Stuff: CRwM and the Case of the Bed-Bug Free, But Still Slightly Haunted Bed.

This sign was posted on a discarded box frame near my wife's shop in Fort Greene.

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Movies: The two Palmer girls.

One of the finest pieces of horror criticism comes from Bart Simpson. During the first "Treehouse of Horror" special, Lisa reads Poe's "The Raven" to her brother (who agrees to be subjected to a book only after Lisa assures him that he will not learn anything). When the narrator of Poe's "The Raven" searches for the source of tapping at his chamber door and finds an empty hall, Bart says, "You know what would have been scarier than nothing? Anything."

Bart's objection is, I think, demonstrably false: the world's full of anythings that aren't particularly scary. That said, the more general assertion that "The Raven" just isn't scary is spot on. It is a point even Lisa concedes later when she speculates that earlier audiences of poem simply must have been easier to scare.

Though, honestly, even early audiences of "The Raven" didn't find it particularly scary. Elizabeth Barrett, in a letter to the poet, claimed the poem produced "a fit o' horror" but admitted the mixed emotional response when she claimed that "Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it and some by the music." The poem's style, more often than its supposedly horrific content, was the source of most criticism, favorable and negative. Though, notably, one critic for the Southern Quarterly Review seems to have agreed with Bart and Lisa, claiming that the poem's scares would only work on "a child who had been frightened to the verge of idiocy by terrible ghost stories."

So, even adjusting for shifting cultural context, one comes to the conclusion that "The Raven," one of the cornerstones of the American horror tradition, simply isn't that scary.

In the horror blogosphere, many many posts have been dedicated to parsing out the experience of horror. We draw fine distinctions between various flavors of dread and speculate about their sources and the effects that best produce them. Less attention has been given to the odd phenomenon of horror that isn't scary. We should take care to separate this subgenre from horror that fails to be scary. It's possible to try to scare your audience and not succeed. Instead, what were considering is a genre of horror that purposefully chooses some other emotional register as primary mode. The dread in "The Raven," despite its gothic mood and trappings, is more akin to melancholy than fright. It's a grim meditation on death. A dark mirror of the transcendent function dead lovers served in Renaissance poetry, Poe's poem is about the inescapable and inevitable pain of loss that eschews the trope of redemption (completing a program of literary subversion that began 300 years earlier with Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella" poem cycle). It's about being epically sad.

It might not seem like such a leap from fear to depression, but one can just as easily find comedies that would be welcome on just about any horror blog. Erotica, adventure, romance . . . we could go on, but that belabors a seemingly obvious point: Horror, as a genre, seems almost boundlessly flexible, even to the point of undermining the emotional response that the genre's name would seem to elevate as its highest and clearest goal. Though perhaps the point isn't particularly obvious. One still finds people attempting to work up definitions of horror that will exclude random work X from the genre by appealing to some reductive, "purified" definition of the genre. Looked at from the position of how the genre is experienced by creators and consumers, such efforts seem always already doomed.

I bring this up because Lake Mungo, the 2008 faux-documentary ghost tale from Joel Anderson, is one of the best horror films of the first decade of the 21st century. And it is too good a horror film to worry about being scary.

I'm a couple years late to this particular party, so I'm not going to bother with a long summary of the plot. In short: The Palmers, a New Zealand suburban family, lose their teenage daughter, Alice, on an outing to a local swimming hole. They gain a modicum of fame when local media outlets find out the dead daughter is haunting their house. The haunting turns out to be a hoax. However, after the media loses their interest, weird things keep happening. In an effort to get to the bottom of these strange events, the family uncovers a second life that their daughter led and these secrets overturn what they believed they knew about Alice.

To get the whole review-function out of the way, I liked this film. In fact, it's been a long damn time since I've seen a horror film so involving.

There, that's done. Let's talk about the flick now.

Lake Mungo is, curiously, the anti-Twin Peaks. Both works center around the excavation of the hidden life of a deceased teen girl. Alice and Laura share the same last name - Palmer - so it is fair to point out a certain family resemblance. Both works capitalize on the intrusion of the surreal on to mundane world of middle-class life (curiously, despite the idea that Twin Peaks was a logging town, blue collar concerns - union/management conflicts, the tension between resource limitation and jobs, and so on - surfaced obliquely; Twin Peaks was, locale aside, just another suburban nowhere).

What sets them apart is Lake Mungo's sympathy for Alice.

Laura is part of vast horde of fictional young women who meet their demise because they were spoiled. Laura's secret life follows a familiar dramatic arc: The perfect girl wanders off the path. Her sexual awakening is squalid, it marks not so much her introduction into adulthood, but the death of her virginal innocence. And, ultimately, this taint of sexualized corruption is connected to her literal death. Laura Palmer appears wrapped in plastic, washed up on the edge of a lake (another connection between Alice and Laura) because she ceased to be a clueless innocent. Her journey from clueless youth to active agent in the in the demimonde of Twin Peaks was just the first half of her march to the grave.

