He started Herald of Truth Bible Hour, a TV show that lasted for decades.

Jesse Baxter's sister, Anna Lee Baxter Hockaday (1892-1970), was married to a preacher, too. He was William Doniphan "Don" Hockaday (1888-1958), a second cousin, twice removed, of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). If you look at a picture of Don Hockaday, you might see a resemblance to the Great Emancipator. Don Hockaday's daughter-in-law died just last month. We send condolences to her family. We also find that an important idea is once again affirmed: History is alive in this moment. What we think of as being dead and in the past still lives.

Les Baxter was a musical child prodigy. He started playing piano at age five and as a six-year-old won a scholarship to the Detroit Conservatory of Music. The 1940 census indicates that in 1935 the Baxter family lived in Detroit. That would have been about the time, I think, that Jim Baxter attended Wayne University (now Wayne State University). Jim Baxter went on to write the Western novel The Circle on the Plain (1961) and the play Next Case. He also collaborated with his brother Les and songwriter Karl A. Suessdorf (1911-1982) on the songs "Rovin Gal" and "Calypso Boogie" (both from the movie Bop Girl Goes Calypso [1957]); "A Gun Is My True Love" (from the movie The Dalton Girls [1957]); and "Shooting Star" (from the album Space Escapade [1958]); as well as "Black Sheep," "Destination Honeymoon," and "Memories of Maine."

Les Baxter studied at Pepperdine University, an institution affiliated with the Churches of Christ. Baxter's uncle, Batsell Baxter, served as the first president of Pepperdine from 1937 to 1939. I suspect that Les Baxter was in attendance at about that time. In the census of 1940, Les, aged eighteen, did not have an occupation listed, but in 1942, when he filled out his draft card, he was employed by Central Casting in Hollywood. By age twenty, then, he had begun working in show business. 

Baxter worked as a concert pianist and joined Mel Tormé's vocal group, the Mel-Tones, in or about 1944. The other singers in that group were Betty Beveridge, Ginny O'Connor, and Bernie Parke. Some combination of them appeared in two motion pictures, Pardon My Rhythm (1944) and I'll Remember April (1945). (Baxter played a singing sailor.) Ginny O'Connor soon after married Henry Mancini (1924-1994), another sometime composer of Exotica. (Be sure to listen to his "Lujon.") Les Baxter also played saxophone in Freddy Slack's big band.

Les Baxter was not only a singer and musician but also, of course, a composer, arranger, conductor, and producer of music. He wrote more than 250 scores for radio, television, and movies, including music for the Bob Hope and Abbott and Costello radio shows. I won't go into his list of credits except in the bullet points and record covers shown below. You can easily find his credits on your own on other websites, including on the Internet Movie Database (here). But I wanted to tell you a little more on the life of this extraordinary composer of so much exotic, evocative, and atmospheric music of the postwar era. I also wanted to tell about his influence upon and connections to the old pulp genres of science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction:

First, as a maker of Exotica, Les Baxter helped to carry some of the moods and forms of more nearly classical music into popular realms of the 1950s through the 1970s. He did this chiefly, I think, by his use of African-influenced percussion, impressionistic woodwinds and strings, and soaring, wordless voices, these first with the Peruvian coloratura singer Yma Sumac (1922-2008), later in other albums of his own. (He produced and composed the music for her first studio album, Voice of the Xtabay, in 1950.)

If you listen to Gustav Holst's Planets (1914-1916, 1918), specifically "Neptune, The Mystic," you will hear wordless voices, but they are in other early twentieth-century compositions, too, such as in Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé (1912). You can hear the influence of Ravel--Debussy, too--on Les Baxter, but then these two French composers had a large effect on American popular music, especially film scores, in which seemingly every ocean-going movie for decades quoted from Debussy's La Mer. (Be sure to listen, too, to the angelic wordless singing of Edda dell'Orso [b. 1935], who worked extensively with Ennio Morricone [1928-2020] on his own film scores. Addition, March 4, 2021: One more piece of wordless singing: "Madrigals of the Rose Angel" from Harold Budd's album The Pavilion of Dreams [1978].)

