Blog-o-ween 2023: Daphne du Maurier

Can you believe it, Blog-o-weeners? It is 30 October. We are on the cusp of the big day — not to mention the Big Giveaway during the Horrorthon. I wonder what Conal Cochran is giving away this year? It must be something B-I-G, because look how excited Dr. Challis is getting.

We here at LARPing Real Life are wishing you the luck of the Irish this year. We’re pulling for ya, Doc.

While the good doctor is keeping the phone lines (not to mention his local barkeep) busy, let’s you and me settle down for an evening of quiet horror. The three stories we have on tap for today are tales of creeping dread told in the calm, cool style that only British writers seem capable of mustering. Writers like M.R. James, Marjorie Bowen, and Robert Aickman (just to name a very, very few) never allow the out-of-this-world, weird nature of the action in their stories to influence the measured, reasonable tones of their storytelling. There are very few exclamation points in the work of these types of writers, which makes the appearance of the outré even stranger and more disquieting.

The stories we are focusing on today are all from the typewriter of Daphne du Maurier. (Although there are some rumors that some of her work passed through the pens of other writers first — more on that later.) Best known for the 1938 Gothic novel Rebecca, du Maurier also penned several short stories that are darker, more ambiguous, and more shocking than her more romance-oriented novels. Two of today’s three stories have been adapted into major motion pictures, and the third feels as though it would have been ripe for an adaptation of The Twilight Zone. So without further ado, let’s you and I head out to the southwestern tip of England, to County Cornwall, and see what Dame Daphne is up to and where her quiet horror takes us...

For our first story, “The Blue Lenses,” du Maurier takes us to a hospital in London where Marda West is recuperating after an operation to restore her sight. She lies in bed with her eyes wrapped in gauze. The voices of all the nurses and doctors passing through her room assure her that the operation was a success and that her bandages will soon come off. When they do, her doctor tells her that everything will be tinted blue because she has been fitted with temporary blue lenses that will help her eyes adjust to seeing light and shapes and whatnot. After this brief adjustment period, the lenses will be removed and she will see everything perfectly fine.

Ain’t medical science a miracle, dear reader?

The day comes when Marda has her bandages taken off and she gets to see for the first time. She is not prepared for what is revealed to her:

“Smiling, she saw the figure dressed in uniform come into the room, bearing a tray, her glass of milk upon it. Yet, incongruous, absurd, the head with the uniformed cap was not a woman's head at all. The thing bearing down on her was a cow...a cow on a woman's body. The frilled cap was perched upon the wide horns. The eyes were large and gentle, but cow's eyes, the nostrils broad and humid, and the way she stood there, breathing, was the way a cow stood placidly in pasture, taking the day as it came, content, unmoved.”

“‘Feeling a bit strange?’

“The laugh was a woman’ laugh, a nurse’s laugh, Nurse Brand’s laugh...She shut her eyes, then opened them again. The cow in the nurse’s uniform was with her still.”

Uh-oh.

More people come and go. All have animal heads. Some are cats, some snakes, others dogs. Her husband has the head of a vulture. Is Mrs. West dreaming? Hallucinating? Is it the blue lenses? And what will the world look like when they are removed? Find out by listening to the story as read by Nightmare Diary below:

Incongruous animals are at the heart of our next story, “The Birds,” which, aside from Rebecca, is perhaps the most famous story du Maurier wrote.

On a farm on the coast of Cornwall, disabled war veteran Nat Hocken, notices large flocks of birds behaving strangely. He chalks their restlessness up to their intuitive knowledge that winter is coming. That night, Nat’s house and family is attacked by dozens of robins, finches and other small birds.

The next morning, on a walk to the beach, Nat sees whitecaps on all the incoming waves. Soon, he discovers that what he is seeing is not foaming water but thousands upon thousands of gulls. While the BBC announces that birds have attacked people across the country, they do not quite comprehend the seriousness of the situation. Nat does, and he begins boarding up his cottage against further attacks.

The days pass and the attacks become more frequent and more dangerous. Hiding in their house, Nat and his family hear the sounds of naval guns firing and of planes flying above them. Soon, the bombardment, like the radio, goes silent.

What has happened beyond the walls of the cottage? Why are the birds attacking? Will it ever end? Does humanity stand a chance? Listen to Tony Walker read “The Birds” over at his Classic Ghost Stories Podcast to find out:

Our last story, “Don’t Look Now,” was, like “The Birds,” made into a motion picture. Most people who know the tale will picture Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in the lead roles and have a preternatural fear of red raincoats. That’s justifiable. No matter how familiar one is with the movie, however, the original story still has the power to delight and terrify.

