WEIRD WESTERNS: BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (1966)

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★☆☆☆☆ 

The first of two Weird Westerns made back-to-back by William Beaudine in which Western outlaws battle monsters. John Carradine starred as Dracula, and regretted it.

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By Max Sparber

I'm going to peek in occasionally on a subgenre of Western films, called the Weird West, which combines westerns with supernatural elements. It's a surprisingly popular genre nowadays. If a western isn't a prestige piece featuring a big budget and serious actors acting serious, it's probably a Weird Western.

Wikipedia has a small and not especially insightful entry on the Weird West, identifying it primarily as a mash-up genre. The entry quotes author G. W. Thomas, a contemporary pulp novelist who wrote an essay called "Crossing Horror: Using Horror in Other Genres," which is the source of Wikipedia's quote. "Unlike many other cross-genre tales, the weird Western uses both elements but with very little loss of distinction," Thomas wrote. "The Western setting is decidedly 'Western' and the horror elements are obviously 'horror.'"

That's true of the movie I am about to write about today, and, to be fair to Thomas, is often true of Weird Western tales. But, as you'll see, it's not entirely true, and I'm not even certain it is mostly true. Because there is another tradition in the Weird West, and it's one that feels as though it rose indigenously with the story of the west. These are the frontier equivalents of Britain folk horror tradition: Tales that borrow from cowboy ghost stories, or Indian legends, or undiscovered monsters that might inhabit the vast, rugged land that stretched west of the Mississippi. We'll get to some of those films later.

But our first film, "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula," is the sort of mash-up Thomas describes . Even though the film was lensed in 1966, it is untouched by the revisionist sensibilities that had started to dominate the American Western, and has more in common with the sorts of juvenile oaters produced by Poverty Row studios a decade or so earlier. There was no effort to recreate the historic west, nor to revisit it with fresh eyes. Instead, the story takes place in a nondescript Western town that was actually the Corriganville Movie Ranch, built in the 1940s as a movie set and looking like it. It featured stock characters, and it's first 10 minutes, featuring a drunk and a stranger on a "Stagecoach," seems an explicit nod to the great 1939 John Wayne western "Stagecoach," which also featured John Carradine.

Carradine had been playing Dracula for a while, debuting in the role in "House of Frankenstein" all the way back in 1944, and his version of the vampire made terrific use of his Mephistophelean features, stagey mannerisms, and sonorous baritone. Carradine was often a very good actor, especially in westerns, as he was part of director John Ford's stock company. He is, it must be said, not especially good here. He may have disliked the role when he was doing it, and later regretted the film — here's the actual quote: "I only regret 'Billy the Kid Versus Dracula.' Otherwise, I regret nothing."

Nothing really works in the movie. Billy the Kid is Billy the Kid in name only here — he's a reformed outlaw, and the filmmakers seem to have no actual historical understanding of the character, so he's presented as an amiable dreamboat, played by a young fellow named Chuck Courtney and looking like a Tiger Beat model. The actual Billy the Kid was jolly, loved to dance, was fluent in Spanish, and a recently discovered photo of him shows Billy in a striped sweater playing croquet. There's none of this here, and Courtney could be playing any retired gunslinger with a boyish face and indistinct but cheerful mannerisms.

Likewise, the film doesn't seem to have a clear sense of what a vampire is. Carradine does sometimes turn into a bat — albeit one of the worst movie bats I have ever seen — and cannot be seen in a mirror, but the film has him allergic to wolfsbane rather than garlic (and the wolfsbane looks like red peppers), and he frequently seems to be out and about during the daytime, although this might be the fault of director William Beaudine, who did not seem to know how to lens a day-for-night shot.

Knowing that it is not a very good film, however, does not preclude "Billy the Kid Versus Dracula" from being an enjoyable film. There is a tension created in the film, and it's fun to watch the film wrestler with it. In fact, there are two tensions, one in the text, and one on the subtext.

Firstly, this film legitimately is a mash-up. The filmmakers took a bland cowboy movie and welded in a bland vampire movie, and every seam shows, to the extent that the cowboys are genuinely bewildered to find themselves in a vampire movie and the vampire seems to have no idea why he's in a cowboy movie. The only moment when Carradine seems remotely interested in the film is when he discovers there is a pretty young girl with a cave on her property, and the entire film consists of his plan to kidnap her and put her on a fairly nice antique bed in the cave, as though he can't wait to get out of the Corriganville Movie Ranch to someplace that felt more appropriate to the vampire.

Billy the Kid is likewise a bit helpless. He is, after all, a gunslinger, but here's a guy who can't be harmed by bullets, and Billy the Kid doesn't have anything else he knows how to do. I am about to give away the film's climax, but, trust me, it won't ruin it for you when you see it: When Billy the Kid fails to kill the vampire by shooting him, he just tosses his gun at Dracula, the way frustrated villains used to do in the Superman television show. Unlike in Superman, however, this works: The gun knocks Dracula out, and Billy the Kid calmly stakes his unconscious body.

In fairness, there is no vampire legend that says they can't be knocked out by hucking a gun at them, but it's still something of a surprise. There's actually a cowboy in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" — the Texan Quincey Morris — who has a gun, and apparently the original vampire novel could have been much shorter if Quincy had just lobbed his sidearm.

But, as I mentioned, there is also tension in the subtext, and it's a pity it goes unexplored. There is a moment when John Carradine gets angry at a vaguely European housekeeper who suspects him, shouting that the immigrant needs to be talked to. But Dracula was also an immigrant, and, a generation back, so was everybody except the Native population of this country.

The story of the so-called taming of the West is actually one of an immigrant population seizing a land from the original inhabitants, and it is a mark of the film's lack of self-awareness that they didn't realize that Dracula is a perfect metaphor for that. After all, Stoker's "Dracula" is an invasion story, about a murderous immigrant coming to London to stalk and murder its population.

It might have been fascinating to parallel the story of Dracula with the story of the West, and the film seems to nod at at, as the first person we see Dracula attack is a Native American, which then prompts a war party to kill everybody in the stagecoach that carried him.

And why would the Indians distinguish between white men and vampires? Both were pestilent European invaders who murdered Indians to steal from them. In fact, the Lakota and Dakota Indians had two words for white men, one punning. The first, wasi'chu, which simply means "non-Indian." But the other word is wašin icu, and it means "taking the fat," and references white men who simply drained a place of its stolen resources, which seems appropriately vampiric.