The wordless singing and rapid-fire percussion of Exotica found their way into the main title theme of Star Trek, especially in the first season opening. The music was by Alexander Courage (1919-2008) and I think very much influenced by Les Baxter's Exotica. All of these voices remind me of the high, sweet, otherworldly, vocal group- or choral group-type singing in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Remember that Les Baxter started out in a vocal group, singing with a man nicknamed "the Velvet Fog." Talk about atmosphere.

Second, Les Baxter also used the theremin early on, an instrument that is kind of a science fiction instrument anyway but also became one of the essential elements of the science fiction movie soundtrack of the 1950s, such as in Rocketship X-M (1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and The Thing from Another World (1951). Here's a chicken-and-egg question: Did science fiction movies use the theremin because of Les Baxter, or was it the other way around? Or maybe both discovered the instrument at the same time.

Third, Baxter composed music drawing from or meant to evoke the genres of Lost Worlds and science fiction (see the record covers below), but he also wrote scores for every kind of genre movie, including: The Invisible Boy (science fiction, 1957); The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (Western and Lost Worlds, 1958); Goliath and the Barbarians (sword and sandal or heroic fantasy, 1959); Master of the World (scientific romance or Vernian science fiction, 1961); Reptilicus (monster movie, 1961); Tales of Terror (weird fiction, 1962); Panic in the Year Zero! (post-apocalypse, 1962); and many others, plus plenty of beach-party and motorcycle exploitation movies.

Fourth, he also wrote the score for The Dunwich Horror (1970), the first movie based on a work by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) that also shares its title with the original source. (I think.) So if a movie score is a kind of program music or a kind of adaptation, then Les Baxter might get credit for the first musical adaptation of Lovecraft's work on film. However, the first film adaptation of a work by Lovecraft was actually The Haunted Palace (1963), a film based on "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (1927, 1941, 1943). The author of that score was Ronald Stein (1930-1988), whose list of credits might be indistinguishable from Les Baxter's, for these two men wrote music for all of the same kinds of movies. Anyway, Ronald Stein should probably get credit for the first recorded musical adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's work, assuming, like I said, that a movie score is a kind of program music and therefore an adaptation. (See my article "The Other Forms of Lovecraft," dated October 2, 2018, by clicking here.)

Well, this article has gone on pretty long and it might be time to wrap things up. I'll close by letting you know that Les Baxter died on January 15, 1996, in Newport Beach, California. He was seventy-three years old, but in departing he left behind music that I hope we can listen to forever.

Further Reading

• "Les Baxter" on the website Space Age Music Maker, here.
• A website called Les Baxter at this URL: Lesbaxter.com.
• The Exotic World of Les Baxter, a website accessible by clicking here.

The "banned" record cover of The Planets by Gustav Holst, which I showed the other day, reminded me of this one, for Space Escapade by Les Baxter (1958). The rocketship in the background might be a little phallic, but it also reminds me of the Flatwoods Monster.

Here's the reverse side of that album. I don't know who the artist is, but he or she knew something about science fiction imagery. And talk about a phallic rocketship.

In Music Out of the Moon (1947), Les Baxter collaborated with composer Henry Revel (1905-1958) and theremin player Samuel J. Hoffman (1903-1967). New things with this album included not only music of the theremin but also the full-color cover and the scantily clad model (actress Virginia Clark). One old-fashioned thing about it: it was released on three 78 rpm records. One real-world application: Neil Armstrong played Music Out of the Moon--on the moon!

To me, Exotica is related to the Lost Worlds genre of literature but perhaps filtered through the overseas experiences of servicemen and -women during World War II. Think of South Pacific with its "own special island." Whatever its origins, Exotica was very popular during the 1950s and '60s. Here is an early recording in that genre, Le Sacre du Savage or Ritual of the Savage by Les Baxter and his orchestra, from 1951.

The cover artist was William Chapman George, Jr. (Aug. 10, 1926-May 25, 2017), who for some reason is not very well identified on the Internet despite his having been a very accomplished illustrator over the course of a very long career. As an example of his talent, the late Mr. George painted this picture when he was just twenty-five years old. He went on to paint interior illustrations and covers for men's magazines, paperback books, especially Westerns, and packaging for He-Man toys of all things. There is an interview with him in Illustration #8, from 2003. On the other hand, there is very little of him on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. I hope someone will correct that oversight soon.

