Name the one horror prop you would most want to own.

Jeff O’Brien

The electrical gear from the doctor’s lab in Frankenstein…

Eric - Bloody Good Horror

One of those replica Nightmare on Elm St. gloves. I’ve got one of the cheap New Line plastic ones. And although they do have their own full metal version (seems like a possible liability issue to me) the real mamas are at NightmareGloves.com. Now THAT could kill a man. Which, ultimately, is probably why I shouldn’t have one :)

Sean - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

The Box, from Hellraiser. I know, I’m predictable.

Mark - Exclamation Mark’s SciFi/Horror Review

I’m envious of Bob Burns because he possesses the silver-headed wolf cane that Lon Chaney, Jr used to club Bela Lugosi to death in 1941’s The Wolf Man. By the way, it turns out the wolf head isn’t really silver at all, but vulcanized rubber.

Rony

Initially I thought of the wheelchair from The Changling but that would freak me out too much so I’m gonna say any severed zombie head from a Romero movie. They always look awesome!

Red Hawk - Happy Horror

My horror tastes run pretty far, so there are several, but if I had to narrow it down, probably the Blade puppet from the Puppet Master series. That guy was always my favorite in the movies. The good news is, there are Puppet Master action figures out… the bad news is, they’re probably long off the market by now.

Incidentally, a friend of mine would most likely say the puzzle box from Hellraiser. She said she’d love to show the movie to someone, then just bring the box out in the middle and start fiddling with it, play with their minds a little bit.

Unkle Lancifer - Kindertrauma

It is impossible for me to decide between an authentic Crawford Academy scarf from HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME and that giant slab of Stonehenge featured in HALLOWEEN 3 SEASON OF THE WITCH.

T. Van - Tolerated Vandalism

I’d like to take home 2 items from Shaun of the Dead. Neither are really horror related but I’d still like to have the jukebox from the Winchester and the vinyl copy of Second Coming by the Stone Roses. The Stone Roses are one of my favourite bands and I thought it was awesome when they snuck that reference into the film. Why would I want the jukebox? It plays Queen randomly. That’s good enough for me.

Nathan - MicroHorror

I want a Lemarchand box, of course. Doesn’t everyone? I’d settle for a nice replica, though. It’s cheaper that way, and much safer.

Bill - Pulp 2.0

The whirling electrical devices from FRANKENSTEIN.

Curt - Groovy Age of Horror

I think it would be super-cool to own the black gloves from a classic Argento giallo–or maybe the sculpture from TENEBRAE.

Arbogast on Film

It’s at times like this when I part company with a great many members of the horror rank and file. I’m not really a collector and don’t desire to own pieces of my favorite movies. I’m glad Bob Burns has the articulated King Kong skeleton and The Time Machine and all those great movie props - I’m glad there’s a place for them, that they’re safe and protected from oblivion (however much they may be rotting from time and the elements).

If I were to be given something from a horror movie, something to cherish, I think it would have to be small and possibly even insignificant, like the sock that Dwight Frye stops to pull up in FRANKENSTEIN or Bela Lugosi’s DRACULA ring or Leatherface’s necktie or the St. Christopher’s medal from THE EXORCIST.

Another side of me (the one who laughs at me from the mirror) would kill for one of Burt Schoenberg’s creepy family portraits from Corman’s HOUSE OF USHER. (Someone’s got those goddamn things and they will turn up some day, believe you me.) And finally, if the fang that Barbara Shelley swallowed during the filming of DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS were to make its way to me, I would wear it around my neck until my dying day.

JA - My New Plaid Pants

Norman Bates’ stuffed owl (no that isn’t a euphemism). The one that lords over his head when he spies on Janet Leigh in the shower. I’ve always wanted a taxidermy collection of my own, and that’d be its crown jewel.

Louis - Damaged 2.0

Tiffany Shepis.