This sometimes makes me want to take issue with the idea that the Weird Western in a mash-up genre. The West itself was a mash-up, and Western stories are often about the conflicts between two different stories. For instance, the range war film is, essentially, a mash-up between a pioneer story and a cowboy story, with the two groups competing for the same resources.

Believe it or not, it is entirely possible to tell a story about indigenous Americans in which no single white man appears, as they were here for thousands of years before Europeans made their way to these shores. This sort of film isn't made very often, but could be.

It is likewise possible to tell pioneer stories where they never meet gunslingers, cowboy stories where they never meet Indians, and so on. But the Western has always enjoyed pressing these groups, and their competing stories, together and seeing what happened, especially since what happens is usually violent conflict, and violent conflict is one of the absolute staples of narrative storytelling.

And so, yes, the Wild Western is often a mash-up film, but it's just mashing something new into a genre that already relied on mashing things up. It's no real invention to tell a story in which a monster moves west across America — that's always been the story of America. It's just that the monsters have changed.

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IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: POTATO CANDY

In February of 1903, in the Kalamazoo Gazette, there appeared an ad of unsurpassed strangeness. “TO SAVE COAL is the problem this winter,” it started, and then immediately dropped the subject, adding “but that has nothing to do with the fact that our new confection has struck the popular chord and has sprung suddenly into favor.”

The company was the German-American-owned Frielink Candy Company, and their marvelous new confection was made of potato, “but you never would know it!” they insist, a tacit admission that this was an act people would question.

They named the confection “Irish Potato Candy,” and I don’t know if they were the first to concoct such a thing, but this is the oldest reference to such a candy I could find. They also made something called “Sea Foam Chips,” and ordinarily I wouldn’t suspect a candy company would make a product using actual sea foam, but with Frielink, anything is possible.

It’s possible the Frielinks were inspired by Cubans, somehow -- a 1908 article in the Jersey Journal from New Jersey claims that there is a popular potato candy in Cuba made by mashing potatoes, combining it with pulverized sugar, adding vanilla, and pressing a walnut into the center. But, then, outside of this one article, I can find no evidence Cubans ever ate such a thing.

But similar recipes continued to appear in American newspapers from that point on. The simplest version appeared in the Cleveland Gazette in 1912, consisting of nothing more than a mashed up potato mixed with confectioner’s sugar; the combination is then rolled into small balls. An identical recipe appeared in the Grand Forks Daily Herald in the same month, suggesting that newspapers were sharing their recipes (or stealing them from each other), or that there was suddenly a national appetite for sugared potato balls.

Similarly, in 1914, a recipe for chocolate potato candies appeared both in a New Mexico newspaper and a Louisiana publication. This was the same recipe as above, but then dipped in melted chocolate and topped with a walnut. And so it went for decades, year after year bringing subtle variations of this basic recipe. In 1916, the Boston Journal suggested adding butter to the mix. In 1917, the Oregonian made the recipe into a nougat by adding nuts and fruits and making the whole thing into a loaf, which they then dipped into fondant.

None of these variations were referred to as Irish, however. They were just recipes, concocted by lunatics, to satisfy the needs of maniacs who wanted to dip potatoes into chocolate or frosting. We wouldn’t hear of Irish potato candies again until April of 1940, when the Springfield Republican published a home recipe from Glen Raven, North Carolina, shared by a woman named Maggie Lee Cooke. She offers this recipe:

IRISH POTATO CANDY

1 Irish potato, size of an egg

1 pound pulverized sugar

1 small jar peanut butter

Boil potato until done, leaving on the peeling until cooked, then peel and mash with a fork. Work in the sugar making a stiff dough. Roll thin like piecrust with a rolling pin, then spread a thin layer of peanut butter all over the crust. Roll up like a jelly roll, and cut in one-inch squares. Chill and serve.

Substantially the same recipe emerged again many years later, in 1979, in a letter in the Trenton Evening Times. The only new addition here is a teaspoon of vanilla, which is added in to the potato after it is mashed. The author of the letter was Shirley Y. Denuk Acheson of Lowell, MI, and she identifies the recipe as having been her mother’s.

For whatever reason, even though makers of the potato candy were rolling it into little balls, nobody has yet thought to make it look like a potato, although, in retrospect, doing so seems thuddingly obvious.

It wasn’t until 1983 that potato mimicry had started to become a trend in Philadelphia sweet shops. The Greensboro Record of North Carolina tracked down one such recipe, and pondered about it, with the puzzled author both saying that such candies may be popular in Ireland but that Irish people she had spoken to had never heard of such a thing. The recipe had grown more sophisticated, and was as follows:

IRISH POTATO CANDY

1 medium-sized baking potato

1 pound confectioners sugar (or more, depending on amount needed for proper consistency)

1 to 1½ cups flaked coconut (optional)

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

¼ cup cinnamon

Turn out hot baked potato pulp in a bowl. Beat with mixer until it almost resembled mashed potatoes. Mix sugar in well. (If potato isn’t hot enough to melt sugar, set the bowl in a bowl of hot water to keep it warm.)

Beat in vanilla and salt. Add coconut if desired. Or you may need to add more confectioners’ sugar, working the mixture until it reaches a consistency that will hold together when shaped like a ball.

Store mixture in jar in refrigerator for a day or two to ripen. Shape into small potato shapes, about 1-1 ½ inches long, then roll in cinnamon to depict potato skin. The blunt end of a toothpick can be pressed into potatoes to make “eyes.” Store in cool place.

It’s still with us, and sometimes still made with potatoes, although saner versions sub in coconut cream. It’s still a sort of a tradition in Philadelphia, especially around St. Paddy’s day, and an Irish-sounding company called Oh Ryan’s apparently makes a seasonal killing shipping the candy, and they can be purchased on Amazon.com, although their version lacks any potato content at all, and, the more I think about it, the odder it seems to me that there is now a candy that looks like a potato but tastes like a coconut.

See’s Candies likewise makes an Irish potato candy, and their version is chocolate, nougat, and walnuts, with a few pine nuts used to make realistic looking potato eyes, which essentially makes it just a Snickers bar. Why would you want your Snickers bar to look like a potato?