A few years ago, I was at a Bigfoot conference in Ohio and stopped at the table of the Explorers Club. One of their promotional items, a flyer or postcard, showed William George's cover for Ritual of the Savage but missing all identifying information. In other words, I think they swiped his artwork and violated somebody or other's copyright. But these are the things people do to the work of the artist. Anyway, I'll have more to say about the Explorers Club in a future article.

Speaking of swipes, here's a movie poster for House of Usher (1960), for which Richard Matheson (1926-2013) wrote the screenplay and Les Baxter wrote the music. The swipe is from Harry Clarke's illustration for "The Premature Burial" by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). (Click on the previous sentence to see it.)

It's strange to think that Edgar Allan Poe and Abraham Lincoln were born less than a month apart.

By 1970, when The Dunwich Horror was released, H.P. Lovecraft had name recognition. Moviemakers didn't have to hide his story behind Poe's byline as they had done just seven years before in The Haunted Palace. I wish I had the name of the cover artist here: he or she deserves some credit for this full-color illustration of a story that had seldom--or maybe never--gotten this kind of treatment before.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Panic in America!

On the evening of October 30, 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air presented a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (1897, 1898). Orson Welles, John Houseman, and Howard Koch were the scriptwriters, but Koch seems to have gotten sole and final credit for what his later book (1970, 1971) called "The Panic Broadcast."

Nearly nineteen years later, on September 9, 1957, the CBS television show Studio One presented the story behind the story in "The Night America Trembled." As it happens, the screenwriter for that live broadcast, Nelson S. Bond (1908-2006), was also a teller of weird tales: from 1940 to 1944, he had seven stories published in "The Unique Magazine."

Another eighteen years passed before ABC-TV broadcast another version of the story behind the story in the film The Night That Panicked America. The date was October 31, 1975. The screenplay was by Nicholas Meyer and Anthony Wilson. Mr. Meyer has his own genre credits, including entries in the Sherlock Homes, Star Trek, and James Bond franchises. He also wrote the screenplay for Time After Time (1979), which is about--of course!--H.G. Wells in his pursuit of Jack the Ripper across time.

Sherlock Holmes has also gone up against Jack the Ripper in this or that pastiche. So did Captain Kirk, believe it or not, in the Star Trek episode "Wolf in the Fold" (1967), written by Robert Bloch (1917-1994) and based, I think, on his earlier story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," originally in Weird Tales in July 1943. As for James Bond--well, there's still time.

These are not lines. They are circles.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Other Forms of H.P. Lovecraft

I have read a paper by my friend Nathaniel Wallace, who presented at the Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium in Providence, Rhode Island, in August of last year. Nate's paper is about adaptations of Lovecraft's work to musical forms. That got me thinking about other adaptations of Lovecraft's stories and poems. Until someone tells me different, I'll stick with Harold S. Farnese's musical settings for two poems by Lovecraft as the first adaptations of his work to a form other than that of verse or prose. Here are the first adaptations into various forms, in chronological order beginning with Farnese's compositions. The source is the website The H.P. Lovecraft Archive, here.

First Musical Adaptations

1932 "Mirage" and "The Elder Pharos," adapted by Harold S. Farnese from sonnets by H.P. Lovecraft from The Fungi from Yuggoth (1930 and 1931 respectively)

1967 H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft, Released Oct. 1967 (Philips Records)

"The White Ship" by George Edwards, Dave Michaels, and Tony Cavallari, based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft (1919)

Side 2, Track 1 (6:33)

1968 H.P. Lovecraft II by H.P. Lovecraft, Released Sept. 1968 (Philips Records)

"At the Mountains of Madness" by George Edwards, Dave Michaels, and Tony Cavallari, based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft (1936)

Side 2, Track 1 (4:57)

1969 Arzachel by Arzachel, Released June 1969 (Evolution Records)

"Azathoth" by Mont Cambell and Dave Stewart, based on the concept by H.P. Lovecraft (1919)

Side 1, Track 2 (4:21)

First Radio Adaptation

1945 Suspense, Nov. 1, 1945 (CBS Radio)

"The Dunwich Horror," based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft (1929)

Starring Ronald Colman as Henry Armitage

First Comic Book Adaptation

1950 The Vault of Horror, Dec. 1950/Jan. 1951 (Vol. 1, No. 16) (EC Comics)

"Fitting Punishment" by Graham Ingels and Al Feldstein, based on "In the Vault" by H.P. Lovecraft (1925)

7 pp. (pp. 9–15)

First Movie Adaptation

1963 The Haunted Palace, Released Aug. 28, 1963 (American International Pictures)

Based on "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft (1941)

Directed by Roger Corman

Screenplay by Charles Beaumont

Starring Vincent Price, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Debra Paget

87 min.