Retropoliltan - Tales To Astonish

Part of me would really like to own the Lament Configuration/Lemarchand Box from Hellraiser, since I’ve always really admired the design and overall look of it; on the other hand, I’ve never really been all that involved with that series, so it would be mostly a matter of aesthetics. Also, having a door to a dimension of endless pain is great for parties.

Really, though, I’ve always wanted lab props from the original Frankenstein. I’m a Universal Monster nut, and while my heart belongs to Wolf-Man, that silver-topped cane doesn’t hold a candle to panels with lots and lots of switches and sparks and stuff. I swear, when I get my hands on some mad scientist props, my kitchen will have the greatest lightswitch of all time.

Michael - The Harrow

The crucifix from THE EXORCIST. I know that there are a few of them in the film, but, you know… THAT crucifix. If only for the theatrics, of course.

Dave - Rue Morgue’s The Abbatoir

Pin! If I could have any horror prop, it would be the creepier-than-creepy life-sized anatomy doll Pin, from the Canadian horror film of the same name. He could sit in a chair at my place and greet guests, ensure me a spot in the car-pool lane and give me all sorts of great life advice. “Why yes, Pin, you’re right, The Horror Blog is cutting into our alone time, maybe I should have very stern talk with Steve…”

Vomit fangs, vague threats and the objectification of women. Only four more Roundtables to go, and I miss it already. Thanks to all the collect gnomes who participated in this orgy of consumerism, and if you have similiar desires, please feel free to jot them down in the comments below.

Name one of your favourite horror movies from when you were a child, and describe how you felt about it then and how you feel about it now.

Jeff O’Brien

The EXORCIST. I recall it played on TV largely uncut and it scared the Hell out of me. To this day it makes me uncomfortable. Demonic possession movies as a rule give me the heebie-jeebies in a way that zombie, slasher flicks etc, never will. I’ve since seen the cut scenes such as the spider-walk and don’t really wish to see it again… the mark of a REALLY scary film…

Eric - Bloody Good Horror

I’ve had many disappointments as an adult, but the one that will forever and always hold up for me is “Monster Squad”. When that finally got a DVD release last summer I hadn’t seen it in YEARS, and I was freaking giddy by the time it was over. Many of my childhood favorites ended up being pretty bad, but I’ll at least have that one.

Rony

The one movie that pops in my head right away is “Silent night, deadly night”(not sure which number it was). I was so afraid of my toys coming to life and trying to kill me that I put them all in a box away from my bed for like a week. I actually saw a few of the movies recently and they made me laugh so hard.Those movies are so awesome. Deadly Santa will scare any kid.

Corey - Evil On Two Legs

I saw my first horror film on 10/25/82, my 7th birthday. The film was Halloween, and I don’t think I slept more than an hour total over the next week until the morning of November 1st, when I was convinced that Michael Myers would go into hiding… at least until next October. For the next five years, until I saw it again, I was convinced there was a scene with Laurie Strode hiding from Michael inside a metal trash can in an alley, occasionally lifting the lid to see if he was there (a la Delicatessen or, I suppose, Oscar the Grouch).

When I was twelve or so I saw Witchboard on HBO at midnight while I was staying home alone. I spent the whole night in the living room with every light in the house on. For years it ranked as one of my scariest movies… at least until last year when it was released on DVD and I saw it again. It’s a fun movie, but horribly dated and campy — hardly the nightmare inducing terror-fest I remember.

Witchboard may be lame in retrospect… but Halloween scares me to this day and remains my favorite film of all time.

Sean - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

Pardon my French, but I was an enormous pussy when it came to horror movies as a kid. At a sleepover when my friends were watching Poltergeist 2 and I Come in Peace, I pretended to be asleep. The video for “Thriller” made me cry. I did however love “monster movies”–the old Universal horror cycle (though I kind of liked reading about them more than watching them), Godzilla movies, The Blob, Jaws: The Revenge, The Monster Squad, the Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera and so on. The big difference between me then and me now is that then I watched these kinds of movies because monsters are cool, not to be scared by them. While they form part of my mental landscape now, they’re not movies I return to. Well, except for The Monster Squad.