You know, I’ve come around. The Frielink Candy Company had it right at the start. If you’re going to make a candy and name it after the Irish potato, there should be some truth in advertising, and something that distinguishes it from every other candy bar on the market.

I know I’ve gone a bit sideway on this, but suddenly I very much want a candy made from potato.

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IRISH FIGHTING ARTS: WRESTLING

Whenever the fighting Irish are represented, it's with fists raised, in a traditional boxing stance, and why not? The American Irish did produce a series of world-class boxers: Your John L. Sullivans, AKA the Boston Strong Boy; your Jack Dempseys, AKA nonpareil.

But there are more ways to fight than the sweet science offers, and, by God, I mean to tell them all. Someday we'll tell the story of "Dandy" John Dolan of the notorious New York street gang the Whyos, who wore shoes with an ax blade embedded in them and put copper eye gougers on his thumbs. Someday, but not today.

Today we look at wrestling. America has gotten a bit dull on this topic, reducing the mat arts down to two: Greco-Roman wrestling, which seems to be the primary way high school and college students accidentally spread Herpes gladiatorum to each other; and catch-as-catch-can, which is the style that professional wrestling draws from, comes from England, and appropriately, surged to popularity in carnivals.

But there were a lot of folk wrestling styles, and one of the most popular, Collar-and-Elbow, came from Ireland.

Wikipedia gives a nice summary of the sport, and points out that while the style originated in Eire, it gained an early foothold in the US and was, for a long time, one of the country's most popular pastimes.

Who was great at it? George Washington was great at it -- he was a county champion, and, really, never stopped tossing people around, flinging seven volunteers in Massachusetts into the air when Washington was in charge of the Continental Army.

What was Collar-and-Elbow like? The St. Albans Advertiser from 1877 offered up the rules, such as they were:

The men shall wear knit shirts and short coat or jacket, not extending below the hips, with strong collar and elbow for grasp of the opponent, and thin rubber sandals for his feet; each man shall take hold of the collar of his opponent with his right hand while with his left he must take hold of his elbow. Both men shall stand up, breast to breast, and show fair and equal play, either man who shall break his hold with one or both hands to save himself from a fall shall forfeit the said fall; kicking the limbs strictly prohibited, and the offense forfeits the contest; the falls must be square back falls, or two hips and one shoulder, or two shoulders and one hip, to strike the ground or floor, to constitute a fall; striking upon the face, side or knees, is no fall, and nothing shall be allowed for forcing a man from such a position to his back; going down on one or both knees is fair, as long as both men keep their hold; no butting shall be allowed under any circumstance; not less than ten or more than twenty minutes rest is allowed between each wrestling bout; the match shall be first fall, best two in three or three in five, according to stipulation.

Now that we know the rules, what was the match actually like? The Advertiser gives us a sense of that as well:

The floor upon which a "collar and elbow" contest occurs must be carpeted or covered with sawdust. In opening, the wrestlers seize each other by the collar with the right hand and by the right elbow with the left hand. Then follows a series of rapid plays with the feet, which are kept in constant motion, till a "lock" is secured, then follows a desperate effort on the part of one contestant to secure and on the other to prevent a fall. There are about a dozen well-known locks, but every wrestler has a number only known to himself, and which he only calls in play in closely contested matches. The play is always lively and graceful, and demands skill rather than brute force.

I'll return to Collar-and-Elbow in future posts and introduce you to some of the legends of the sport, including a gloriously bewhiskered fellow, John McMahon, who started in the Union Army during the Civil War and ended in a circus, and would sometimes wrestle for three continuous hours.

In the meanwhile, track down some rubber sandals and a short wrestling coat. Collar-and-Elbow is an almost entirely lost Irish-American art, and these things don't revive themselves.

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IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: ONION AND DRIED CODFISH

It's always my desire to help the aspiring foodie. After all, if any trend is au courant, perhaps the au courantest is taking regional, ethnic, or peasant food and refashioning it with the techniques of fine dining. And we Irish-Americans are falling behind the rest of the world in this.

Our forebears from Erin have kept apace with the trends, and it is now possible to get exquisite renditions of rustic Irish foods. But wither thou, Hiberneo-Americans? Where are our foods?

Actually, now that I think about it, what are our foods? Irish-Americans have never stopped looking to the auld country for cues, and so whatever trend emerges in Ireland will break on these shores shortly afterward. So contemporary Irish-American pubs offer chips and curry, a trend that probably dates back no further than the 1970s in Ireland.

We do have corned beef and cabbage, yes, and that certainly is an Irish-American innovation, although less so than we might suspect. The Irish actually made corned beef, but primarily tinned it and sold it to the British navy and North American military. The amount of grazing land turned over to a consumer market abroad increased the native Irish dependence on the potato. The Irish are right when they say corned beef was not part of their diet; it was part of their starving.

It's not clear how we Irish-Americans took to corned beef during the successive waves of Irish immigration. Some say it was because the food was readily available in pubs, which then offered free meals with alcohol. Some say we absorbed it from our Jewish neighbors. And some say Irish-Americans started eating it because it was a luxury item in Ireland but widely available here, the way our Jewish neighbors took to smearing cream cheese on a bagel, which would have been prohibitively indulgent in Europe but was suddenly cheaply available in the U.S.

Whatever the case, I don't want to talk about corned beef and more than I want to talk about green beer. Instead, hither and thither, I will look at some of the foods available to Irish-Americans in the early years of our American experience, in the hopes of inspiring a foodie renaissance of specifically Irish-American meals.

Firstly, lets go all the way back to 1859, and to Macon, GA, where the Macon Weekly Telegraph offered up a vivid description of the experience of riding an omnibus in New York City -- an omnibus being a horse-drawn enclosed bus.

"I was indelibly impressed with the beauties, comforts, and conveniences of city traveling," our author states, and then immediately reveals that he's being pissy. The remainder of the article is a prolonged snit about the experience of sharing public transportation with "passengers of all classes, clean or dirty, black or white, drunk or sober, monkeys, all kinds of vegetables, beef, mutton, and pork."

He has the misfortune to share the bus with a "son of Erin" who is busily belching up his lunch, eaten at a "first-class Irish Saloon," and here the author gives us a sense of what early Irish-Americans ate. Inventive chefs, take note! The lunch consisted of:

.. three cent whiskey and a free lunch of onions and dried codfish.