First Television Adaptations

1971 Night Gallery (NBC-TV)

Hosted by Rod Serling

"Pickman's Model," Broadcast Dec. 1, 1971, based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft (1927)

Directed by Jack Laird

Teleplay by Alvin Sapinsley

Starring Bradford Dillman and Louise Sorel

"Cool Air," Broadcast Dec. 8, 1971, based on the story by H.P. Lovecraft (1928)

Directed by John Badham

Teleplay by Jack Laird

Starring Barbara Rush and Henry Darrow

First Stage Adaptation

(1932) Fen River or The Swamp City, a one-act operetta proposed by Harold S. Farnese to H.P. Lovecraft but never written or performed.

In other words, there has never been, as far as I know, a stage play based on a work by H.P. Lovecraft. That sounds like an opportunity for an ambitious and enterprising playwright.

Thanks to Nate for leading me to this research and the writing of this series.

The blurb says: "Edgar Allan Poe's The Haunted Palace," but that was just to hook potential viewers. The movie is actually based on "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

True Detective

I guess I'm catching up on my viewing from 2015, the HBO TV series True Detective included.

Few people remember it today, but in its first incarnation, Weird Tales had a companion magazine called Detective Tales, later Real Detective Tales, which began publication in 1922. The publishers of these two magazines got into financial trouble about a year into their venture. One of the publishers, Jacob Clark Henneberger, gave up his interest in Detective Tales and held onto Weird Tales, which has had an on-and-off career in the nine decades since. Detective Tales carried on under a different publisher and became Real Detective Tales, then, in May 1931, simply Real Detective. The similarly titled True Detective, part of Bernarr Macfadden's True series of titles, began publication in 1924 and lasted until 1995. The point of all this is that the makers of the TV series True Detective seem to have intended to evoke pulp fiction and pulp imagery in their show. I think they succeeded. I would add that, despite the title, True Detective has much--maybe more--in common with weird fiction than with detective fiction.

I heard a lot about True Detective in 2015 when it first aired, and I can say after having seen it that the show is compelling. The co-stars, Woody Harrelson as Marty Hart and Matthew McConaughey as Rustin Cohle are excellent. (Note the symbolism in their names.) Matthew McConaughey is, as always, like a chameleon in portraying seemingly real people. A lot of the supporting actors are also good. I'll single out Brad Carter as Charlie Lange, the peckerwood ex-husband of the murdered woman, for his performance.

There is some clunky, inauthentic, and overly literate dialogue in True Detective, but over all, the characters speak in ways that are true to life. Rust is often sophomoric in his pseudo-philosophical musings. Hart registers proper skepticism and disgust at what he says. (I'm not sure that any actor is as good at disgust as is Woody Harrelson.) The main title sequence is very good, and the theme song is perfect for it, one of the best theme songs I've heard in a long time. The settings and scenery are great, as is the cinematography. There are some anachronisms, I think, and places where the screenwriter's politics show through. For instance, he takes unnecessary swipes at private schools, especially parochial schools, and at school choice. In reading about the show, I find that the screenwriter, Nic Pizzolatto, was raised Catholic. A lot of us were, but so what? Get over whatever it is that got your underwear in a knot and move on. To that end, the Rustin Cohle character is evidently an atheist, but at the end of the show he sees the light (literally). I imagine that was a bitter disappointment for any atheists watching and enjoying the show. Significantly, his penultimate vision--the one actually shown on screen rather than the one he describes from his wheelchair--enters the otherwise flat land of Louisiana (see Flatland below) in the form of a spiral (see The King in Yellow below) and through a circular opening in the spherical roof (see The Ring and Flatland below) of a decrepit building (see almost everything below).