Arbogast on Film

Herbert Leder’s THE FROZEN DEAD did a job on me back in the day because it was, to my 8 or 9 year old mind, unclassifiable. There weren’t any vampires or werewolves or monsters of any kind, I didn’t know what Nazis were, I didn’t know that secret Nazi experiments were a bad thing and the most disturbing, haunting, bother-you-in-your-bed-later creature is the film’s most pitiable victim, who winds up shaved bald and decapitated and living this sort of non-existence as a cyanotic lab experiment. Another movie, made later but which I saw around the same time, was a TV movie called THE SCREAMING WOMAN, directed by Jack Smight, in which Olivia de Havilland hears the voice of some woman calling for help in the night. It’s interesting to me now that both of these films, which absolutely terrified me as a kid, localized horror with the victims and not with the evil-doers. You could make a friend of a monster, even a ravening beast like Oliver Reed in CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF could be a projection of the force of nature you wish you could be, but some poor soul rasping for their life from a shallow grave or, in the case of THE FROZEN DEAD, pleading to be killed from within a glass jar, is irreconcilable. It is what it is… scary!

I haven’t seen THE FROZEN DEAD since I was a kid, although that’s not a case of me avoiding it so much as it’s just legitimately unavailable. I’d love to see it again. I’m betting it would creep me out just as much.

JA - My New Plaid Pants

There’s a moment in The Amityville Horror (the original, not the Ryan Reynolds be-abbed edition) where a pair of demonish eyes glare in a window from outside that gave me nightmares for weeks when I was a kid. I rewatched the movie a couple of years ago and it looks like a pair of red Christmas tree bulbs that the Lutzes forgot to take down.

Uncle Lancifer - Kindertrauma

When I was little my family moved from the East Coast to California for a couple of years. This was a pretty exciting time for us because California seemed very exotic and different. At some point a television movie called WHERE HAVE ALL THE PEOPLE GONE? was filmed at the grocery store near our house and this became a favorite movie of mine and my siblings. The movie was about solar flares that kill everybody on the planet except a family that happened to be in a cave at the time of the event. The cool thing was that the dead simply turned into piles of ashes inside their clothes. This concept was not so much horrifying to me, but a fantasy come true. Sick as it sounds, I spent a lot of time daydreaming about being the last person alive on the planet and therefore, the rightful owner of everything. A couple years back I got to see the movie again while visiting my parents (my brother had somehow found it on DVD). The film was a bit less convincing then I remembered it and far less exciting, but the thing that really blew my mind was seeing our old neighborhood again circa 1974 which appeared almost like a wild west town with its dirt roads and ochre fields. It was like seeing a world that simply does not exist anymore and damn did it make me feel old as hell.

Nathan - MicroHorror

Thanks to the new DVD release, I was recently able to rewatch “The Monster Squad,” which I hadn’t seen in about fifteen years or more, but watched several times and enjoyed as a youngster. To my pleasant surprise, it held up well. The special effects are dated, and the story has some holes, but the acting is good and the dialogue is well written. The Stan Winston monster designs, especially the Gillman, came as a particular treat. I was actually unaware for a long time that the movie had such a big cult following, and thought I was the only person who had seen it, but I was glad to be proven wrong.

I do, however, regret one thought that occurred to me while watching the DVD. It was during a scene with the swirling portal, and my jaded twenty-first-century eyes saw little but the primitive green-screen compositing. Before I realized what I was doing, I found myself
thinking, “They should really go back and fix that with CGI.” You’ll be pleased to hear that I immediately slapped myself, because I know damn well that if you go back to fix some clumsy compositing, you’re going to start “fixing” other things as well, and before you know it
Greedo is shooting first. We don’t need that.