After the sudden death of their daughter from meningitis, John and Laura take a trip to Venice, Italy, in an attempt to put some actual, as well as emotional, distance between them and their grief. One night, John catches sight of a small figure in a pixie-hooded cloak. It appears to be a girl running away from some danger. While out for dinner, John and Laura meet a set of middle-aged twin sisters, one of whom may blind, but has second-sight. She tells John that what he saw was a vision of his daughter trying to warn him that he is in danger if he remains in Venice. It seems that Venice has been plagued by a series of murders recently.

A telegram comes informing John and Laura that their son, who is staying at a prep school back in England, has fallen ill. Laura agrees to fly back as soon as possible, leaving John behind to take care of getting their car on a special train running from from Milan to Calais. Long after Laura should have been on her plane home, John sees her in a water taxi with the two sisters. He chases after the trio, but cannot find out where they went. While searching for her, he sees the pixie-hooded girl running through the streets again, this time pursued by a man. The murderer, John assumes. He gives chase, determined to save the girl.

Does he reach her in time? Why was Laura on the water when she should have been in the air? Does John also have the gift of second sight as the old woman said? If so, what is the small figure running through the streets trying to tell him? Tony Walker reads “Don’t Look Now” for his Classic Ghost Story Podcast below:

Daphne du Maurier was born in London, England, in May of 1907. Her father was the actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and her mother was the actress Muriel Beaumont. While she grew up in Hampstead, London, she spent her summers at the family home in Fowey, Cornwall. In 1932, she married Frederick Browning, who was known as the “father of the British Airbourne Forces” and was also an Olympic bobsledder(!), and became Lady Browning after he was knighted in 1946. Later, after being made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969, her full title was Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE. But she remained plain old Daphne thereafter, as she never used the title.

Though seemingly happily married and the mother of three children, du Maurier held an interesting view of her own sexuality. She claimed that her personality was made up a feminine side — the wife and mother roles she projected to the world at large — and a masculine side that she kept hidden from view. This “male energy,” she said, was the source of her writing. This dichotomy, according to her biographer Margaret Forster, was never truly resolved, and du Maurier allegedly remained in denial of her own bisexuality.

Du Maurier’s writing career began by having some early stories published in her great uncle Comyns’s magazine Bystander. In 1931, she had her first novel, The Loving Spirit, published. In 1938, Rebecca was published and became an immediate hit. However, shortly after Rebecca hit bookstores in Brazil, critics and readers noticed many similarities in plot and specific situations between it and a 1934 novel by Brazilian writer Carolina Nabuco, A Sucessora (The Successor). Though du Maurier and her publisher claimed no prior knowledge of Nabuco’s book, it must be pointed out that when Nabuco had her novel translated into French and published in France, the publisher that she sent it to in Paris was also du Maurier’s publisher.

Did du Maurier see Nabuco’s book, read it, and inadvertently absorb its story? It’s hard to say for sure, but the fact that this wasn’t the only time that du Maurier would be accused of plagiarism does muddy the waters a bit. Author Frank Baker thought there was something funny going on when du Maurier’s short story “The Birds” came out in 1952. The something funny was that Baker had published a novel in 1936 about millions of birds attacking the people of London. His book’s title? The Birds.

Oops!

It doesn’t help quell public opinion that du Maurier worked as a reader for Peter Llewelyn Davies, Baker’s publisher, at the time he submitted his manuscript.

Double oops!

I’m not here to accuse or exonerate anyone of anything. I just report on the news, I don’t make it. I do feel, however, that if one is burning with indignation over du Maurier’s supposed literary offenses, one should take a look at Jonathan Lethan’s 2007 Harper’s Magazine essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” In it, Lethem suggests that everything from inadvertent copying to outright stealing is the norm of literature and has been since the dawn of (written) time. It’s an interesting article made even more interesting by the fact that everything in it has been cut-and-pasted from other sources. The art of literature, it seems, is much like the art of architecture: the importance is in how the bricks are stacked and not where one found them in the first place.

It’s time to say good-bye, Blog-o-weeners. We’ve had a great time here on the coast of Cornwall, but we don’t want to overstay our welcome. What’s that? Why, yes, that does seem like an unusually large flock of birds in the sky. I don’t think it means anything sinister. They’re just migrating to warmer climes. Maybe we’ll see them when we get back to Italy? In the meantime, snuggle up against me, close your eyes, and have...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh?

