Holy Trinity vs. the Trifecta of Terror?

Horror is a literary and film genre I’ve always loved from a child. Give me a good Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr. or Boris Karloff film above the over sanitized song & dance Busby Berkley movies any time, any place or anywhere. Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy drove me nuts with their bursting into song at the most inopportune moment during the story.  I’ve never had any external or internal conflict concerning my Christian faith with my fondness for Vampires, Werewolves or zombies. Why? Because I know that they are not real.  Just scary entertainment and nothing more.

Albeit back in my college days there was a Goth girl in my school who drank human blood. Believe me I gave the Goths a wide berth but then again since I was an older (36 year old) night time student we never crossed paths so she and her minions never had the opportunity to access the quality of my veins and arteries.

Like many women I’ve dated a guy with a hairy back. Poor fellow had more hair on his back than on his head but at no time during the months that we were together did he become a snarling libidinous ravenous Wolf Being after Midnight. If he had made some sort of hirsute transformation in the midst of our eating dinner or watching a play then I would have become Cat Woman.

No, not the Cat Woman most of us are familiar with from television and movies but the old school Cat Woman in the film, 1942 flick “Cat People” where the woman upon sexual arousal turns into a real cat! A Panther!  Yes I know there was a 1982 remake of Cat People but I did not like that one.  The original 1942 version was much better.  Did you get that visual of the Cat People Woman and the Werewolf changing during their most erotic moments?  

The Trifecta of Terror: Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies all came from the overly active imaginations of writers mixed with folklore from various parts of the world.  Bram Stoker created Dracula based on myths and legends from Eastern Europe coupled with a healthy dose of hidden references to repressed sexuality. Mary Shelley gave birth to Frankenstein or as was in the original title The Modern Prometheus which may have been a possible response to the debate on evolution and of course the forbidden realm of the occult.

As for Zombies, I’m not really too keen on them but I see Zombies aka The Walking Dead in my daily dealings with the general public who display a shocking lack of basic historical knowledge, good manners, common sense and a lack of respect for the rest of the visitors or for my hardworking fellow co-workers.  The Walking Dead is also an accurate description of our government, i.e, the Congress and Senate as well as an apathetic public that believes the hype and drinks the Kool-Aid.  Unfortunately with the advent of modern media such as personal computers, tablets, the Internet, the Web, Smartphones, Laptops, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social media perhaps the true horror and terror of the movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” has come to pass.  Many have been sucked into the mindlessness of Reality TV resulting in assimilation into the Borg Hive.

My favorite Horror sub-genre is psychological horror. It’s that seemingly, quiet, peaceful mundane happenings in small towns and pastoral villages across the globe, that have a hidden under current of evil. Stephen King and Anne Rice are Horror Masters. You know those small towns that exude normalcy but are really the Belly of the Beast. The late great Rod Serling hit the name on the head with the unexpected with the classic TV series, “The Twilight Zone.”  A television favorite of many viewers’ decades after his death.  I’ll leave you with two links to Two of my favorite disturbing Tales of Understated Terror.

A great literary example is the Shirley Jackson short story, “The Lottery.”   http://sites.middlebury.edu/individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf

AND

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner    http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html