Kimberly - Cinebeats

I recently watched and reviewed the 1965 Hammer thriller The Nanny, which I hadn’t seen in its entirety since I was a kid. The movie terrified me when I first saw it at around age 11 or 12 on television and somehow I was sure that Bette Davis (who plays the nasty nanny) was shown drowning a little girl in the movie. My memory of the film was completely wrong. Davis never kills a child in the movie but she tries to. I was so frightened by Davis’ character when I was a kid that I had managed to make her into an even bigger monster in my imagination. It’s still a chilling movie but very different from the one I had created in my imagination. I can appreciate the film much more on its own terms now that I’m an adult since a lot of the subtle story elements don’t go over my head anymore.

Tim - Mondo Schlocko

The one that comes to mind is TOURIST TRAP. I was probably in the first grade when I saw that on television and all I could remember was a head rolling on the ground and something about people being turned into mannequins. I didn’t even know what the title of the movie was.

Decades later when it was released on DVD I rented it and sat down to watch it and to my amazement I begun to see that the film playing on my DVD player was in fact the film I barely remembered as a kid.

It’s funny because the first time around I didn’t realize that Chuck Connors had telekinesis and that the mannequins could move. Seeing it as a kid was definitely creepier, but watching it decades later was far more special when I found out what the whole plot was about.

This roundtable was one of my favourites from a few years back, and it still holds up fairly well today. Thanks to all of this week’s participants for their thoughtful responses, and please consider leaving your own answer to this week’s query in the comments below.

Share a favourite horror quote.

Jeff O’Brien

“We’re done, man! Game Over!”

Cpl Hicks, ALIENS.

Sean - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

For my money there’s no beating “We have such sights to show you…” as said by Pinhead in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. Sums up the whole damn genre. Also, one time a girl said it to me before sexytime, which was fucking awesome.

B-Sol - Vault of Horror

“For one who has not lived even a single lifetime, you are a wise man, Van Helsing.”

–Dracula (1931)

David Z. - Tomb It May Concern

Oh that is a fun one…

I’ll take Tenebre and the classic “Pervert…filthy slimy pervert.” Of course the character saying that is running around and killing people while the horrid pervert is a pretty lesbian. I’d take lesbians over serial murderers anyday there fella.

Corey - Evil On Two Legs

“I dunno what the hell’s in there, but it’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.”

The Thing (1982)

Uncle Lancifer - Kindertrauma

“As a matter of fact, it was…” Dr. Loomis’s response to Laurie Strode’s question of whether “the shape” was indeed “the boogeyman” in the final scene of HALLOWEEN comes to mind first. In fact, most of John Carpenter’s films are highly quotable and he’s really not given enough credit as a writer of crisp, to the point and still hauntingly lyrical dialogue. His collaborations with Debra Hill especially shine. So, assuming I’m not the only one to jump on that brilliant tone confirming remark by the good doctor, let me throw in for good measure, a little last minute advice from smokey voiced DJ Stevie Wayne (ADRIENNE BARBEAU) from THE FOG, which is a wonderful tribute to THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD’s “Keep watching the skies!”

“I don’t know what happened to Antonio Bay tonight. Something came out of the fog and tried to destroy us. In one moment, it vanished. But if this has been anything but a nightmare, and if we don’t wake up to find ourselves safe in our beds, it could come again. To the ships at sea who can hear my voice, look across the water, into the darkness. Look for the fog.”

Kevin

“We must destroy the living…”

Garden of the Dead.

JA - My New Plaid Pants

I could list every single line spoken by Piper Laurie in Carrie here (”Red. I might’ve known it would be red.”; “I can see your dirty pillows.”), but I’ll stick with the mother (hardy har) of all of them:

“I should’ve killed myself when he put it in me. After the first time, before we were married, Ralph promised never again. He promised, and I believed him. But sin never dies. Sin never dies. At first, it was all right. We lived sinlessly. We slept in the same bed, but we never did it. And then, that night, I saw him looking down at me that way. We got down on our knees to pray for strength. I smelled the whiskey on his breath. Then he took me. He took me, with the stink of filthy roadhouse whiskey on his breath, and I liked it. I liked it! With all that dirty touching of his hands all over me. I should’ve given you to God when you were born, but I was weak and backsliding, and now the devil has come home. We’ll pray.”