I know this isn't much to go on, but Iron Chef challenges often give their contestants less.

The onion is due for a comeback anyway. I'd go ahead and declare onion to be the new kale, but I think I'd seem dated, as kale hasn't been the new kale for months. Onion is the new version of whatever has supplanted kale. Chia? Onion is the new chia. What could be better? Onions are low-calorie, low in fats and sodium, but are rich in flavors and nutrients.

For us to do this right, we have to look past our supermarket onion, which are often imported from abroad (China is the world's largest exporter) and represents only a few varieties.

No, firstly, let's look to heirloom onions -- I would experiment with a variety called New York Early, which was grown in New York in the 19th century and who knows, maybe was the onion that our gassy Irishman ate before climbing aboard the omnibus. It also is reported to have a relatively tender skin, which you're going to want, because we're going to bake and eat this onion.

How do we do that? Well, the simplest option is just to throw it in the oven and cook it for a while. In the south, they will take Vidalia onions, peel them, press some butter onto them, and cook them at 400 degrees for an hour. That could do it. But I'd like to suggest something else:

Old John McSorly, who founded the ancient bar that still bears his name in New York, used to hollow out a heel of french bread and stick a whole onion into it, and then he'd eat that. You could do that. McSorley's still offers onions -- you pile sliced raw onion onto American or cheddar cheese, dab some spectacularly spicy mustard onto it, and just eat it like that.

I don't have recommendations for how to take this decidedly working class cuisine and elevate it, but I'm sure someone can figure it out. Start with the heirloom onions and work your way out from there.

As to the dried codfish, well, you have two choices here: salted or unsalted, and the latter goes by the name stockfish.

This is a classic of North Atlantic cuisine -- so much so that the cod population has been depleted and other fish are often subbed in. There are Irish recipes for the stuff, but we want an Irish-American version here, so we can borrow liberally from anybody our 19th century Irish-American ancestors might have met -- and, this being a New York recipe, they might have lifted versions from sailors in from Norway, or Newfoundland, or Iceland, or even the Faroe Islands. Try them all and stick with whatever you like. It was Norwegian? It's Irish-American now!

As to the whiskey -- well, the combination of onion and salted cod is going to be, shall we say, flavorful, so you're going to want a bold whiskey to go with it. I'm going to go out on a limb and recommend Connemara, which is a small-batch, peated whiskey, so it will have the sheer, brute strength to compete with the other flavors.

It won't cost you three cents, but, then, if you want to do it on the cheap, just chew on an onion, munch on some fish jerky, and wash it down with Kilbeggan. I won't judge you. Heck, I'll praise your authenticity, as the meal enjoyed by our son of Erin in the above story probably wasn't the sort of thing that would earn any Michelin stars.

It's not a meal that would make me want to be on an omnibus with you, but I'm not here to explore foods that will make you popular in enclosed spaces. I'm here to discuss early Irish-American foods, and I'll let omnibus riders fend for themselves.

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JEWISH HORROR MOVIES: JERUZALEM (2915)

A few days before Rosh Hashana, I wound up watching "JeruZalem," which is set on Rosh Hashanah, and even makes a point of looking up at the night sky above Jerusalem at once point, locating the three stars that demonstrate the holiday has begun. I'm always thrilled to find a movie that I can watch on a holiday, and "JeruZalem" is just about weird enough that I might want to revisit it.

The film's pleasures aren't really in its plotting, which critics mostly shrugged off as fairly typical for a found footage horror film, and they're right. The film is a sort of mish-mash of "Cloverfield's" young people running in city and "Blair Witch's" young people running in the dark, and it's also sort of a zombie film, in that things rise from their grave and if they bite you, you become one of them.

If you like this sort of thing, well, it's not badly done here, but is hardly superlative. The CGI looks very CGI, the young people are likeable but sketched in, and the scare scenes are sometimes badly blocked and more confusing than terrifying.

However, the city these kids have found themselves trapped in is Jerusalem, and it's really Jerusalem, as Israeli directors Doron and Yoav Paz reportedly filmed a lot of it surreptitiously is the Israeli city.

Further, the cast is entirely Israeli, although, delightfully, three of them are pretending to be American, and the film is in English. So an accidental subtext of the film is that it mildly satirizes what Israelis think American Jews are like: Apparently, attractive and dopey in equal measure, addicted to social media, and possessing a real likelihood of sudden religiously inspired psychotic breakdowns. And, knowing Americans as I do, I have to say, they nailed it.

The film ends up touring the Old City in Jerusalem, which is fun, with the streets filled with Hasids of both the black hat and peyos-bedecked variety and the Breslover sort, the latter wearing their iconic white knit beanies and dancing ecstatically to music. But behind unassuming doors there are bars with brass bands playing what sound like high-speed Balkan marches while young people get drunk and make out in the bathrooms, and it's the first time I have really wanted to visit Jerusalem.

Unfortunately, this is a horror movie, so the fun stops pretty quickly as the eschaton starts. The dead spill out of their graves, grow wings, and set to gnawing on people as everybody flees to the walled city's various gates, which are guarded by the military with orders to shoot anyone who tries to break out.

The film makes about as good use of Jerusalem as "Cloverfield" did of New York, building its set pieces around the actual geography of the city but then abandoning it for a long stretch underground, which is supposed to be terrifying but ends up being a little disappointing for those of us who use horror movies as a cheap way to vacation.

The film does manage a few neat tricks of its own. There are, for example, giants that we sometimes see wandering around Jerusalem, and a mental ill p points at them and declares "nephilim!" These were, of course, the giant sons of God and human women mentioned in the book of Genesis, and where else are you going to see that?

The whole thing is recorded through, essentially, Google Glass spectacles, which has face-recognition software that works by placing little virtual rectangles around someone's mouth and eyes, which is irritating at first but has a delicious payoff when, in total darkness, it starts making those little rectangles, as though it were able to see faces we cannot and is trying to identify them.

The film is mostly set in a section of Muslim Quarter where, from the roof of a hostel, you can see a church, a temple, and a mosque, all in close proximity, which prefigures a scene in which three of the film's characters, a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim, all sit down in terror and start to pray their respective prayers in their respective languages, which feels like an image particular to this story and this setting.