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Bacchae" by Elizabeth Hand

Just the other day, I was having an online discussion with someone about the 1980s Satanic Panic (Hello, johnwithanhberry!) In the course of that conversation, I mentioned that I used to watch the evangelical preachers on television because, aside from the fact that they were comedy gold, they would rail against heavy metal and punk music with a real gusto. Heck, they had better musical tastes than a lot of my friends! I used to sit there with a notepad and pencil and jot down all the albums I needed to buy the next time I was at National Record Mart. “Dead Kennedys? Check! W.A.S.P.? Alrighty, then! Talking Heads? Wait...Talking Heads are Satanic? Okay, okay, Pastor Gary Greenwald, whatever you say!”

I find this method to still be useful in this new Satanic Panic we find ourselves in. (Now with 33% more panic!) Nosy parental groups and know-nothing political action committees are demanding the removal of scores of titles from school and public libraries. Why? Because they’re too violent, they’re too sexy, they’re too “woke”! Hell, sign me up, I say! You got a list of those book titles handy so I don’t get carpal tunnel syndrome writing them all down?

Today’s Blog-o-ween subject is another example of my “Well, if it’s making [enter your favorite stick-in-the-mud, busybody group here] uncomfortable, then it’s gotta be good.” style of media consumption. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a damn fine story.

Now, just imagine (or as my college French teacher would say, “Imaginez...imaginez...”) it’s 1991, you are perusing the letters section of the British magazine of science-fiction and fantasy, Interzone, and you come across this doozy that fairly drips with butthurt male indignation:

“I think I have seldom encountered a story as repulsive as ‘The Bacchae’...It was a vile parade of anti-male hatred, an exhibition of baroque man-killing justified, so it seems, by the crimes of discarded beer cans and a dying fish...[It] is nothing more than a snuff movie in prose, heaped with feathers, jewels, and fins...I hope that you’ll never again subject the magazine’s readers to similar chuckling depictions of agony.”

If you are like me, then your very next thought is “Where, oh where, do I find Elizabeth Hand’s short story, ‘The Bacchae’? I have to read it!” What kind of kinky kicks are committed in said story that could have ruined this poor guy (and, of course, it was a guy) for marriage and caused him to write such a strongly-worded letter? Let’s find out...

“She got into the elevator with him, the young woman from down the hall, the one he’d last seen at the annual Coop Meeting a week before. Around her shoulders hung something soft that brushed his cheek as Gordon moved aside to let her in: a fur cape, or pelt, or no, something else. The flayed skin of an animal, an animal that when she shouldered past him to the corner of the elevator proved to be her Rottweiler, Leopold. He could smell it now: the honeyed stench of uncured flesh, a pink and scarlet veil still clinging to the pelt’s ragged fringe of coarse black hair. It had left a crimson streak down the back of her skirt, and stippled her legs with pink rosettes.”

It is the not-too-distant future (next Sunday, A.D.), and the earth is in the throes of an ecological collapse. There are shields in orbit to protect the planet from the sun’s UV radiation. Gordon, our protagonist, is wandering through the landscape of his city as a sort of “stranger in a strange land.” There seems to be a shift occurring of which poor Gordon is slowly becoming aware. Women seem to be lashing out, striking back against the men in this world.

“Gordon had heard of some of these on television, but other tales came from friends, male friends. Near escapes recounted in low voices at the gym or club, random acts of violence spurred by innocent offers of help in carrying groceries, the act of holding a door open suddenly seen as threatening. Women friends, even relatives, sisters and daughters refusing to accompany family on trips to the city. An exodus of wives and children to the suburbs, from the suburbs to the shrinking belts of countryside ringing the megalopolis. And then, husbands and fathers disappearing during weekend visits with the family in exile.”

Gordon hears the story of Debbie Delucia on the evening news. She was on trial for the murder of a young man she claimed had assaulted her the summer before:

“The young man had been beaten severely about the face and chest with one of Ms. DeLucia’s high-heeled shoes. When he was found by the parking lot attendant most of his hair was missing. Gordon switched off the television when it displayed photographs of these unpleasantries, followed by shots of a throng of cheering women outside the courthouse.”

Ms. DeLucia was found not guilty.

The next morning brings the story of three women who, having left a nightclub and been harassed by a group of young men, killed one of them “with a ferocity the newspaper described as ‘demonic.’”