To be fair, this isn't an overtly wrong-headed notion. For everything that growing-up is, it is also the progression to the grave. In the sense that Laura is moving forward in her life, she's also moving towards her death. Still, this idea of the fatal corrupting crisis has a distinctly feminine slant to it in our culture, especially once sex enters the picture. Male coming of age stories can have a touch of sadness about the edges: think of a bittersweet narration of "and then we never saw one another again, but they are still my best friends" of countless Stand By Me-ish films. But, mostly, the quest for sexual maturity for boys is presented as an adventure or a comedy. More importantly, whatever the tenor of the tale, the central theme is one of completion rather than downfall. At the end of any given "we have to lose our virginity before we go to college" film, the male protags have gone from boys to men. They've become whole. In contrast, the women emerge from the same adventure irreparably broken.

What's interesting about Lake Mungo is that it uses it's dead-pan tone to wreck that idea. Alice, like Laura, kept secrets. But, unlike Laura, her death was, in the end, an accident. She drowned. It had nothing to do with the life she was living. It was the sort of dumb, senseless, stupid death that can befall anybody at any moment. It does not come as a judgment upon her.

Furthermore, the excavation of Laura's life is, oddly, invasive. Meant to solve the mystery of her death, there's something obscene about it. In death, Laura is defenseless and the investigators keep stripping her rep naked. It's investigation as rape. Here, the exploration into the Alice's life is driven by the presence of the ghostly Alice herself. It isn't an unveiling or a confession, but something more personal and profound. It's not unusual for ghost stories to trot out the "unfinished business" trope, but rarely is the business so poignant: Alice haunts her family because she wants the people to love to know her, entirely and truly know her.

And this, ultimately, is what sets Alice apart from Laura. Laura's a McGuffin. Her life exists to give others meaning and every decision she makes is a puzzle piece to fit into the story of her murder. She's a little girl converted in a tragedy by forces that rob her of life. Alice's life, by contrast, isn't a simple narrative. It's a awkward, opaque series of decisions made by a young woman quietly balancing the demands of two worlds.

Uncanny, sometimes heartbreaking, Lake Mungo's a powerful little film.

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Movies: Three's company.

I think I dropped the ball on Paranormal Activity. I suspect that you had to see it in the theaters to truly get what this movie was about. You had to be sitting in an audience of a hundred and fifty or more willing participants, all hyped and eager to get scared. That's what the movie was meant for.

In fact, the formal and visual elements of the movie seem tailor built for mass participation. Last time I was in a social group and the title Paranormal Activity was dropped, the title was greeted with a collective "hunh" of unknowing. Outside of the horror fancy and their loved ones, it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact. On the assumption that there are readers of this blog who are not here for the horror but rather the comedy of watching me ramble on about cannibals and the like, I'll briefly spoil the plot. Micah, a day trader (back when that "profession" didn't sound like a slang term for sucker), and Katie, a student pursuing her education degree, live in an absurdly large home: Two floors, three bedrooms, two + plus baths, kitchen, dining room, I live in New York so it's important to me, living room, large yard with pool. Oh, and a functional fireplace. Kidding aside, we're going to discuss their house later, so this isn't just an apartment renter getting a rubbery one over some choice housing pron.

Now, given their level of affluence, Micah must be a wiz at choosing stocks, predicting fluctuations in futures markets, and sniffing out poor folks who won't be able to pay off their housing loans. But he's an absolute bonehead when it comes to choosing a female companion. Turns out Katie has been ground zero for freaky deaky demonic possession style activity for like forever. Since she's been eight, an supernatural entity with no respect for the property or sleep habits of others has been stalking her on and off. Micah and Katie attempt to take proactive action to rid themselves of this infernal pest guest, but that sparks an escalation of activity that eventually leads to fatal consequences. Like these things do. Truly a child of the Girls Gone Wild and YouTube age, Micah captures the whole downward spiral on camera. In essence, the flick alternates between day time scenes, in which Katie and Micah stress about what they should do, and nighttime scenes, in which Katie and Micah find themselves pretty much at the mercy of their invisible tormentor.