It's not entirely clear why the Americans have gone to Israel in this film. Although they explain that they are Jewish, neither seem that into it, and they haven't taken the trip through any sort of established program, which many American Jews do, but instead just lit off on their own.

A lot of these programs are intended to either encourage American support of Israel or to get Jews to hook up with each other, and our heroes (Yael Grobglas and Danielle Jadelyn, specifically) fail to do either. They tour mostly Muslim and Christian sites (and one has an unexpectedly hostile reaction to the Western Wall), and then one hooks up with a Christian while the other makes out with a Muslim.

Maybe that's the real hidden satire of the film. That if you let American Jews go off on their own in Jerusalem, they will entirely fail to accomplish what we want them to accomplish. Indeed, at one point, the Christian fellow buys a white dress for one of the women, because Jews wear white on Rosh Hashanah, and she completely fails to wear it.

That's the real apocalypse. It's not zombie-like angels and Old Testament giants running rampant in the Holy City. It's American Jews gone wild, and, even in the Jewish holy city, utterly failing to be the sorts of Jews their parents want them to be. One even gets a call from her father and refuses it.
Come to think of it, this may be the most Jewish horror film ever made.

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EVERYBODY TOLD ME IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD: PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS, AN INTRODUCTION

I took a speech class once with a boy who once said the word "Pyscho-Cybernetics" and we never let him live it down. It was 12th grade, so likely 1985, and the class was taught by Ernie Gulner.

He was the sort of oddball teacher -- young, bearded and showily eccentric -- that you usually only find in films about visionary instructors who transform the lives of their young students. Gulner had a wild sense of humor and somewhat bullying mannerism, and he was about as likely as any teacher I have ever met to make a student cry, but a percentage of his students fell passionately in love with him and worked to please him.

Gulner had been my English teacher in Junior High School, and seemed to take an interest in me, which I found exhausting. Any time a teacher decided I was capable of more than I was providing, it developed into a problem. Parent-teacher conferences followed, and behind them new plans. Perhaps I might be encouraged toward better grades with the help of different goals, or different rewards, or tutors.

To Gulner's credit, he seemed to sense that this wasn't especially helpful to me, but instead overwhelming, and he backed off. He remained cordial and supportive, and I think I managed a relatively decent grade in his class, honestly earned.

For whatever reason, this speech class, years later, was far more interesting. I proved to have a thankfully effortless talent for it, bashing out speeches the night before the class that were generally seen as quite good. I also got in the habit of being uncomfortably intimate with my speeches, discussing things that pained or embarrassed me, riffing up old wounds and detailing them in front of the class.

This seemed like a bit of a trick to me -- discussing these subjects was relatively effortless to me and felt more like a performance than an act of intimacy. But it got me good grades, as it seemed to be the sort of thing Gulner liked.

Other students likewise discussed personal, intimate elements of their lives, including the poor young man I introduced at the start of this. I don't recall his name, but I remember him being a mild, kind, clean-cut young man who managed to be friendly without striking me as especially interesting. I was, nonetheless, friendly in return, in the way that boys sometimes are, in the sense that I felt license to sometimes be a little mean to him.

He had a memorable voice -- deep and strained, with elongated vowels and pinched consonants. In fact, he sounded like Kermit the Frog, who I already could do a pretty good impression of.

In one class, this young man rose to the front and produced a book. "Psycho-Cybernetics," he said, reading its name to a few astonished giggles. The name was odd, and, delivered with that voice, unexpectedly hilarious.

But the young man told of struggling when he was younger, until he father bought him the book as a gift. He had read it and it gave him tools he needed to make welcome changes in his life. It had helped him decide what sort of person he wanted to be, and then helped him to become that person. It was a book he returned to, because we all struggle now and then, and the book helped him when he struggled.

The discussion made me quietly uncomfortable. If I were to guess, I would guess that I saw something of myself in that story. I also struggled, and also looked for help in books -- I had gone through a variety of self-help books, many of them embarrassingly new age-y.

Despite my self-honestly shtick, I would never have felt comfortable standing up in front of the class and admitting that I frequently read Richard Bach's "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah," in which the author of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" tells a tale of an enlightened man who quietly works as a barnstorming pilot.

I knew there was something enormously flaky about Bach's writing, and so it was a guilty pleasure. The book comforted me somehow, perhaps in its suggestion that the world is illusory, and that the things that make the biggest demands on us -- grades, as an example -- aren't merely unimportant, they are entirely artificial. That one can make a life for oneself doing something odd and fascinating and be satisfied with that.

Psycho-Cybernetics sounded worse. It sounded like the same sort of flaky, but packaged for overachievers. Instead of revealing the world to be an illusion, it seemed like it showed us how to modify ourselves to work best in the illusion, how to be the perfect manufactured human in a frustrating and senseless construction.

And so, because the young man sounded like Kermit the Frog and I could impersonate Kermit the Frog, and because Psycho-Cybernetics is a funny pairing of words, I spent the rest of the year saying those words in a Kermit the Frog voice.

I did this in front of my friends, who thought it was hilarious, and I did it in front of the young man, who didn't seem especially bothered by my impression. I dismissed the book as just another self-help fad, albeit one with an especially weird name, and didn't bother to think about it any more.

In general, I became increasingly uncomfortable with self-help, which seemed increasingly shallow, a  con artists' version of real spiritual seeking or genuine psychotherapy.

And my interest in these sorts of books felt like it represented me as a flake, which I did not want to be. It's still how I see the self-help movement, as a way unscrupulous confidence men can shake money out of frustrated flakes, and I am not entirely unjustified in this. The world of self-help is rife with abuse, because nobody is easier to take advantage of than someone who is unhappy.

But I am also not entirely justified in this either. Whether or not the world is an illusion no longer strikes me as a useful question. Whatever this world is, I live in it. Like most of us, I don't think I am entirely successful at doing so. I think there are enormous, exhausting demands placed on us every day, and most of us are fighting a hard battle, as John McLaren is supposed to have said.

McLaren is supposed to have followed that statement up with a single suggestion: Be kind.

I was not kind to the young man who opened up to the class about his struggle, and how he had found something that helped him with it. I was also not kind to myself, wriggling with shame that I might also be fighting a battle and needed help.

Worse still, I wasn't even rejected the idea of self-help. I just turned into a self-help snob, recasting myself as a spiritual seeker rather than someone just looking for simple tips about getting along in this rough world.