Eric - Bloody Good Horror

Mine’s slightly obscure. But more or less the entirety of “Sleepaway Camp 2″. With the exception of a few slightly offensive ones, my favorite is when the (one) black camper is readying a practical joke to pull on Angela, and as he’s painting red stripes on his hockey mask he says, “Angela will dookie in her pants!”. There is something magical about both his cadence, and the way that he emphasizes “dookie”, that gets me every time.

Nathan - MicroHorror

Skeet Ulrich as Billy Loomis, “Scream” (1996): “Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative.”

Retropoliltan - Tales To Astonish

There are so many great lines in horror that it would take me weeks or months to sift through them all to find just the right one for this occasion. Instead, I’ll offer the very first one to come to mind, from the 1983’s atrocious horror-comedy “Hysterical”:

“The library is closed. All white people must leave.”

Tim - Mondo Schlocko

I still get a kick out of the “Wolfman has nards!” line from MONSTER SQUAD. No exactly thrilling but it has stuck with me whenever I think of watching movies during my years as a youngin’.

Kimberly - Cinebeats

My thoughts went straight to horror film quotes so I hope you weren’t asking for literary quotes or general quotes about horror. A couple of favorites that popped into my head were:

“It’s a dog eat dog world, and from where I sit, there just ain’t enough damn dogs!” - Drayton Sawyer (Jim Siedow) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

“I find a coffin much more comfortable than a bed” - Dr. Lorenz (Bela Lugosi) in the Corpse Vanishes (1942)

“Monster? We’re British, you know.” - Dr. Wells (Peter Cushing) in Horror Express (1973) in response to the question: “But what if one of you is the monster?”

Arbogast on Film

Does it get any better than “We belong dead”?

Well, does it? Let us know in the comments below. Thanks once again to all of this week’s participants, and until next week, keep your balls in the air, Reg. Keep your balls in the air.

Name one of your favourite pieces of writing on the horror genre.

T Van - Tolerated Vandalism

I think my Danse Macabre by Stephen King was a really great book. I also really enjoyed Adam Rockoff’s recent book on the slasher genre, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978 to 1986. I highly recommend the book over the accompanying documentary that was made. Rockoff’s book is not particularly thought provoking but it is engaging. It certainly brought back a lot of memories of long forgotten movies. It’s clear that Rockoff is a fan of the genre and that shines through in the book.

Mark - Exclamation Mark’s SciFi/Horror Review

Hands down, Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes (The Mutant Melding of Two Volumes of Classic Interviews) by Tom Weaver. For old sci-fi/horror fans like me this is hard to beat. Great interviews with the actors, actresses, directors, producers, and writers involved in the making of the wonderful B films of yesteryear, and written by a man with an obvious passion for the genre. Good stuff.

Sean - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

Oh, writing ON the horror genre? I thought I’d get to say “Clive Barker’s Books of Blood” and be done with it. Oh well, in that case I’ll say it’s a toss-up between Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror and H.P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature. Combine the two and you’ve basically got my own POV on the genre.

Donald May, Jr. - Synapse

My all-time favorite piece of writing about horror/film is Stephen King’s DANSE MACABRE. I wish he’d do an update!

JA - My New Plaid Pants

There was a good long stretch of time in college when I always had my stolen-from-the-library copy of Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol Clover on me. The sexual politics of the slasher film proved endlessly fascinating to me. Still does, although it’s all become so self-aware these days (thanks to writing like Clover’s) that it’s become tougher to find movies so raw, stripped down to nothing but id, as we used to get. Every so often a movie like Hostel or Haute Tension slips through the cracks though, and I feel myself mentally flipping through Chainsaws again.