The alternating day/night scenes - the pattern of theater illuminating sun-kissed full color shots and stretches of pale grey and green porny night vision - gets everybody in the audience working the same groove as reliably as the animated bouncing ball used to do in theater sing-along shorts. (What a sad day it was for popular culture when we crew to cynical for that. Even that horrible "Citizen Soldier" song from Nickleblind 182 would be tolerable if, throughout the add, a little bouncing animated smiling National Guardsman's face encouraged the entire audience to sing along.) It gives the audience a breather to laugh and make fun of the reactions of others, throws in some chatter for the bloggers to theorize about later, and then focuses everybody's attention again by dimming the lights. The transition from day to night in this flick works not unlike the dimming of lights in a movie theater: "Alright people, time to pay attention." In a gentler era, William Castle would have dubbed the night vision effect Demon-O-Vision and audience members would have all slid "Vatican-designed protective goggles" on to prevent demonic possession via the eyes. Even without the Castle-isms, it's a brilliant use of a simple visual pattern to marshal viewer expectations. The film quickly trains the viewer to watch it. It's nearly a Pavlovian reaction: As soon as the lights dim, viewers find themselves scrutinizing the nearly static image of Katie and Micah's room, searching for the slightest hint of supernatural shinanigans. Who knew you could make a nicely effective fright flick out of Warhol's Sleep? Go fig.

Not that such intense scrutiny is necessary; when the baddie does act, it isn't anything you'd miss. In fact, its the viewers tendency to subject the screen to hyperscrutiny whenever the lights are dimmed that makes the low-fi scares director/writer Oren Peli deploys so effective. When you're scrutinizing every inch of the screen for the slightest tell-tale twitch of activity, suddenly moving the door to the bedroom a few inches seems like a monumental shift in what you're seeing. This is how a flick that, for most of its running time, threatens its characters with nothing more sinister than the inexplicable flicking of light switches managed to land such high spots on so many best-of lists last year. The film knows how to prep the willing viewer. This is also, coincidentally, why there's so much bad data in so many reviews of this flick. Not only have reviewers consistently overstated the amount of ruckus the invisible stalker commits - a single light flicked on and off becomes a tour of the house with lights going on and off as the demon moves from room to room - but have overstated elements of the flick that occur during the daylight scenes - transforming the milquetoast Micah into the equivalent of an abusive spouse. This is the oddest critical transformation since Micah's biggest sin seems to be that he's a bit of a tech geek and slightly overconfident. In the relationship, he's the weaker of the pair. He capitulates to nearly every whim of Katie's, apologizes for the one time he doesn't, and never even tries to force an apology out of her for knowingly bringing this monster into his life. Honestly, who is more at fault here: Micah, who can sometimes be insensitive about what he's recording, or Katie, who neglected to mention her superpowered, unstoppable demon stalker before Micah moved in with her? People are so keyed up that they lose sense of perspective, both visually and thematically.

Since I missed out on what I think it the quintessential Paranormal Activity experience, I'm going to just share some observations in lieu of the standard review.

Size does matter, but in the opposite way.

Micah and Katie live in a huge house. One that, honestly, doesn't really seem like theirs. They have three bedrooms, all of them done up with queen-sized beds. No junky storage room. No office for Micah, though he supposedly spends most of his days there "at the office." The middling efforts to disguise the set aside, the real issue is that their house is too big for them keep an eye on what's going on. The demon can play with their heads for so long because there's so much unsupervised room for the demon to roam around in.

In contrast, if the movie featured my wife and I in our apartment, we would have reached the do or die moment with our tormentor in the first 10 minutes of the film. We wouldn't have any "Did you see those lights go on?" moments. No slamming doors, no need to have one person wait vulnerable in the bedroom while the other explores the attic or whatever. Nope. We can pretty much do the whole sweep for demonoid phenomenon from our bed.

That saved time is something to consider if you're demon haunted and looking for new digs.

Don't negotiate with terrorists from beyond.

Depending on which ending you see, either Katie and Micah end up dead or Micah ends up dead and Katie gets demonified. Variable details aside, it's fair to say that they get royally screwed regardless of the ending you prefer.

I bring this up because Micah and Katie regularly fail to pull the trigger on getting outside help because they fear that bringing in exorcists or the Ghostbusters or whatever will upset the demon. And if they upset the demon, the demon might kill them both. Or kill one of them and demonify the other. Better not risk upsetting the spirit of evil that dwells in their house and wishes to harm them. After all, the demon might get so mad it will wish to harm them even more harmfully.

This would also be an opportune time to mention that their fears of what might happen if they upset the demon that wants to eat their souls or whatever are crystalized by an account of a similar case of possession that ended with the death of the demon-haunted woman involved. When the woman sought outside help, the demon killed her. It's worth noting that they find the story following a clue the demon left them. That's right. Essentially the demon sends them to "proof" that they'll die if they try to get help. Why the demon might be trying to scare them away from getting outside help doesn't seem to cross the collective mind of Katie and Micah.

What's the take home? Don't hesitate. Don't listen to the soul-craving embodiment of all that's unholy. Get help immediately. Get a bunch of collar-wearing pros to hit this mammer jammer with the smells and bells and take the fight to him. Don't let the demon set the agenda and don't play by his rules. He's pure evil. Nothing you are going to do will make him eviler.