And so I will begin this project with "Psycho-Cybernetics." Because that young man with the froggy voice said it helped him, and he seemed okay. Maybe it did help him to be okay. If it managed that, then who am I to be a snob about it?

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JEWISH HORROR MOVIES: THE POSSESSION (2012)

If you do a Google search for "Jewish horror film," 2012's "The Possession" is the first and most common search result. It is also the only explicitly Jewish film produced by Sam Raimi, who, like fellow horror directors J. J. Abrams, Larry Cohen, David Cronenberg, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, John Landis, Eli Roth, Rod Serling, and Stanley Kubrick, is Jewish. And like the others, his Jewishness sometimes seems to inform his filmmaking, but is almost never explicit.

There really aren't that many Jewish horror movies, for some reason, despite the number of Jewish directors who make this sort of film, and a number of Jewish actors who regularly appear in horror movies, including Peter Lorre from the classic era of horror films and more contemporary performers like Eva Green, Daniel Radcliffe, and the sadly deceased Anton Yelchin, all of whom staked out iconic roles in films of the uncanny.

I'm not quite sure why this is. Jews not only have a vivid folk heritage to draw from that is teeming with demons, monsters, and curses, but also a sizable body of supernatural and occult literature. But for whatever reason this hasn't often translated to the screen.

I suspect the main reason "The Possession" wound up having Jewish content because it claims to be based on a true story, and that true story was inextricably Jewish.

It's not, really. Instead, the story is closer to an online trend called creepypasta, which are urban legends, of a sort, that make the rounds through the internet, often without any attribution. This film is closest to a related trend that I will call "haunted eBay." I

Specifically: an object on the online auction site eBay is promoted as being haunted, which gooses its value considerably, although most also include a "this is for entertainment only" notice, perhaps fearing legal action when it turns out the burned doll they sold is just a burned doll and not a spirit of the angry departed.

In the case of the story that inspired this movie, the haunted object in question was a wine casket. According to the original listing of the item, it was bought at an estate sale in Portland in 2001 and had been the possession of a concentration camp survivor.

The family claimed the woman called the casket a "dibbuk box" and behaved superstitiously toward it. Opening it, the casket contained a few strange, seemingly totemic items, such as a wine cup and a sculpture inscribed in Hebrew.

At once, terrible things started happening: A break-in at the seller's store, the seller's mother suffering a stroke, etc. The item sold, and then resold, a series of sellers who all claimed to have had traumatic experiences upon owning the box, although I suspect this is actually an example of what I'll call "haunted object flipping," where an eBay reseller hopes to make more money off the sale of a supposedly haunted object by adding to the story.

And I love this story. I don't care whether the box was actually haunted or not. I love that there is a strange market for objects made special by urban legends, and that this has been supercharged by the web. I don't know what the movie version of that story might have been, but I would have enjoyed watching it.

However, "The Possession" instead follows the barest outline of the original story on the original eBay posting, with a child buying a Hebrew-carved box from and infirm old woman (possibly Polish, possibly Jewish, possibly a Holocaust survivor, although all three are hinted at rather than made explicit, and, even then, barely hinted at.)

The girl opens the box and all sorts of terrible things happen. And since this is called a dibbuk box, the film's screenwriters (Juliet Snowden and Stiles White) borrow a little bit from the Jewish story of the dybbuk, which is a ghost or malevolent demon that possesses people. So the little girl is possessed.

As every other critic has pointed out, a lot of this is cribbed from "The Exorcist," and not necessarily well. Even so, the film has its pleasures. Even though the dybbuk box is Jewish, the family at the center of the story is not, including the father. He's played by the gruffly handsome Jeffrey Dean Morgan, an actor I have always liked, and he limns his role with a crinkly-faced concern for his daughter.

He also does something I approve of: He immediately believes something supernatural is afoot. I do not like movies where characters insist on behaving like skeptics, because, in my experience, the average human will immediately blame any door that blows closed on a ghost. We're not just inclined to believe supernatural experiences, we actively seek them out.

While the film was produced by Raimi, whose named was featured prominently in the promotional materials, the actual director was Danish filmmaker Ole Bornedal, and he brings a sort of stately formality to the film, making it almost a Danish modernist version of a horror movie: If this was an end chair, it would be sleek, elegant, and primarily functional. It hard not to wish Raimi were the director, as the movie could have used his signature hysteria.

Nonetheless, the movie literalises the dybbuk's possession in an entertaining way: The possessed girl actually has a tiny monster living in her that occasionally makes efforts to emerge, most startlingly in a scene in which she examines the inside of her mouth with a flashlight and see two fingers dart up from the back of her throat.

The film also presumes that, because dybbuks are Jewish spirits, it will take a Jew to get rid of it, and so they bring in beatboxer and reggae singer Matisyahu as a sort of punky Hasidic exorcist. There's an entire scene set in Borough Park (presumably subbed in by a Vancouver neighborhood, as the movie was filmed there, and looks it) filled with be-shtreimeled Hasids sitting around a dimly lit, empty room, muttering darkly and unhelpfully about Jewish folklore.

There is a rebbe in the center of this room, speaking Yiddish with the grim determination of somebody turning down a bank loan. The Hasids all leap back in terror when they see the wine casket, which is contrary to my reading of historical Hasids, who would have leaped toward the thing, stretching out wine glasses and crying out it was time to makh a tikkun. Of course, the historical records I have read were written by religious Jews who did not like hasids, and so may have misrepresented them as drinks.

But the film gives us very little Hasidism, either of the drunken or the sober varieties. Instead, we are left with the non-Jewish family in the basement of a hospital, with Matisyahu circling them with a tallis over his head, shouting Deuteronomy 6:5 in Hebrew, if I caught the Hebrew right, which is mostly directions for wearing tefillin and I did not know it could be used to exercise a ghost. Spoiler: After a few hiccups, the prayer works, and the dybbuk crawls back into his box, looking like an exceptionally crabby baby.

The film has a typically ambivalent coda, which I shall not spoil, but I was left hoping that there would be something else: After all, a non-Jewish family has just discovered they live in a Jewish universe, or at least the supernatural world is Jewish. What do you do with that knowledge?

I feel like you would have to become Jewish, wouldn't you? I mean, if tefillin prayers will send demon babies into wine caskets, there must be something to Judaism, mustn't there?

