Review: 'Classic Monsters, Modern Art'

When I took my wife to see The Bride of Frankenstein at NY's Museum of Modern Art on one of our first dates, the one thing she commented on after seeing it for the first time was how "iconic" every frame of it is. It may not be as lauded as Citizen Kane, but Kane doesn't have an image half as indelible as Karloff's monster lumbering through a crypt or Lanchester's Bride shrieking in horror when she first meets him. As far as I'm concerned, the horror of the unseen (see The Haunting or The Blair Witch Project) will always be scariest, but the monsters, crypts, and graveyards of less frightening films will never fail to scratch the itchy shoulders of those like me who look forward to Halloween more than Christmas.

Review: 'Into Every Generation A Slayer Is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts'

In the "Pre-Prologue" of his new book, Into Every Generation A Slayer Is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts, Evan Ross Katz states that he "set out to write a book about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the historic and groundbreaking television series that altered and then reshaped the television landscape..." before clarifying "This will not be that book. It will contain remnants of the book I set out to write" but, he goes on to explain, the context has changed. 

Any fan of the show knows exactly what he means. Actors Charisma Carpenter, Amber Benson, and Michelle Trachtenberg have all gone on record about how formerly-revered series creator Joss Whedon made them feel unsafe, manipulated them, lied to them, or insulted them (or in Carpenter's case, all of the above). Others from the show's cast and crew have since come out to corroborate these stories or offer support to the women who went through all that crap.

Whereas Katz apparently began his book in a world where Buffy the Vampire Slayer was generally considered to be a groundbreaking piece of television about a feminist superhero who slays vamps with her Mr. Pointy and its creator was considered by many to be nothing short of a genius, the landscape then shifted to one in which Whedon was outed as a serial-jerk (who still hasn't reckoned with or apologized for any of his alleged transgressions) and the show itself has been widely reevaluated in ways that have seen its feminist stock plunge severely.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 16

Series: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Episode: “Hush”, in which a clutch of well-dressed fellows with hideous Gwynplaine grins invade Sunnydale, California, to steal the voices of the town’s residents… so the folks can’t scream when the so-called “Gentlemen” cut out their hearts. In the middle of a fairly weak season, Buffy the Vampire Slayer gets off one of its best-loved and ingenious (“Hush” is almost completely devoid of dialogue) episodes. The floating, constantly gesticulating Gentlemen are regularly cited as the scariest motherfuckers ever to pop up on a show with no shortage of them.

Review: 'How to Kill a Vampire: Fangs in Folklore, Film, and Fiction'

Liisa Ladouceur upends the dour face of vampirism with her gleeful new book How to Kill a Vampire: Fangs in Folklore, Film, and Fiction. Like a Goth Mary Roach, she offers a breezy yet detailed history of vampires in culture (pop and otherwise), paying special attention to the myriad ways to dispatch a peckish vamp. We learn the roots of vampires’ allergies to silver, sunlight, stakes, and all other sundry preventive measures. There are profiles of slayers from Van Helsing to Buffy and an international dictionary of vampire-like demons and the various ways those creatures can be killed (nastiest method: destroy the Penanggalan of Malaysia by snaring its exposed intestines on thorns; least nastiest method: give the Langsuir, also of Malaysia, a haircut and neatly place the trimmings in a hole). Valuable information, of course, but it’s Ladouceur’s writing that makes How to Kill a Vampire a full-on fun read. Her style is witty and jolly throughout, even when running down the litany of vampire suicide methods or describing how vampire babies tend to tear through their moms from the inside.

Review: 'The Rise of the Vampire'

The title of Erik Butler’s new study is really misleading. The Rise of the Vampire suggests an origin story. Instead we get an all-inclusive history that takes wing with the first time the word vampire was put to paper in 1725 and the creature’s roots in Serbian folklore to the most contemporary depictions of the beast in pop fictions such as “True Blood” and Twilight. In between, Butler explores bloodsuckers in poetry, art, pop music, regional cultures, opera, religion, and politics along with the usual movies, TV shows, and books. He approaches the term “vampire” with smart elasticity, allowing off-genre works such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Murnau’s silent melodrama Sunrise to fit into the discussion as naturally as Nosferatu or Carmilla without setting off alarms that he’s overreaching. Interestingly, the same can be said of his strange theories, such as the case he makes for Quincey Morris being a vampire in cahoots with Dracula.