The alternate ending isn't all that.

Though much has been made of the clumsy CGI at the end of the theatrical release, less has been made of the narrative opacity of the original ending. In the original, despite the fact that we've spent the whole movie learning that the demon "wants" Katie for some reason - presumably possession, I guess - the demon uses his handful of minutes within her to make he commit suicide. Which means that really the demon just wanted to kill her, I guess. But he's been inexplicably waiting 20 odd years for just the right night for it. Maybe demons are just really picky about when they off somebody or maybe it took more than two decades for the demon's bad-emotion-o-meter to fill up to it Finishing Move threshold. I dunno.

Honestly, the original ending strikes me as if it belonged to a film in which we were never clear whether or not Katie was haunted by an invisible monster or whether she was just crazy. Then the last image of her cutting her own throat would be ambiguous. Was she under demonic possession? Is she insane? (In fact, if we have to allegorize this flick, I propose we ditch the untenable domestic violence allegory for an allegory of what a resurfacing mental condition can do to a household. It's like The Metamorphosis, but being haunted by a demon replaces turning into a bug as your symbol for mental illness. The rest falls loosely into place: fears that treatment might be worse than the disease, her significant other's powerlessness, getting dire news but no real help from specialists who pass you on to other non-helpful specialists, etc. It's a start.) But since the filmmakers firmly establish the reality of the supernatural threat, it forces you to wonder why the demon didn't just drop a magic piano on Katie's head years ago.

Awkward as the visuals may be, the theatrical ending at least makes sense with the film's own established narrative. Between the two, I found it the more satisfying.

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Mad science: "The case of the haunted scrotum."

Vaughan of Mind Hacks discusses an unusual case human's seeing meaning - specifically, in this case, a human face - in random data. He tells it better than I do:

This is quite possibly the oddest example of an illusory face I have ever discovered.
Seeing meaningful information in meaningless data is a psychological effect known as pareidoia or apophenia and this is an example that was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1996:

The case of the haunted scrotum

A 45-year-old man was referred for investigation of an undescended right testis by computed tomography (CT). An ultrasound scan showed a normal testis and epididymis on the left side. The right testis was not visualized in the scrotal sac or in the right inguinal region. On CT scanning of the abdomen and pelvis, the right testis was not identified but the left side of the scrotum seemed to be occupied by a screaming ghostlike apparition (Figure 1). By chance, the distribution of normal anatomical structures within the left side of the scrotum had combined to produce this image. What of the undescended right testis? None was found. If you were a right testis, would you want to share the scrotum with that?

J R Harding

Consultant Radiologist, Royal Gwent Hospital

Pic below:

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Stuff: And Mrs. Barrett would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you kids!

Forgive me if my recent infatuation with the archives of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle is wearing thin on you screamers and screamettes who don't dig the wacky Victoriana. But this story from August 29, 1901 issue had a goofy charm to it and I couldn't keep it form myself.

Cryptically titled "Only One Foot Was Visible," today's story covers a haunted house that caused a stir in Fort Hamilton, a neighborhood that grew up around the Fort Hamilton Army Garrison in Brooklyn.

The ghost, described a female figure about 35 years of age, appeared regularly in the windows of an abandoned home on Fort Hamilton Avenue and Ninety-second Street. Occasionally she was robed in white, but some spotted her dressed in black. Witnesses – and there would eventually be many witnesses – claimed that audible moans came from the house whenever the ghost would appear.

As luck would have it, the building across the street from this haunted house was the home of two Brooklyn police officers: Patrolman Frank Many, who lived with his mother, and Detective Martin White, who lived with his wife. Mrs. Many was the first to spot the ghost. According to the story, Mrs. Many saw the ghost several times. When she told her skeptical son of the restless spirit, Frank "scoffed at the idea and paid no attention to the matter at first."

I can only assume that, eventually, his mother's nagging wore down Patrolman Many's resistance to the idea of the continued existence of the spirit after bodily death. Without a word of explanation as to why Many changed his mind, the article states that Many "spent several nights trying to solve the mystery of the ghost, but although he would see her, yet she always eluded him."

Having now seen the specter, the patrolman called for back-up and enlisted the aid of Detective White. White, apparently without the aid of Many, also "for several nights . . . kept vigil, but failed to capture the woman."

By this point, the presence of the ghost had the whole neighborhood in an uproar. Speculation about the identity of the ghost became a popular pastime. As nobody could think of a suitably tragic candidate from the house's past, many wondered if it wasn't a a spook that had immigrated from some more tragic place. Crowds gathered around the house nightly. Some nights more than 200 people came to see the spirit. The ghost was seen regularly, but then, inexplicably, disappeared for days. After several nights, the excitement began to die down and the crowds dwindled away to nearly nothing.