I have to admit, the change in tone at the end of True Detective is a little jarring, but if being gored and hatcheted by the worst serial killer in history isn't enough to change your life, I don't know what is. The show also changes in its structure and viewpoint in later episodes. I'm not sure if those were good moves or not. There are also too many convenient developments (the owner of the green house is still living, still lucid, still available for questioning, and has an impeccable memory), too many things left hanging (who called the man who subsequently killed himself in his prison cell?), and too many missed opportunities on the part of the detectives (why didn't they talk to an anthropologist, a folklorist, and a botanist very early on in the case?), but over all, True Detective is a good show, I think, and well worth the viewing.

I said that True Detective seems to want to evoke pulp fiction and pulp imagery. Here are some possible sources of inspiration, or at least examples of creative minds arriving at the same points independently of each other:

From The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1895): Carcosa (drawn from Ambrose Bierce); the King in Yellow; the viewing of the tape in True Detective vs. the reading of the play in "The Yellow Sign" as an experience that changes people's lives or damages their sanity; the secret symbol, in True Detective, a spiral, in "The Yellow Sign," the eponymous sign.

From H.P. Lovecraft (who drew from Chambers): the decadent and inbred family; the decrepit houses and other buildings; the backwoods setting; the circle or arrangement of stones in the woods at the the site of the cultist's rites; the super-secret and far-reaching cult; the secret and profane rites of the cult; the found object (in True Detective, the videotape).

From "Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner (1974), The Blair Witch Project (1999) (both of which drew from Lovecraft), and the art of Lee Brown Coye: the found object in the videotape; sticks and stick lattices (there are sticks and lattices everywhere in True Detective; even the Cross can be seen as a stick lattice); drawings or murals on the walls of abandoned buildings; the old, decrepit, backwoods house; the murder of children; the super-secret cult.

From Twin Peaks (1990-1991): the opening sequence in which the body of a woman is found in some backwoods place; the otherwise eccentric storytelling, setting, and characters.

From The Silence of the Lambs (1991): the demented serial killer and his extensive house of horrors (if there is such a thing as the Gothic Baroque, the house and grounds of the serial killer in True Detective is it).

From The Ring (2002): the found object in the videotape; the viewing of the tape, which changes the lives of those who see it; the lone tree in the field; the repeated imagery of the circle or ring; the main title sequence in True Detective as a video montage like the contents of the tape in The Ring; the family with evil secrets; the decaying house of that family.

From Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot (1884): talk of multiple dimensions beyond our own; flatness, circles, spheres, and other geometric or topological concepts (is a spiral merely a track made by a one-dimensional point as it moves in a certain way through a two-dimensional area, or, alternatively, the shadow in a two-dimensional area of a gyre spinning in three-dimensional space?; also, mention is made in the show of a psychosphere; also, sphere is another word for the different levels of the heavens, as in "music of the spheres"); flatness itself in the topography of Louisiana.

and

From the true-to-life Black Dahlia murder case (1947): The murder scene as a tableau for artistic, aesthetic, or personal expression; the ritualization of murder and of the preparation of the murder victim's body; the unsolved nature of the case.

As for philosophizing of Matthew McConaughey's character: I'm not sure where that comes from except from the minds of those who have given up hope or who are angry at and disillusioned by life and the world. It's not especially deep or serious-minded thinking, and though I'm no philosopher, I don't know of any formal source for the character's ideas or words. I'm with Woody Harrelson's character, though: Shut the eff up and let this vehicle we're riding in be an area of silent reflection. (But then the show would be far less interesting.)

One more thing: there is talk among writers and artists of "subverting" this or that. Trying to subvert things is an attempt at rebellion or innovation, very often a childish attempt. I would just say that when people claim that such-and-such "subverts" conventional storytelling, what they are really describing is something far simpler: it's called a twist, and genre writers and pulp writers use twists all the time. If you have never seen a twist before, or if you mistake a twist for a "subverting" of conventions, you haven't read very many stories. Next, I'll say that everyone in art, literature, politics, and society should remember the words of Ecclesiastes: there is nothing new under the sun. Nic Pizzolatto created a very fine piece of art, and he richly deserves the praise he has received, but I can't say that it subverts anything and I can't say that it's like nothing before it. (I don't know that he made those claims, only that viewers and critics tend to be carried away by hyperbole.) True Detective is just a really good piece of storytelling.