Maybe that's why there are not so many Jewish horror movies. Because for the audience to enjoy them, to suspend their disbelief, they must watch a movie set in a Jewish universe, where Jewish mystical and theological conceptions work, and are correct, and that's asking a lot of a mostly non-Jewish audience.

Horror films are usually set in a world with no overarching theology, are set in a Christian world, or, in the case of folk horror movies, are set in a world in which ancient paganism is in conflict with Christianity.

This is not that. This is a story where gentiles are characters in a Jewish world, and, if there is one thing the past few years have shown, the majority is very rarely comfortable being relegated to being supporting players in any story. They can't see someone with a sign that says "black lives matter" without screaming "all lives matter," they can't see a women's only space without demanding to know why men are excluded, they can't stand to hear themselves described as cisgender, because how dare transgender people come up with a word to describe people who are not trans.

It's hard to tell a story set in the world of a minority, even when you make gentiles the main characters, as in this film. See what happens when filmmakers try to market films about the black experience to white audience members, and what happens when filmmakers cast women in lead roles in films typically dominated by men. It seems to me that it happens with horror films, even if the directors are Jewish, even if the actors are Jewish.

I'm going a little off topic here, but I wonder if this might also explain another phenomenon: That of the Jewish character who is instead presented as being Italian, as happened with half of the cast of Seinfeld and the entirety of Everybody Loves Raymond.

Perhaps the fear is that audiences can stand Jews up to a point,  especially in comic roles, but don't want to have to inhabit a Jewish universe to do so. I just did a series of articles on films set in Jewish summer camps, and in almost every case the Jewishness of the film was subsumed almost to the point of invisibility.

I don't know. Maybe it's strange to want a movie in which Jewish victims are torn to pieces by Jewish monsters. I don't think so, though. I have done some film work in my life, including playing a chinless zombie in a movie shot in Waco and a zombie with an intact chin for an internet commercial shot in Los Angeles, and it's a lot of fun. Horror movies are fun, period.

Maybe Jews should get to have that sort of fun once in a while.

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JEWISH HORROR MOVIES: WORLD WAR Z (2013)

I will soon post about "JeruZalem," which details a sort-of zombie takeover of Jerusalem, but since I am posting these stories in chronological order I will start with "World War Z," which details a sort-of zombie takeover of Jerusalem.

Despite the similar themes, the films are quite different, with the former acting as a POV of a Biblical apocalypse and the latter a sprawling epic that behaves like a epidemiological procedural concerned with a fast-spreading plague.

In fact, most of "World War Z" is not set in Israel. It's based on the popular novel by Max Brooks, a former Saturday Night Live writer and voice actor who also happens to be the son of Mel Brooks. His book borrowed from oral histories of World War II, and so takes the form of a series of oral interviews, spanning the entire globe.

The original novel is a clever book, slyly satirizing government ineptitude and isolationism, and none of that made it into the film. Produced by Brad Pitt and directed by Marc Forster, the screen adaptation instead presents a series of connected set pieces following a UN investigator, played by Pitt, as he hops the globe, trying to locate the source of the zombie infection.

This film's zombies are idiosyncratic. While the original cinematic zombies, associated with the films of George Romero, were slow-moving, these have taken the running zombies of the remake of Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" and supercharged them. The zombies run at you, bite you, and, 12 seconds later, you are likewise a zombie, and likewise running.

The results are crowds of zombies that are more like a flood or a swarm of bees than any undead creature shown on screen before, and their single-mindedness is terrifying: They will climb atop each other like ants, or leap off buildings, or smash through glass, to get at their victims, always teeth first.

Each scene with these monsters is self-contained and pretty similar. Pitt will show up, learn something new, and get out just as zombies overrun the place. But the film is well-made -- each scene feels distinctive, and some iconic, such as a moment when a zombie infections occurs on an airplane, mid-flight.

Due to problems with the filming and the fact that the movie takes great liberties with the source material, aliening fans of the book, "World War Z" was predicted to be a bust. Instead, it earned a half-billion dollars, and I don't wonder why. It's not a great film, and loses much of what was great about the novel, but it is a bracing, efficient piece of filmmaking, and effectively folds the epic scope of Brook's novel into the more contained story it tells.

I won't concern myself with most of the film's set pieces but instead limit myself to the Israel sequence. Pitt's character flies to Jerusalem, mostly out of curiosity, as the city is one of the few that has not been overrun. It turns out that the Israelis had the foresight to build massive walls around the city before the zombie infection arrived. Pitt speaks with a Mossad agent, who explains that Israel has a policy, informed by the Holocaust and later violence toward Jews, never to disregard anything as unthinkable.

The Israelis have not only built a defensive wall, but are bringing in Palestinians, explaining that every human they save is one less zombie they might fight. Their plans don't really work -- the zombies manage to climbs the walls, piling up on each other like ants, and there is a long sequence in which Pitt and an Israel soldier (Daniella Kertesz) race through the narrow Jerusalem streets.

There was a bit of a dust-up over this scene, as there often is when Israel is involved, with critics claiming the scene is pro-Israel propaganda. I make it a policy to avoid Israeli politics, so I will not comment, but I will note that in the novel, the sequence is far more complicated, with haredi Jews revolting in a miniature civil war due to Israel retracting its borders to pre-1967 size, the authorities see as being tactically more defensible, and the zombie threat eventually causes a coalition between Israelis and Palestinians. By the end of the novel, Masada-styled walled enclaves are one of the ways people have started surviving the plague of zombies.

All this is so Jewish I can barely stand it, and very little of it made it into the film. And perhaps that is fine, as the idea of warring nations unified by a supernatural threat dates back at least to a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits called "The Architects of Fear," and was also the climax of "Watchmen," and so is well-trod ground. On the other hand, everything in "World War Z" is likewise well-trod, if sped up, and at least a haredi civil war would have the benefit of novelty.

I will say this: Jerusalem is a great location for a zombie film. Those narrow streets between stone walls and stone buildings are perfect for fleeing the dead. There's even a moment in "JeruZalem" when the characters race down the Via Dolorosa, which is supposed to be the path that Jesus took on his way to his crucifixion, and it goes unmentioned, which seems like a waste.