Then, as suddenly as she had vanished, the ghost re-appeared. Accord to witnesses the spirit was "robed in white" and she "appeared at the window, uttered a few mournful sobs and disappeared."

A frustrated Detective White decided that he'd had enough and he broke into the house. A mob of men and children followed him. From the paper:

They searched every hole and corner of the house, and just as they were about to give up the hunt, White saw a woman's foot inside the old fireplace. Stooping down the detective discovered the ghost. He dragged her out into the room, tore away a sheet from the woman's head, and discovered a trim, but greatly frightened woman. She was Mrs. John Barrett, who had making her home at the house, and the ghost business was merely a sham to keep people from entering the house.

Jinkies!

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Stuff: Portrait of a Victorian ghost hunter.

After the digital archives of the Brooklyn Eagle yielded up the odd story about a cult of blood-drinking faith healers, I decided to poke around some more. Subsequent poking around led me to the gentleman pictured above: Edward Drinker Cope, paleontologist and ghost hunter.

In 1894, the town of Mapleton on Long Island was caught up in a ghost panic. The public hysteria began on the first day of August. Passengers on a commuter train spotted the phantom near Woodlawn station. The Eagle quotes Richard Larke, superintendent of the road, who was a passenger on the train at the time:

We had just passed Woodlawn, the only station between Coney Island and Mapleton, without stopping, and had rounded the curve, when Fireman Van Pelt pulled my coat sleeve and pointed ahead, over to the left of the track. I saw what seemed to be a tall white figure. It seemed motionless at first, and you may believe me or not, but I'll take my oath that it was standing, or appeared to be standing, just where last Sunday's suicide occurred. It was tall and shadowylike. It had the appearance of a substance gradually melting into a filmy white nothing, and seemed to be covered with a long white, filmy veil. Two seconds after I saw it it began moving over toward the railroad track. It moved slowly at first, waving its long draped arms. I could see distinctly, as we approached nearer, that it motioned to us, gesticulating as one would do trying to stop a train. Engineer Mailon then saw it. He began to blow his whistle with a sucession of sharp toots and put on brakes. The thing didn't get out of the way, though it was careful to avoid the light of the head lamp, and the train was brought to a standstill. Just as the train stopped the thing glided off the track and skimmed along toward the woods, all the time gesticulating as if motioning someone to follow. It disappeared in the woods.

The same article includes a description of the phantom, though the source of these details is unclear.

It is about the size of a woman. It crouches. It has eyes of fire and is as big as a tree, but gets smaller when you look at it. It may have genuine feet, but perhaps they are imitation, for what use would feet be to a ghost? It can wail in a lonesome and despairing manner. Of course, it can glide. The most ordinary kind of a ghost can glide.

"Sunday's suicide" refers to Margaret Barning. She's a blank in the record. We know she killed herself with a pistol not far from the tracks. Witnesses, Mapleton residents, and reporters quickly linked the ghost to suicide and assumed the ghost was the restless soul of Barning.

After the initial report, Mapleton resident Jere Lott and his coachman came forward with their account of the apparition. They claimed to be the first residents to have seen the spirit. Mr. Lott describes the encounter:

I'm the first man, I believe, who ran against that ghost. Thursday morning, about 12:30 o'clock - and that was a whole twenty-four hours before the train stopped out here to let the thing get out of the way - I was awakened by hearing a tapping at my window pane. It was gentle at first. Then it got louder and oftener. I woke up with a kind of a start, but lay right still. I thought it was birds at first, but soon found it was no bird's sound. Then I began to get up, and, as I stirred about, the tapping stopped, and I heard a brushing sound against the window and then all was still. Next morning, when I had the ghost had been seen by the train folks I knew that's what I'd heard.

On August 11, just ten days after the first reported story, the ghost appeared to a rail work crew.

Saturday night the Sea Beach railway had a work train out in charge of Conductor Hilger and Engineer Kirk. A gang of laborers was along. This train was on a side track just below Mapleton, near Woodlawn, waiting for the 1 o' clock train from Coney Island to pass. The latteh [sic – CRwM] train was running in two sections to accommodate the crowd. After the first section of twelve cars had gone by, Mike Clooch, one of the laborers on the work train, emitted a blood curdling yell, pointed toward the woods, where the ghost had been seen to retreat, and made for the locomotive. Everyone divined at once the cause of his fright. The other employees caught the alarm and a general panic ensued.

Over the next couple of weeks, the number of sightings skyrocketed into the hundreds. These sightings, and others left unreported by the Eagle, were enough to attract the attention of a team of would-be ghost hunters. This crew was led by Edward Drinker Cope.