Updates, July 12, 2017
1. I see from another website that one of the books read by Rust is the collected poems of Theodore Roethke. Roethke was known for his recurring imagery of stones, bones, blood, sticks, and other natural objects. One of his most famous poems begins: "Sticks in a drowse droop over sugary loam." See "Sticks" and The Blair Witch Project above. Also, Roethke worked in greenhouses when he was young. Does green house (in True Detective) = greenhouse?
2. I see from that same website that flowers, especially in connection with sex, are part of the symbolism of True Detective. I hadn't thought much about that, but I'll add that flower parts--sepals, petals, etc.--are in whorls, a word similar in meaning to spirals.
3. Along those same lines, much of the imagery and many of the themes in True Detective have to do with sex, especially transgressive sex: pedophilia, adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, transvestism, bondage, group sex, pornography, sexting, sexual snuff films (the videotape). Even the spiral symbol can be interpreted as being related to transgressive sex. It's worth noting that all of the sex acts depicted outside of marriage are in one way or another transgressive. If I remember right, only one scene, a loving scene between Hart and his wife, shows a man and a woman in the missionary position (vs. what might be seen as pagan or pre-Christian alternatives). In contrast, the sex scene between Hart's wife and Rust shows her from behind, like the body of the murder victim at the beginning of the show. (By having sex with Hart's wife, Rust cuckolds him, i.e., places horns upon him, also like the body of the murder victim. Hart by the way is another word for an adult male deer.) I take all of that to be symbolic of a supposed moral decay that would have taken place over the years covered by True Detective, 1995 to 2012. Remember, True Detective was written by a Catholic. Remember, too, that 1995 was before cell phones and the Internet really took off.
4. In the climactic (not related to sex) scene, the main characters are on the floor of a domed building with a circular opening at the top of the dome. The building can be seen as analogous to an eyeball--i.e., a hollow sphere with a hole, aperture, or pupil in it--gazing upwards into the heavens (or spheres). (No wonder Rust sees a black hole, i.e., a kind of star but also a kind of spiral, through the aperture.) If the building is an eyeball, then maybe the stick-lattice representation of the Yellow King is at the fovea, a place also occupied for an instant, perhaps, by Rust. Significantly, fovea is Latin for pit, which is another word for abyss (for the Yellow King and his cultists) and trap (for Rust, who says early in the series that he feels like he's in a trap; the spiral symbol can also be taken as a labyrinth or maze, another kind of trap). Remember, Rust continually looks at his own eyeball in a mirror.
5. There is a lot of pagan, pre-Christian, post-Christian, and satanic imagery in True Detective, but other websites have gone into all of that, so I'll leave the analysis to them.
6. Whew!

Copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

I Walked with a Zombie

Next came I Walked with a Zombie, from 1943. People of today like their mashups--an odious word. Well, I Walked with a Zombie could easily be subtitled Jane Eyre Meets the Walking Dead. It's the story of a Canadian nurse, played by Frances Dee, who goes to the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian to care for the invalid wife of a sugar plantation owner. There, for the first time, she encounters the concept--and the apparent reality--of zombie-ism.

I Walked with a Zombie was based on a newspaper feature of the same name by Cleveland journalist Inez Wallace (1888-1966). The title is sensationalistic and confessional. The story in the movie is told in the voice of the nurse, but it's controlled, intelligent, and even in tone. I imagine much of that is attributable to Curt Siodmak (1902-2000), one of the co-screenwriters. As is the case with the best horror movies, much is left to your imagination.

I wrote about zombies a few months back, pointing out at the time that the fear of zombie-ism is the fear among black people of being returned to slavery or of being made a slave forever. It is not the fear of a capitalist exploiter as critical theorists of today would have us believe. The shadow of slavery and of life under slavery is cast across I Walked with a Zombie, even in the opening minutes as the nurse rides in a wagon with a black driver. I can't say how black people of today might react to the movie, but I think that the awareness of the slave experience, of the suffering and pain of slavery, and of the fear black people had or have of slavery are conveyed in the film at a time when portrayals of any authentic black experience were rare in movies.