While we're at if, if horror movies are going to make use of actual Israeli locations, let's see one based on Brooks' suggestion at the end of "World War Z." Let's retell the story of Masada, on location at the desert fortress, with zombies taking the place of Romans.

I mean, it's perfect. Set it during the swearing-in ceremony of the Israeli Defense Force, which used to be done at Masada, and, for the sake of our film, will be again, and ends with the declaration that "Masada shall not fall again."

So we have hundreds of newly trained IDF soldiers, man and woman alike, all in their late teens, and trained in the use of weapons. Trap them in Masada, surround them with zombies, and see what happens.

Hollywood, and Max Brooks: call me.

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JEWISH HORROR MOVIES: THE UNBORN (2009)

Generally speaking, I like writer/director David S. Goyer. Specifically speaking, I like the deco paranoid supernatural noir fantasy "Dark City" that he cowrote, am a fan of his work on the "Blade" films, and enjoy his work on the Christopher Nolan Batman movies. He also wrote the recent Superman movies, but I won't hold that against him, as I suspect they were more a product of director Zack Snyder than Goyer.

Goyer has a punky, pulpy sensibility in his best work, perhaps best exemplified by the opening scene to the first "Blade" movie, in which vampires dance at a rave in a slaughterhouse, culminating with blood spouting from the building's sprinkler system.

It was a scene with real verve, and a lot of Goyer's best work seems pitched at near-hysteria, with everything just a little too broad and noisy to be tasteful, which is just how I like things. Tasteful can be awfully dull; give me something brash enough to be tasteless in a fun way.

Unfortunately, "The Unborn" is not that. This is a film about possession, and, to Goyer's credit, he rarely seems to borrow from "The Exorcist," but instead invents his own cinematic representations of intrusive evil.

Goyer is Jewish, and, theoretically, this is a film about a dybbuk. There's even a Jewish book in the film, Sefer Ha-Marot, The Book of Mirrors, that is filled with woodcuts of terrifying exorcisms.

It's all invented, naturally. There never was such a book, and, if the woodcuts are real, they are likely not Jewish. The film's dybbuk is a cinematic invention, somehow both very ancient and called into existence by the Holocaust, which I will discuss in a moment. The dybbuk represents itself through floods of potato bugs, for some reason, as well as dogs with upside down heads, and both are legitimately unnerving.

The dybbuk also appears as a hollow-eyed boy who looks a bit like a very mean Eddie Munster, and he is less unnerving, in part because these sorts of children show up in this sort of film with great frequency. Years ago, I met Kyra Schon, who played the little girl in "Night of the Living Dead," perhaps the first hollow-eyed child in contemporary horror. I asked her what she thought about all the ghoulish children in movies nowadays and she told me she sees them and thinks, well, there I am again.

There are three parts to the film: The haunting, which I have described, the exorcism, which is pretty chaotic and mostly consists of Gary Oldman as a rabbi and Idris Elba as an Episcopal Priest shouting a lot, and the backstory.

As I mentioned, the backstory is set during the Holocaust, in Auschwitz, no less. We learn of a Nazi doctor who had a special affinity for doing medical experiments on twins, and the film's dybbuk used this as the opportunity to inhabit the body of a dead twin, and has been chasing twins in the family line ever since.

This is inspired by a true story, and it is a terrible one. The Nazi in question was Josef Mengele, who earned the nickname the Angel of Death, and indeed performed hideous medical experiments in Auschwitz, often paying special attention to twins. In fact, an experiment shown in the film, in which the Nazi doctor injects the eyes of twins to see if they will change color, is something Mengele actually did.

And here's where things get tricky. I am not opposed to using the Holocaust as a setting for horror, per se. It's a real-world horror, and many Nazis were obsessed with the occult, and I am not someone who thinks horror is a degraded genre that should keep its grubby hands off the really serious stuff.

Instead, I think horror exists in a tremendous metaphoric space with is well-suited to exploring difficult ideas or historic events, such as the Holocaust. In fact, the Hellboy comics regularly makes use of Nazi imagery, including a murderous German who, in the film version, was hideously disfigured due to obsessive self-surgery, and exists as a sort of monstrous metaphor for the Holocaust.

I think this works quite well, and I trust Hellboy creator Mike Mignola's control of his material enough that, should he ever directly tackle the Holocaust, I think he would have a lot to say about the subject.

Goyer, and "The Unborn," doesn't, alas. The Holocaust flashback doesn't really inform the film so much as it provides a suitably horrific backstory. The film does not tackle the big questions of genocide, nor the smaller questions of how, under the right circumstances, a certain percentage of men will become monsters. Mengele and his surgical experiments are vastly more terrifying than a pale child who likes big ants, but he seems somehow generic in this film, in part because he's unnamed, and in part because his purpose is simply to create the circumstances of the dybbuk.

The story barely even exists in a Jewish context. While the film's lead character is Jewish (played by Cuban-American actress Odette Annable, who nonetheless is passably Jewish), and her father is played by an actual Jewish actor, James Remar, they never reference their Jewishness and it is possible the protagonist doesn't know about it until she first meets her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Gary Oldman plays a rabbi, but his presence is relatively small and he joins forces with a priest because they mutually agree that the dybbuk precedes organized religion.

So the lead character is not especially Jewish and the dybbuk predates Judaism, and this contributes to the Holocaust scenes feeling tacked on. I suppose there might be something interesting in taking the world of the Holocaust, with its occult murderers and Jewish victims, and seeing how it plays out in the secular world, where nobody much thinks about the occult nor Judaism. Such a story could ask what the meaning of the Holocaust is in this world, which is so far removed from the specific circumstances, and could ask if this sort of evil could duplicate itself without those specifics.

But I'm writing a different film than "The Unborn," which does not concern itself with those sorts of questions, and so I find its use of the Holocaust to be tasteless, and not in the way I like Goyer to be tasteless.

I will note something I found interesting in the film, however. One of the woodcuts in the Book of Mirrors shows a possessed woman with an arm reaching out of his mouth, and this lone image seems to have inspired the entirety of "The Possession," which returns to variations of that image again and again.

I tracked down the original source of the woodcut: It's from a 1598 book, and shows a priest exorcising a woman. I don't know what to say about the fact that these two mainstream Jewish horror movies couldn't seem to make use of actual Jewish imagery to tell their stories, but it's disappointing.

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