Edward Drinker Cope was a notable paleontologist whose fame in his chosen field of study has been stunted due to his occasional flights of theoretical fancy and his heroic capacity for engaging in reputation destroying rivalries. Cope's successes demand respect. He identified the Triassic class Archosauria, he was a brilliant taxonomist, a renowned field researcher, and the discoverer of two distinct dinosaurs. Even today he holds the record for scientific publications: Cope has more than 1,200 published papers. His theory that evolution tends towards increases in body size, known as Cope's Law, is still referenced in evolutionary theory, though its application is understood to not be universal.

Despite all those accomplishments, what Cope's best remembered for is his vicious feud with fellow paleontologist O.C. Marsh, a long running and mean-spirited rivalry that became known in as "The Bone Wars."

Both Cope and Marsh inherited a vast amount of wealth. Using their family's money, they launched on massively expensive fossil hunts that, over time, turned into a sort of bone-collectors race between the two deep-pocketed scientists.

More than professional jealousy was at stake in this mad race to accumulate specimens. Both men believed that accumulating data in the form of fossils would allow them an edge over their rival in solving one of the pressing scientific issues of the day: the historical role of evolution. Marsh was a Darwinian. Marsh's reconstruction of the evolution of the horse over sixty million years is widely credited as the first substantial fossil proof of evolution. Cope could not accept the absence of divine design in nature due to his religious upbringing. He became a leading exponent of the "Neo-Lamarckian" school of evolution, which relied on a proto-intelligent design premise. At the time, Neo-Lamarckian evolution was more popular in American than Darwin's ideas.

The two rivals also represented two differing paradigms of scientific endeavor. Cope was, in some ways, a throwback to the self-made polymath gentlemen scientists of the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries. A youthful prodigy, Cope was college educated, but disdained what he felt was the creativity-crushing organization and intellectually isolating atmosphere of university life. He never managed to score a degree (though he obtained honorary degrees from several institutions) and preferred to work as far on the fringes of academic life as possible.

In contrast, Marsh was educated in private schools, graduated from Yale, studied mineralogy in the US, learned anatomy in Berlin, an was an excellent example of a new kind of international, college-trained, theoretically-rigorous scientist-as-professional.

The first great fight between these two occurred in 1869. Marsh discovered a serious error in Cope's reconstruction of a Plesiosaur, a giant ancient sea monster. Cope had mistakenly put the skull of the giant beast on its ass-end, capping its long tail instead of its snake-like neck. This started a two decade-long tit-for-tat game of public corrections and humiliations between the two men. (Though Cope screwed up first, Marsh's biggest blunder is still with us. Marsh put the wrong head on an Apatosaurus body and dubbed the new species "Brontosaurus." Though the scientific community has long since debunked the bronto's existence, its popularity with lay people keeps the beast alive and well.)

From 1877 to 1892, the two men rushed to get new fossils discovered. In their dash to claim the next big find, Cope and Marsh's work led to the discovery of over 140 new dinosaur fossils. At one point, the rivalry got so fierce that Cope and Marsh's digging teams attacked one another with stones. The "wars" came to an end when Marsh's funding dried up and a financial crash dealt a blow to Cope's personal funds.

In 1892, Cope was given a position as the professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania. The small stipend helped stem the financial fallout of the Bone War, but it also tangled him up in the spiritualist movement. Since 1889, with the formation of the University of Pennsylvania Seybert Commission for Invesigating Modern Spiritualism, the school had thrown resources at some very unorthodox studies. Cope's 1894 ghost hunt was part of the same trend.

What Cope's stake in the study of spiritualism was is unclear. An 1888 article in Knowledge magazine summarized Cope's attitude to the is of life after death in the following terms:

Professor Cope seems to regard immortality as possible in spite of apparent evidence against it, but doubts the persistence of personality.

Still, Cope's skepticism did not rule out more general belief in the existence of a spiritual dimension to life and his own religiously influenced views of evolution were often described (as in an 1887 issue of Popular Science Monthly) as "spiritualistic conception of evolution." Perhaps Cope's sudden interest in the supernatural was a logical extension of his feud with Marsh. The Bone Wars had ended inconclusively for Cope. In sheer numbers of animals discovered, he'd actually come out behind Marsh. Though that wasn't as bad as the fact that the rapid accumulation of data did nothing to unseat Darwinism. However, evidence of the supernatural would seriously undermine the materialist basis of evolution.