Uncle Lancifer - Kindertrauma

Even though it may be a way too obvious answer, I have to go with Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. When I read it as a teenager it really opened up my eyes, not only to the larger history of horror but also to the many possibilities of interpretation. Suddenly the world that I loved didn’t begin and end in Haddonfield, Illinois. I have just recently re-read the book and although I don’t agree with everything he says (particularly his criticism of Kolchak:The Night Stalker! ), I still found it fascinating and its conversational style to be the literary equivalent to sitting around with an old friend and discussing the genre over many beers.

Corey - Evil On Two Legs

The definitive book on my chosen little corner of the horror-verse is Adam Rockoff’s Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978 to 1986. This is the first book I would recommend to anyone interested in horror films… however, after careful consideration, it is not my favorite piece of writing on the horror genre. Somewhat embarrassingly, that honor goes to Peter Bracke’s Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday The 13th. While not as ambitious, academic or as relevant to the horror genre as a whole as Rockoff’s work, my love of Jason Voorhees and his cinematic exploits cannot be denied.

Curt - Groovy Age of Horror

H. P. Lovecraft’s SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE. It’s not just a survey of what he considers the finest horror through the ages; he also articulates a vision of what horror should be that has influenced me a great deal.

Jeff O’Brien

Favorite work of fiction is a tie: GONE SOUTH by Robert R McCammon and the brilliant FADE by Robert Cormier. Non fiction has to be DANSE MADABRE by Stephen King

Nathan - MicroHorror

As a horror editor, I have one and only one book to recommend to anybody who has any aspirations towards writing horror. If you’re a horror writer, it’s likely that you already own a copy, but if not, you have no excuse. Go directly to Amazon or your favorite bookseller and purchase a copy of _On Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers Association_, edited by Mort Castle.

Inside this unassuming tome you will find dozens of essays by experienced horror writers, including some of the biggest and most respected names in the business: Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Landsdale and Jack Ketchum all contribute. You’ll learn the history of horror fiction. You’ll learn the tropes and clichés of the genre, and how to use, avoid and subvert them. You’ll learn what editors want and don’t want. You’ll even learn about writing horror for other media, including film, comics and video games.

Buy this book, study it, and send me submissions.

Arbogast on Film

Good Lord, how did it get to be Friday already?

I don’t know if it’s in fact my favorite piece of genre writing but the first thing this question brought to mind was Jack Kerouac’s essay on NOSFERATU, published originally in The New Yorker Film Society Notes in 1960 but made more widely accessible in the collection of critical writings FOCUS ON: THE HORROR FILM (Prentice-Hall, 1972). The King of the Road and the Lord of the Undead in one 3-page article. Koo-Koo-Crazy-cool!

Kerouac has a folksy, unfussy style whose occasional awkwardness works in his favor to make the piece read like a snatch of folk testimony:

Nosferatu is an evil name suggesting the red letters of hell — the sinister pieces of it like “fer” and “eratu” and “nos” have a red and heinous quality like the picture itself (which throbs with gloom), a masterpiece of nightmare horror photographed fantastically well in the old grainy tones of brown-and-black-and-white.

There was always something childlike about Kerouac’s bop prosdy, informed as it was by the Old World superstitions he got from his mother, and that naive quality is very much in evidence here as he refers to Graf Orlock as a “throat-ogre” who rises up out of his coffin “like a plank.” That is such a perfect description of how Orlock comes to life each night that I’ve never forgotten it. I love how Kerouac obsesses about minor things about the movie, like how Orlock’s coach horses are hooded and about the tile floors of his castle:

The castle has tile floors - somehow there’s more evil in those tile floors than in the dripping dust of later Bela Lugosi castle where women with spiders on their shoulders dragged dead muslin gowns across the stone.