Gordon finds that his partner, Olivia, is also experiencing some sort of awakening, a kind of violent metamorphosis. One night, they take a walk by the river. Gordon wants to get back to the street, but Olivia walks to the river’s edge and pulls a dying fish from the water. She angrily accuses Gordon of being blind to what is happening to the world, of not caring that this poisoned planet is becoming unlivable. “There’d be nothing left at all,” she tells him, “if it was up to people like you.”

Uh-oh, Gordy!

On their way home, Olivia confronts two men and proceeds to kick the everloving snot out of them. Worse (at least from Gordon’s perspective), she seems to enjoy the violence.

What is happening to Olivia? What is happening to the world? Why does there seem to be a switching of gender roles, with men afraid to walk the streets alone at night for fear of running afoul of predatory women? 

In her notes about this story in her collection The Best of Elizabeth Hand, she says that “the Bacchae” is her “ecofeminist homage to J.G. Ballard.” After its initial publication in Interzone, Hand says readers named it their most hated story of the year and that

“The mostly male readership of that magazine hated it and wrote letters to that effect, which is how I knew I’d done a good job and hit a nerve.”

Oh, yeah, you did!

You can see the inspiration and influence of Ballard in Hand’s tale. However, where Ballard would have detailed and investigated the ecological space, Hand is more concerned with the psychological toll that space has on the individuals within it. Hand uses the play “The Bacchae” by Euripedes to great effect. In that ancient Greek tragedy, King Pentheus is torn asunder by the women of his kingdom, driven mad by the god Dionysus during a festival. Hand’s women are also driven mad, not by a god, but by a world destroyed by men.

After being published by Interzone, “The Bacchae” was included in the anthology Best New Horror 3, edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell. It later made its way into Hand’s own collections Last Summer at Mars Hill and The Best of Elizabeth Hand. You can still read it online here on the Nightmare magazine website.

The Dark Tome (which I always call “The Dark To Me” because there’s just something about their logo that makes me read it that way) is an audio drama podcast that follows a young girl named Cassie who uses the books she finds in a spooky old shop as doorways to other worlds. One of the stories she travels to is “The Bacchae.” It’s a slightly different telling of the tale, but still an interesting one. You can find the link to the episode here.

This is the second Elizabeth Hand story we’ve written about for Blog-o-ween 2023, so if you want to learn more about this amazing writer, then jump back to the post about her novel Wylding Hall here. Since writing about that short novel, I’ve had the opportunity to listen to its audiobook, and I have to say that I loved the way it used multiple actors to mimic the epistolary-documentary interview narrative format of the novel. Highest recommendations!

So, we come to the end of another Blog-o-ween entry. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember, fellas, not everything in this world is meant for or about you. One man’s repulsive, vile parade of baroque anti-male hatred is another woman’s...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

20 October: The Bay

 

Today for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween, we’re talking the much-maligned genre of the “Found Footage” film. Though there were earlier examples of the genre - namely Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust - when you mention found footage most people tend to think of The Blair Witch Project. These films are usually chock full of first-person perspective, official news footage, surveillance camera footage, and/or pre-existing footage of some sort, all of which are presented in a faux-documentary style. Oh, and shaky-cam. Lots and lots of shaky-cam.

(I am fighting the urge to go off on a tangent about my hatred of shaky-cam. It works well if you are showing someone being chased through the woods, but not so well if you are showing someone crossing the room to get a drink of water. Buy a tripod and leave the darn camera alone, folks.)

Anywho...where were we?

Oh, yeah...found footage movies.

Let’s talk Barry “Diner” Levinson’s 2012 f-f, eco-horror picture, The Bay. And let’s do it quickly, because it creeps me the heck out!

The bay in The Bay is Chesapeake Bay, a 64,000-square-mile watershed that covers parts of six states along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. It’s a beautiful area of the country, but thanks to the chicken industry, it’s become one of the yuckiest and most dangerous. Due to the use of steroids to make the chickens bigger (bigger = more money, natch) and the dumping of the chickens’ droppings into the bay, the water of the Chesapeake around the town of Claridge, MD, has become toxic.

But the toxicity of the water is only one of the problems facing the good people of Claridge. It seems the chicken-poop infected water has affected a tongue-eating louse, Cymothoa exigua, in the bay. These isopods are a normal part of the environment, but thanks to the toxins in the water, their life-cycle has sped up. They are no longer willing to settle for feeding on fish...they want bigger, two-legged game now.