I Walked with a Zombie is, I think, a very effective film. The sequence in which the nurse leads the invalid wife through the sugar cane to the Voodoo gathering is very fine. Images of Darby Jones as the zombie Carrefour are extraordinary and unforgettable, surely among the most iconic in American movies. And has any singer in movies been more menacing than Sir Lancelot as he advances upon the nurse, singing his song in deadpan, casting his lyrics upon her like a curse?

I Walked with a Zombie was innovative in some ways. It is supposed to have been the first movie with a calypso song in it. Beyond that, I'm not sure that any previous movie had attempted to show the practice of Voodoo with the same evenness or humanity as this one does. I'm also not sure that any previous movie would have used the words houngan or obeah or Damballah or would have given any credence at all to Voodoo belief or practice. One of the things I like most about I Walked with a Zombie is that the black characters are treated as real human beings and not as stereotypes. There may be divisions in the movie--it is after all about white people and the real threat of zombie-ism is against a white woman--but the white and black characters interact with each other as fellow human beings, and the suffering of black people under slavery is essentially the context in which the drama plays out.

One last thing: I Walked with a Zombie was produced by Val Lewton (1904-1951), who wrote one story for Weird Tales, "The Bagheeta," published in July 1930 and the source for Lewton's film Cat People, from 1942. Lewton was of Jewish extraction, as was Curt Siodmak. Perhaps the history of suffering and slavery among Jews gave these men sympathy for black people and their similar experiences here in the New World under a system imported from the Old.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Amelia Reynolds Long (1904-1978)

Aka A.R. Long, Peter Reynolds, Patrick Laing, Adrian Reynolds, Kathleen Buddington Coxe (with Edna McHugh), Mordred Weir
Author, Poet, Editor, Museum Curator
Born November 25, 1904, Columbia, Pennsylvania
Died March 26, 1978, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Amelia Reynolds Long had a long and very fine career as an author of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and detective stories. She was one of few female science fiction authors before the Golden Age and very likely one of few in that category to be published in both Weird Tales and Astounding Science-Fiction. Her stories for "The Unique Magazine" were six in number. One was made into a movie. Many of her stories have been reprinted again and again.

Amelia Reynolds Long was born on November 25, 1904, in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and moved at age six with her family to Harrisburg. She graduated from Harrisburg Central High School in 1922. By the time she had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1931, Amelia was already a published author with stories in Weird Tales and Amazing Detective Tales to her credit. (She received her bachelor's degree in 1931 and a master's degree the following year.) Stories for Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Strange Stories, and other publications rolled out of her typewriter during the 1930s, but by the end of the decade, Amelia was ready for a change. Late in life, she explained:

I stopped writing science fiction and the weird story right around that time, because science fiction had hit the comic strips and I felt it was sort of degrading to compete with a comic strip. (1, 2)

Her first mystery novel, Behind the Evidence, was published in 1936. In all, Amelia Reynolds Long wrote nearly three dozen novels in that genre, twenty-five of which were translated into other languages. Her short stories numbered about one hundred. "The Thought Monster," from Weird Tales (1930), was made into a movie called Fiend Without a Face in 1958.

Amelia also wrote poetry and had two collections, Shreds and Patches (1974) and Counterpoint (1975), published in her lifetime. Her first poem, "Lucifer's Reply," had appeared in Kaleidograph in the early 1930s. From 1951 to 1958, Amelia was an editor of textbooks at The Stackpole Company in her hometown. Outdoor Reference Guide, from 1959, carries her byline on the cover. She was also a member of the Harrisburg Poetry Workshop of the Pennsylvania Poetry Society, and a curator at the William Penn Museum.

Amelia Reynolds Long died on March 26, 1978, in Harrisburg. She was seventy-three years old.

Stories, Article, & Letters of Amelia Reynolds Long

(Stories and one letter in the weird fiction magazines are in bold.)