As a result, Butler manages to present this way over-analyzed topic with novel perspective and insight. I’m pretty sure I’ve never read another book that got into how singing is a sure-fire way to make a vamp lose its threatening potency, and it’s validating to read that Butler apparently squirms in his seat as much as I do when Spike starts crooning his power-ballad bullshit in the “Once More with Feeling” episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Review: 'TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen '

About four years ago I wrote a piece about the mostly unacknowledged history of horror as a television genre and how it has never really managed to get “a claw-hold on the small screen the way it has in cinema houses, while dumb sitcoms, cop shows, and doctor shows continue to proliferate.” Horror has rarely been acknowledged as a thriving or even a legitimate television genre, yet monsters and murders have made their mark in TV, not just in overt genre programs such as “The Munsters” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” but in ones that straddle the lines such as “CSI” and “The Mighty Boosh.”  As cable stations concerned with quality and open to experimentation continue to expand the possibilities of what is permissible on television, horror has found a more comfortable home on pay channels such as HBO and AMC. If nothing else, after sixty years of The Quatermass Experiment, “The Twilight Zone,” “Dark Shadows,” “The X-Files,” and “The Walking Dead,” TV horror has made a deep enough impact that it warrants a study much deeper than the 2,700-or-so words I gave it back in 2009. Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott have done precisely that with their new book TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen.

The multitudinous programs the writers cover in just 225 pages really draws attention to how overdue this study is. Because of that past failure to acknowledge horror TV, Jowett and Abbott had many, many stones to fling over. They trek to all corners of the topic to discuss how horror has infiltrated non-genre programs, how the televised version differs from its cinematic cousin, how the “mainstreaming” of horror has changed what we are able to see on our TVs, how children have always been more open to the genre than programmers often realize, how horror programs function as metaphors for the entire genre, and how the television set, itself, has functioned as a thing of horror. The discussion is academic but always readable and accessible, though I am now convinced that academic writers get paid based on how many times they use the word “liminal.” A word non-academic writers love to use to make themselves sound academic is “seminal,” and I’ve always promised myself I’d never use it here on Psychobabble. I’m going to break that vow—just this once—because “seminal” is exactly what TV Horror is. It is the first thorough discussion of that creature in the closet, that thing the academics refused to acknowledge until now. Let there be many more intelligent studies of horror TV such as this one and many, many more horrifying programs to study in the decades to come.

Review: 'Angel: After the Fall' (slipcase edition)

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” receives the vast majority of geek love, but I personally preferred its spin-off. “Angel” was more adult, less cutesy pie (no talk of “smoochies” or “scoobies” to offend the ear). Although the title character—Buffy’s brooding, befanged ex-beau—was a bit of a drip, the supporting players were almost uniformly fab. And while “Buffy” certainly declined in quality over time, “Angel” hit its stride in season five when he and his gang took over an evil law firm (I know, I know, they’re all evil. Hardy har).

September 18, 2009: Psychobabble Presents: A Horrible History of Horror TV!

Today is the 45th anniversary of the debut episode of The Addams Family and this September 24th finds The Munsters celebrating that same milestone. These two ooky, kooky birthdays have got me thinking about one of TV’s fringiest genres: the horror program. Horror has never gotten a claw-hold on the small screen the way it has in cinema houses, while dumb sitcoms, cop shows, and doctor shows continue to proliferate. Perhaps this is because it’s hard to sustain terror week after week on an episodic series. The anthology seems to be the horror program’s favored format, but it’s difficult to get viewers to tune in every week without familiar characters to follow. While a respectable number of horror shows have aired since TV’s cultural breakthrough in the 1950s, many of them were short-lived. Even indelible shows like The Addams Family and The Munsters only lasted two seasons. But the appeal of even some of the most fleeting horror TV shows has endured long beyond their original airings.