Not only is The Bay a great found footage horror movie, it is also another variant of one of my favorite movie genre: the “We aren’t closing the beaches!” picture. Yep, it seems Claridge’s mayor, John Stockman (Frank Deal), took a page from Amity Island’s Mayor Vaughn’s playbook. He doesn’t want anything to get in the way of tourist dollars, even if that means that the streets of his town fill with corpses.

Who’da thunk that Barry Levinson would be able to bring the yucky, horror goods the way he does here in The Bay? Using pre-existing material that he’d shot for an actual documentary on the problems facing Chesapeake Bay, Levinson constructs are really creepy-crawlie film that’ll have you brushing imagined (or are they?!) isopods from your arms, neck, and legs.

18 October: Kingdom of the Spiders

 

Today is all about animals for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween.

Uh...not quite.

No, not him either.

Now we’re talking!

It’s time to celebrate those movies that show us just where humanity stands in Mother Nature’s view. When we’ve gotten too big for our britches, ol’ Mom sends a horde of the creepy-crawlies to put us back in our rightful place. I can take an animal attack movie that uses big critters like lions and tigers and bears, but when movies start using our six- and eight-legged friends, that’s when I say, “Oh, my!” In 1977, one of the creepiest of the “animals attack” movies was released to theaters, but it wasn’t until it started showing up in video stores and on cable TV did the nightmares really begin. We’re talking John "Bud" Cardos’s classic Kingdom of the Spiders.

The film’s events take place in rural Arizona. Local veterinarian Dr. Robert "Rack" Hansen (played by none other than William Shatner) is asked to look at an ailing prize calf owned by local farmer Walter Colby (Woody Strode). The calf dies for unknown reasons, and Rack sends the animal’s blood to the university to get checked out. The test results come back: it’s spider venom!

Soon, spiders are attacking more than cows. People are found cocooned in webbing in their homes and vehicles. What’s more, these aren’t just the attacks of one kind of spider. Nope! It seems that for the first time ever, all spiders are putting aside their differences and working together, as the giant spider mound in the Colbys’ backyard makes apparent. Rack and university Professor of Arachnology Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) try to figure out why this is happening while also trying not to let it happen to them.

Kingdom of the Spiders is not only an “Animals Attack” movie, it’s also a proud member of that post-Jaws genre: the “We’re not closing the beaches” movie. That’s right - not only are spiders attacking people, but the powers-that-be won’t deal with the problem in the manner that Dr. Ashley (an actual, honest-to-goodness expert on the subject) suggests because it would interfere with the County Fair! Sorry folks, spiders are oogie, but business is business!

This is also one of those movies that I saw on TV as a kid, and it gave me all sorts of nightmares. Tarantulas crawling all over the place - in basements, in cars, in planes - gave me the willies, but it’s the movie’s final shot that sent me over the edge. I won’t ruin it for you if you haven’t seen it, but I’m sure you’ll feel the same way when you do. It’s the perfect downer ending, maybe one of the better ones the 1970s served up. You'll sleep with the lights on for a month, unless...

It is 10 October. There are 21 days until Halloween

I’ve mentioned before how seeing Day of the Triffids on TV one Saturday afternoon when I was a kid changed the way I felt about being in the woods. Every tree and every plant my size or taller became a potential meat-eating Triffid. Any clicking or tapping I heard weren’t squirrels or woodpeckers. No! They were Triffids signaling to each other that there was a yummy meal in sneakers and a Han Solo t-shirt coming their way.

Thank god I didn’t read Algernon Blackwood’s novella “The Willows” as a kid, too. I never would have left the house let alone gone back into the woods.

Blackwood’s tale of eco-horror is, like so many tales of terror from the early 20th century, a slow burn. Over four chapters, Blackwood slowly builds and layers the horrors to a frightening climax as the two men trapped on that sandy island on the River Danube realize what may be in the woods. Blackwood, however, never fully divulges the identity of the entities that are stalking the men. What are they doing? What do they want? What are they even? Blackwood reveals nothing that would help explain away the horror in the willows.

The deeply mysterious nature of things outside human understanding – are they gods or monsters, and is there a difference between the two? – is one of the reasons H.P. Lovecraft considered “The Willows” his favorite story of cosmic horror:

"Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.”

Blackwood’s tale seems ripe for a motion picture production. The ambiguity and slow-burn creeping dread seem perfect for a movie in the vein of The VVitch or The Lighthouse.

You can find the story in its entirety here. Surprisingly, as well as disappointingly, there doesn’t seem to be an old-time radio program that took on the tale, but, as always, the good folks at HorrorBabble have recorded an excellent audio version.