Wouldn’t it be great if more film bloggers aspired to this kind of poetry?

Retropoliltan - Tales To Astonish

Even though I spend tons of time in the horror genre, I actually can’t remember all that much that I’ve read ABOUT the horror genre, aside from the occasional histories and short articles; even then, those are more often than not just a collection of interesting facts rather than anything particularly in-depth or insightful. I’ll probably think of a hundred better examples immediately after I send this in, but the foremost piece of writing that I’ve read on the genre itself was Stephen King’s ‘Danse Macabre,’ and I read that a loooong, long time ago. I won’t be surprised if I’m not the only person with this answer.

Now don’t you feel silly, Retropolitian? Thanks to all the eggheads who contributed to this week’s Roundtable. Why not reward their scholarly pursuits by visiting their respective sites? And if you have anything you’d like to recommend, please do so in the comments below.

Apologies to Kindertrauma and Evil On Two Legs for the mix-up. Consider this your initiation. Help me make it up to them by checking out both their wonderful sites.

One of the only things I liked about living in Ottawa was the strong film community. Every other week there seemed to be a film festival or independent screenings of some sort. Strangely, one of my favourite venues was the Ottawa Public Library. It was in that small basement theatre that I experienced some of my most rewarding cinematic experiences.

One of those occurances was a screening of The Goblin Man of Norway, with director Howard Byrackk in attendance, and shown as part of a tribute to The World Film Society, held in cooperation with The Norwegian Film Committee. I’m usually not one for documentaries, but an early experience with The Legend of Boggy Creek ingrained in me a love for all things cryptozoological and pseudo-cryptozoological.

The Goblin Man of Norway revolves around the discovery of technology dating before recorded history, and the attempt by some scholars to link this artifact to creatures of Myth. As the film progresses and the study of the creature turns from the theoretical to the practical, this initial excitement is tempered by, and eventually replaced in whole with barely suspressed fear and paranoia. As one participant extols, “It reinforces the notion that what has been dismissed as mere story may indeed be a record of the actual.” Taken at face value, this idea of cyclic history could be considered to be a positive step toward understanding our own nature through the uncovering of the distant past. However, upon further reflection such considerations may be seen as a double-edged sword. Some legends may be better off buried and half-remembered.

While I had heard good things about Byrackk’s previous outings, including his critically acclaimed film The Lost Are Now Found, I was unprepared for a documentary with this kind of cold beauty. The Goblin Man of Norway is an eerie example of the form, with its strange combination of Errol Morris-style reenactments, Norse mythology, and imagery that evokes John Carpenter’s The Thing. The creature itself is unnerving, not only in its appearance but in the implications suggested by its very existence.

The Q+A afterwards was one of the most intriguing, yet volatile, I’ve ever been witness to. Director Howard Byrackk was genial and engaging, even when taking exception to accusations that he was exploiting this scientific find in an attempt to create unnecessary controversy and further his own notoriety. Oddly, one of the people protesting Byrackk’s methods was Mark Hoyt, one of the geomorphologists who discovered the creature. Hoyt interrupted a question directed at Byrackk and proceeded to accuse the filmmaker of misrepresentation. Hoyt’s objections centred around a belief that Byrackk had distorted the scientific basis of the findings in favour of cheap scaremongering. For some, this intrusion dispelled the feelings of foreboding that the film conveys, but as the confusion died down and the lights came up I was left with a lingering sense of unease. Hic sunt dracones.

I was convinced that, considering it’s origins, I would never get another chance to view it. The only copy I could track down was a VHS release distributed exclusively through reference libraries and assorted education institutions in Norway. Thankfully, it appears that the documentary recently served as a springboard for the development of a video game, and the company creating the game has obtained the rights to use The Goblin Man of Norway in their promotions. You can find the first third of the documentary in question here, listed under Developer Diary (March 27, 2008). While this means that we probably shouldn’t expect a proper DVD release, at least this rare work is finally available in North America.