Cope's ghost hunting expedition arrived in Mapleton on August 21, 1894. The team included Colonel John L. Burleigh, who, the Eagle claimed, was responsible for "offensive, defensive, and tactical movements." What sort of trouble they expected from the tree-sized specter of the late Ms. Barning is unclear from reports. Economist, statistician, and geographer Henry Farquhar took a short leave from his government post in Washington D.C. to join the expedition. In Mapleton, at the team's headquarters in the Clarendon Hotel, the team was joined by novelist William Hosea Ballou. Ballou had made a name for himself cranking out hack dime novels like A Ride on a Cyclone, before gain a reputation as a naturalist (though many felt that he was little more than a partisan propagandist for Cope in his long-running feud). Ballou's expressed reason for joining the team was to gather material for a new novel. Finally, an unidentified reporter from the The Brooklyn Eagle rounded out the team.

The team left the Clarendon Hotel at 10:00 and marched to the site of Barning's suicide. The site itself was in the middle of an untended field bounded by train tracks on one side. At the exact location of the suicide rested a "stone with a white cross on its face . . . level as a billiard table . . . it is the only stone in the field."

At 11:00, the team began searching a tree that, according to reports, was the site the ghost most frequently materialized from. To Cope's surprise, the team uncovered another team of would-be ghost hunters! Two members of the South Brooklyn Dramatic Society were conducting their own investigation in the hopes of creating a play from their research. If the sudden appearance of second Mapleton Phantom project upset Mr. Ballou, the Eagele did not report it.

Finding no evidence near the tree, the now seven-man team took positions in a nearby ditch to spy upon the haunted rock. Out of boredom, Ballou began making bad puns. He pointed to the gas-lamp glow of the nearby town of New Utrecht and questioned the newly-joined dramatists what town it was. When they answered New Utrecht, the novelist responded, "When was New Ute wrecked?" The Brooklyn reporter said that he didn't get it. Ballou repeated the joke several times. Professor Cope told everybody to ignore him.

The conversation turned to the question of personalities surviving after death. Cope expressed the opinion that it does not. He also stated he'd attended many séances, but all he'd ever witnessed was faked up stage gimmicks. Colonel Burleigh, however, claimed to have felt the presence of a departed spirit. According to Burleigh, he'd made a deal with five other soldiers that the first one to die would attempt to communicate from the dead. Burleigh claimed that he had been approached, in daylight and on a crowded city street, by the spirit of one of his dead comrades. He supplemented the story with several anecdotes from the Civil War regarding spirits and ghosts.

At 1:00, the members of the expedition grew quiet as, across the field, several dark figures approached the haunted stone. One of the figures rapped on the stone and the members of the expedition leap from the ditch and rushed them.

It turns out to have been a third ghost hunting party: several drunken ensigns from the ships the San Francisco and the New York. The ensigns were, it turned out, heavily armed. Only their inebriation had prevented them from firing on Cope's team.

Convinced that the ghost would not come out tonight, the all three groups of ghost hunters returned to town to catch the last train to Brooklyn. According to the reporter, the naval personnel remained roaring drunk and Ballou kept up the steady stream of awful puns.

Cope died in 1897. He suffered from gastrointestinal problems that were exacerbated by the fact that he was self-medicating with a derivative of formaldehyde. After he died, his brain was removed and given to the Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Cope's bones were extracted and studied by anatomy students at the University. Many theorized that Cope had died of syphilis. However, in 1995, Dr. Morrie Kricun a professor of radiology declared there was absolutely no evidence of bony syphilis on Cope’s skeleton.

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Movies: Over and out.

I have a soft spot for movies that pit their supernatural baddies against members of the armed forces. Properly done, the militarization of the victims of a horror film imparts a sense of genuine conflict. When a bunch of boozed up co-ed nymphomaniac camp counselors find themselves the target of an eight-foot tall semi-undead mass murderer, the action that follows resembles either a ritual sacrifice or the relentless grind of a factory farm meat processing plant. But, replace those teens with a squad of soldiers and you've suddenly got a ball game. The presence of significant levels of firepower, a pre-existing command structure meant to handle decision-making in a crisis, the willingness and capacity to meet violence with violence, training that facilitates teamwork between tactical assets, and an assumed minimal-level of individual competence all suggest that, whatever the flick might throw at them, the soldiers have a real chance at surviving.

Of course, this perception is largely illusory. My wife's mother likes to say, "God never gives you more trouble than you can handle." Horror films work on the opposite premise: The danger you face must always be greater than your capacities. Usually this works through a simple logic of escalation. Evil always rises to the occasion. If you've got a bunch of teens on a summer holiday, then a serial killer will come after them. Replace one of the teens with an ex-cop packing a .44 Magnum and the standard-issue serial killer will upgrade to a tribe of mutant cannibals. Dump the teens, remake the cop into a British soldier, add a half dozen other troopers, and the cannibal tribe will transform into werewolves. And so on and so on until you've got the entire military of a nation on one side and a giant city-stomping monster on the other.