"The Twin Soul" (Weird Tales, Mar. 1928)

"The Mechanical Man" (Stellar Science Fiction Series #7, 1930)

"The Thought-Monster" (Weird Tales, Mar. 1930) 

"The Magic-Maker" (Weird Tales, June 1930)

"The Mystery of the Phantom Shot" (Amazing Detective Tales, July 1930)

"The Undead" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1931)

Letter to "The Eyrie" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1931)

"Omega" (Amazing Stories, July 1932)

"Scandal in the 4th Dimension" (Astounding Stories, Feb. 1934)

"Masters of Matter" (Marvel Tales of Science and Fantasy, Mar.-Apr. 1935)

"Flapping Wings of Death" (Weird Tales, June 1935)

"A Leak in the Fountain of Youth" (Astounding Stories, Aug. 1936)

"The Album" (Weird Tales, Dec. 1936)

"Cosmic Fever" (Astounding Stories, Feb. 1937)

"Reverse Phylogeny" (Astounding Stories, June 1937)

"The Mind Master" (Astounding Stories, Dec. 1937)

"The Dimension Drug" (serial, Spaceways #1-2, 1939)

"Death by Fire" (Science Fiction, Mar. 1939)

"Time-Traveling" (letter, Startling Stories, Mar. 1939) 

"The Box from the Stars" (Strange Stories, Apr. 1939)

"Bride of the Antarctic" (as Mordred Weir, Strange Stories, June 1939)

"When the Half Gods Go--" (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1939)

"Justice in Time" (Stardust, May 1940)

"Castaways in Space" (Science Fiction, June 1940)

"Machines That Think" (article, Spaceways, Dec, 1940)

"The Man Who Vanished" (The Phantom Detective, Summer 1950)

"The Man They Couldn’t Kill" (The Phantom Detective, Fall 1950)

"Spirit Voice" (5 Detective Novels Magazine, Fall 1950)

"Hot Money!" (G-Men Detective, Winter 1951)

"Handmade Alibi" (The Phantom Detective, Spring 1951)

"Reverse Alibi" (Smashing Detective Stories, June 1951)

"Dames Ain’t Neat" (Famous Detective Stories, Aug 1951)

"The Mountain Comes to Mohammed" (Smashing Detective Stories, Sept. 1951)

"Fatal Footsteps" (Famous Detective Stories, Nov. 1951)

"Death Looks Down" (Triple Detective, Winter 1951)

"Case of the Frightened Child" (as Patrick Laing, Famous Detective Stories, Feb. 1952)

"Breathe Deep of Death" (as Patrick Laing, Smashing Detective Stories, Sept. 1952)

Further Reading

There are several sources of information on Amelia Reynolds Long on the Internet. The most comprehensive is called "A Tribute to Amelia Reynolds Long" at this URL:

http://amelialong.tripod.com/index.htm

The author, Richard Simms, has included a long list of links and has posted numerous images, including images of Amelia's rarest books.

You can also read about her in Etchings & Odysseys #10, from 1987.

Notes

(1) Quoted in "Etchings & Odysseys Profile: A Visit with Amelia Reynolds Long" by Chet Williamson in Etchings & Odysseys #10 (1987), p. 61.

(2) I'm not sure what comic strips Amelia Reynolds Long was talking about. The big three--Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. (1929), Brick Bradford (1933), and Flash Gordon (1934)--were between six and ten years old when the 1930s ended. Perhaps she was talking about science fiction comic books rather than comic strips. In any case, her remarks are sound proof that even science fiction authors--who were themselves very often on the receiving end of cultural snobbery--could also be horrible snobs. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Science fiction is a genre. Comics are a form. You cannot compare one to the other. More to the point: There is an old quote from Duke Ellington: "If it sounds good, it is good." That judgement can be applied to all things. If a science fiction story is good, it's good. It doesn't matter what form it takes. I have read science fiction comic book stories that are much better than certain science fiction prose stories. Just because a science fiction story takes the form of a comic strip or comic book doesn't mean that it's some low form of expression. We should all remember that of all the vaunted writers of Golden Age science fiction, none foresaw that ordinary people would watch the first moon landing on their television sets. V.T. Hamlin, author of the comic strip Alley Oop, did however, and drew such a sequence in 1947. At that time and for many years after, science fiction writers were busy with the Shaver Mystery, flying saucers, Dianetics, and other nonsense.

A poster for Fiend Without a Face (1958), based on a story by Amelia Reynolds Long.

This is first in a series of three articles in observance of International Women's Day, which takes place this weekend, on Sunday, March 8, 2015.
Text and captions copyright 2015, 2023 Terence E. Hanley