In early 1982 Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine‘s April/May issue arrived in the mail. Nestled inside was a fascinating essay about one William Hope Hodgson, a writer I had never heard of, and a reprint of his 1907 short story The Voice in the Night. This is when I learned that the Japanese horror movie Matango (aka Attack of the Mushroom People) had been based, in part, upon that particular short story.

Many years later I would crack open an old paperback anthology titled Masters of Terror: Volume One: William Hope Hodgson, which introduced me to what might be my all time favorite William Hope Hodgson story, A Tropical Horror.

“Glut! Glut!“

Far too many years after that, I cracked open The Ghost Pirates and Others. I was delighted to find that both The Voice in the Night and A Tropical Horror held up to my memories of them being both chilling and nightmarish. Also holding up was the tense and terrifying tale The Mystery of the Derelict, another story I remembered from that Masters of Terror anthology.

The titular yarn of this anthology, The Ghost Pirates, got me wondering if John Carpenter had read some William Hope Hodgson, back in the day. There is some imagery in this bizarre tale that may or may not have helped shaped the look and feel of the attack on the Sea Grass. Just a thought.

As for what followed The Ghost Pirates…

The Sea Horses showed that Hodgson could pluck, or yank, at a reader’s heartstrings every bit as adeptly as he could chill their nerves.

The Searcher of the End House let me know I really have to stop putting off reading Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki stories. The Stone Ship is yet another cautionary tale warning that derelict vessels adrift at sea are best left alone.

We Two and Bully Dunkan is a wonderful tale of revenge, best described as a kind of collaboration between Jack London and Edgar Allan Poe that I never knew I really needed to read.

Two other stories are worth noting: The Shamraken Homeward-Bounder, which offers a melancholic twist on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, and the tense monster yarn Demons of the Sea.

Fans of weird fiction and tales of high seas mystery and adventure should find plenty to enjoy in The Ghost Pirates and Others.

The year: 1963. The place: Mexico. The project: a Yul Brynner picture titled Kings of the Sun. This is where stuntman Roy N. Sickner first shared an idea he had for a movie. It would be about a group of outlaws that rob a train, only to get chased into Mexico, become trapped between the posse hunting them and the Mexican authorities, which causes a massive shoot out. Sickner had even come up with a title for his would be movie: The Wild Bunch.

I only have the vaguest of memories of when I first saw The Wild Bunch. This is due to my being, at least at that particular time, no big admirer of the Western genre. I preferred car chases, places with indoor plumbing and electricity, and looking at people that seemed to bathe with some degree of regularity. The Wild Bunch did not fit that bill, at all.

My dad, bless his cineaste heart, tried to get me interested in this “really bloody and violent” western, but I would have none of it.

The only thing I do remember about this viewing is of my dad saying, “Look at those guys, they’re just itching to kill.” An observation made when the camera zoomed in for a close up on the delirious and deranged faces of both Coffer (Strother Martin) and T. C. (L. Q. Jones) just before the opening gunfight erupts and unleashes a storm of bullets upon an unsuspecting town near the Texas-Mexico border.

I got a more formal introduction to The Wild Bunch a few years later, when I read John McCarty’s seminal book Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen. Which had an entire chapter devoted to both a detailed analysis of the film, as well an overview of the career of its iconoclastic, and deeply troubled, co-writer and director, Sam Peckinpah.

Prior to cracking open W. K. Stratton’s The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film, that chapter in Splatter Movies was where most of my knowledge and understanding of The Wild Bunch came from. I had so much more to learn. So very much.

What I appreciated most about Stratton’s encyclopedic breakdown of how, where, and why every single nut and bolt that came together to create The Wild Bunch was just how forward thinking Peckinpah and company were in terms of representation.

Decades before all this Culture War nonsense broke out over woke this or diversity that, Sam Peckinpah strived for an authentic and realistic portrayal of the Mexican people and culture during the horrors of their revolution. While there are some missteps and antiquated biases on display, it seems that The Wild Bunch managed to get a lot more right than it got wrong.

Stratton’s book gave me a better, bigger, and deeper appreciation of the many complex layers the make up The Wild Bunch. Now it’s time to dust off my blu-ray and give the movie another long overdue viewing…

The late Gene Siskel described his job as film critic as covering “the national dream beat.” He believed that movies contained “the coalesced vapors of the consciousness of a society.”

That belief is the core thesis of W. Scott Poole’s Dark Carnivals Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire, a supposed examination of how American Horror Cinema can either reflect or critique the innumerable imperial abuses of the United States. I use the descriptive “supposed” because Dark Carnivals is more historical text than it is media study or film criticism.

While I do agree with Poole’s thesis, I wish he had dug a tad deeper into American Horror Cinema’s offerings than just Jaws (1975) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

Jaws, of course, is used as the template example for a conservative reflection of the fears of empire. What with its square-jawed everyman hero saving a quaint small town, a haven for simple, pure Americana, from a marauding monster of a giant, man-eating shark.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, on the other (and severed) hand, serves as an example for a somewhat progressive-leaning critique of how the imperial economic policies and practices of the United States can and does chew people up and spit them out, without mercy or feeling.

Other films are referenced or mentioned, of course. A few examples being Get Out, The Mask of Fu Manchu, Independence Day, White Zombie, Scream, and The Last House on the Left. Those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. I also noticed the absence of a substantive discussion of The Exorcist seeming to be rather conspicuous.

Yet, as I said at the start, these are all just used as illustrative examples of cinema reflecting the fears and/or consequences of imperial power, rather than a deep dive into the texts of the films themselves and how they embodied those fears and consequences.

As a history text I do feel that Dark Carnivals is worthwhile reading and recommend it. But as a media studies text, I thought it fell short of the mark. So it goes.