But bigger baddies only get you so far. There's a pragmatic cap on the logic of perpetual escalation. Eventually you end up trafficking in such enormous levels of destruction that it becomes virtually impossible to conceptualize a threat that could withstand the onslaught. One workaround for the escalation problem is to hamstring the troops. You can give them incompetent leadership, place them in a training context that requires they have fake weapons, or cast "weekend warrior" National Guard types as your military personnel. Clever directors can also exploit the martial assumption that superior firepower, expertly applied, is what every situation calls for. Pit the troops against a virus, ghost, psychic phenomena, or other un-shootable thing and you've pretty negated their major advantage. Regardless of how it's done, we know on some essential level that being soldiers won't actually help the film's protags.

Still, the idea that being soldiers should matter is crucial to carrying off a good army versus monster flick. We have to feel that we're watching humanity's last line of defense, the people you'd call to handle this sort of thing, do real battle. If the mechanics of the plot are too naked visible, the actions of the characters take on an insignificance that fails to grab us.

The 2008 mercs versus monsters flick Outpost starts as a serviceable horror/actioner. But the logic behind its villainous otherworldly sci-fi Nazi immortals (not actually "zombies" in any conventional sense of the term, as is often stated) so overwhelms the agency of the soldiers of fortune at the films core that the flick's stripped down structure tips from pleasingly Spartan to smotheringly arbitrary. What starts as tension devolves into a forced march. There's plenty of gunfire, gore, and a rich layer of pulpy technobabble to act as eye glue. But once the audience has grokked that the actions of the protagonists don't have any effect on the plot's direction, the narrow pleasures of the film are undermined by the sneaking suspicion that they're just waiting for the film to run out of bodies.

The film starts with a pleasingly bare bones plot. The representative of a mysterious and unnamed cabal of investors pulls together a seven-man team of mercenaries to retrieve an unidentified item from a long-abandoned World War II Era bunker in an unnamed Eastern European country. This lack of information gives the flick a user-friendly, almost videogame-ish feel that makes up for in narrative efficiency what it lacks in depth. (Some of the deleted scenes available on the DVD include extended sequences that build character backstory and motivation, but director Steve Barker wisely left such distractions on the cutting-room floor).

Shortly after their arrival at the target, the crew is fired upon from dense woods surrounding the bunker. Convinced that they're outgunned, they hunker down. As they explore the bunker, they crew begins to fall prey to a seemingly unstoppable enemy who, despite the mercs best defenses, slips in and out of the bunker, killing with impunity.

In the meantime, their employer reveals that the target of their search is a "unified field generator," a bizarre bit of strangely Buck Rogers-ish tech that sits at the heart of this otherwise straightforward run and gun. Though I recall many Brits bemoaning the historical inaccuracies of American flicks, the backstory regarding the UFG shows that Americans have no monopoly on bad history or science. Attempting to explain the UFG, the employer explains that four forces govern the behavior of matter in the universe. He doesn't say what they are, but so far, so good. He explains that unified field theory explains the link between these forces. Then, he goes of the rails. Basically, in this film, the unified field acts like the "one ring to rule them all" of time and space. With a unifed field – which is less a mathematic explanation of the links between nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism than a new super energy – people could bend the rules that govern physics. We're told that Einstein was working on the unified field until he saw the detonation of the test a-bomb at Los Alamos. Worried about its destructive potential, he stopped working on it. (In fact, Einstein wasn't at the Trinity test, the a-bomb has little to do with unified theory, and the famed physicist never stopped working on unified field theory.)

The Nazis, it turns out, were ahead of the curve on the UFG and used the unified field to experiment on their own troops, turning them into silent, shambling things that can teleport, become solid or immaterial at will, and exist in a sort of timeless neverwhere outside of their bodies (which are piled up, perfectly preserved, in a cell in the bunker).

The rest of the flick follows our ever-dwindling crew as they slowly come to terms with truth about their unbeatable foes and getting soundly thrashed by Nazi ghosts from beyond time and space.

Though somewhat formulaic, the pick gets creativity points for its innovative and quirky monsters. I suspect the repeated use of "zombie" in reviews and commentary about this flick has to do less with intellectual laziness than with the fact that they're virtually impossible to classify using standard horror beast taxonomies. Furthermore, even in its less innovative aspects, the film's shot with a crisp confidence that carries the viewer over the less interesting bits. The acting is well handled, though nobody is given much beyond broad character types to deal with.

Ultimately, the real problem with the flick is that you can practically see the characters' strings being pulled by the director. For all the shouting and firing, characters are powerless to stop what comes their way. This powerlessness drains the fight and kill scenes of their drama and raises questions about the seemingly nonsensical way in which the Nazi unified field ghosts, or NUFGs, behave. (Even the script gives a nod towards this problem by having a character wonder aloud why the seemingly invincible NUFGs are taking so long to kill them all. He receives no explanation.) The end result is a sort of viewer indifference.

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