Category: The Ramble (page 169 of 463)

AND WE’RE BACK.

Sorry — I was away for the last couple weeks.

Which is how I’m leading into today’s flash fiction challenge! Drum roll please: I’d like you to write a story about a vacation. This can be in any genre. Horror, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, whatever. Whatever it is, it must be set in and around a vacation (though your interpretation of that is as flexible as your creativity).

Length: 1500 words

Due by: Friday, August 5th, noon EST.

Post at your online space.

Drop a link to it in the comments below.

ENJOY YOUR TRIP.

Gen Con did something pretty great this year, which is to say, it made sure to ensure gender parity across its guests and featured speakers and also started to address other disparities, too. Some of you may know that I cut my teeth in the paper RPG industry, working for over a decade with White Wolf and other game companies — I know too then that the game industry’s audience and its creators are wildly diverse, even as the industry often only chose to actively reflect the white guys like, well, yours truly. A.A. George wanted to write a little bit about what Gen Con has done this year in order to hype you up for what is likely to be a great con. (I won’t be there, razza frazza sadness. Maybe next year!) Here goes:

* * *

Gen Con: one of the oldest and largest gaming conventions in the world, where many important and famous members of the industry meet and mingle with casual hobbyists in an epic tribute to all things geeky. From trends in design to the hottest new releases, what happens here reflects what’s happening in analogue gaming.

This year I had the pleasure of sitting on the committee that chose the Guest of Honor and Industry Insider Featured Speakers at Gen Con.

Selecting the Featured Speakers was a fantastic – if daunting – challenge. An incredible pool of veteran and award-winning designers, organizers, writers, academics, artists, critics, and activists applied in droves for one of these coveted spots. This was Gen Con and we had to get it right.

The result? A beautiful testament to what gaming was, is, and will be: a powerful line-up of voices that represent decades of experience in the industry as well as emerging, innovative, and disruptive voices that are changing how we look at, understand, and play games.

Here are three reasons why the Guest of Honor and Industry Insider Featured Speaker panels can’t be missed:

1) You will meet many of the most talented and exciting people working in gaming today. Mike Pondsmith, the creator of Cyberpunk, Castle Falkenstein and a host of other games is the Guest of Honor this year. He is the founder of R. Talsorian Games, previously an Xbox design manager, former president of GAMA, and a rockstar speaker. Mike Pondsmith is a living legend.

The Featured Speakers boasts a star-studded cast.

Wesley Schneider is the editor-in-chief of Paizo, co-creator of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, author of Pathfinder Tales: Bloodbound, and is developing a game supplement for Vampire Hunter D.

Katherine Alejandra Cross is a PhD student in sociology at CUNY, a cultural critic who has written for Rolling Stone and Bitch Magazine, and a game critic whose work has appeared in Gamasutra, Polygon, and Offworld, and a professional speaker who has spoken at conferences like GDC and SXSW.

Jessica Price is the project manager at Paizo, a writer and director of the animated series Nanovor, which has garnered over a million views on Youtube, a writer and producer for Microsoft’s Kinect launch portfolio, and a writer for State of Decay 2.

Emily Care Boss is a game theorist, editor, writer and award winning game designer, founder of Black & Green Games and co-designer of Bubblegumshoe.

Anna Kreider is a game designer, illustrator, diversity consultant, and activist who has worked for Onyx Path, Green Ronin, and Wizards of the Coast and whose industry-watched blog Go Make Me A Sandwich has had more than two million views.

Kathryn Hymes, co-founder of Thorny Games, is an award-winning game designer who did her Masters in Applied Mathematics at Stanford, was the first computational linguist hired by Facebook, and utilized gamification strategies at Foursquare.

Hakan Seyalioglu is a Fulbright Scholar with a PhD in Mathematics with a focus in Cryptography from UCLA, a software engineer at Google working on Youtube and Google Play, and the co-founder of Thorny Games.

And so many more amazing speakers!

2) You’re going to consume a fantastic lineup of panels on a wide range of topics that will make you question your assumptions and look at gaming in new ways:

RPGs are more mainstream than ever, but many of us have stories about a game that went bad and how a potential player lost interest in the hobby. Making RPGs Welcoming To New Players will teach you what you need to know to ensure new players feel invited, welcomed and eager to come back to the table.

Want to know how to include sex in games from a woman’s perspective? Right There On The Kitchen Table: Sex in RPGs brings in three great female writers and designers who understand the complexities of representing sex in gaming.

Are you an aspiring game designer who wants to learn game development using established systems? Hacking As Other: Minority Game Design is a fantastic workshop that helped launch some great new games, including the hotly anticipated Bluebeard’s Bride.

So many RPGs are designed around fighting. But roleplay is more than the melees. Beyond Combat will open up a whole universe of gaming without all the battles.

Roleplaying is all about putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, understanding a different perspective. But how do we tell stories that are outside of our own lived experiences? Designing With Empathy will give you the tools to approach sensitive and challenging topics to create memorable, powerful play.

Are you a victim of imposter syndrome and feel paralyzed in the creative process? 5 Ways of Finding Your Spark will reignite your passion, your belief in yourself and your creative powers.

Writers and designers have struggled with creating honest and authentic trans characters. Three talented trans women will show you the way to making your stories and games ring true in Writing Trans Characters For Games & Fiction.

We all have powerful, personal stories inside of us. But telling them is tricky, sometimes even scary! Storytelling & Self-Censorship will give you the tools to tell incredible, intimate stories through gaming.

And many more!

3) You will be part of the gaming zeitgeist! This year’s Industry Insider Featured Speakers famously made history for finally reaching gender parity, capturing the spotlight in news outlets ranging from the BBC and the Washington Post to BoingBoing and Tor.com. It’s a game-changing year for Gen Con and you will get to be part of this special moment in history, hearing from the women and men who are making gaming relevant and exciting to wider audiences than ever before.

This is only a taste of the enormous talent, knowledge, and experience that the Featured Speakers have to offer you. Gen Con’s Speaker slate is spotlighting the Microsofts of the gaming world – industry giants who represent the foundation of modern gaming side by side with the Teslas of the gaming world – exciting, cutting-edge, inventive industry pioneers who are shaking up and expanding what gaming can be. Simply being in the same room with these people will open your mind to new possibilities, inspire your own gaming dreams, and help lead you down a path to one day join them as a future Gen Con Featured Speaker!

If you’re used to being told, “gaming can’t do that,” or “you can’t do that,” this year’s Gen Con will show you, “yes we can,” and “yes gaming can!”

We have a Japanese beetle problem, and really, the best way to handle Japanese beetles is to hand-pick them. If you ever use the bag traps, you note a disclaimer that says you need to change the bag traps often because Japanese beetles are repelled by the smell of their own dead. Which should give you an idea as to how I control the beetles — I hand pick them, I squish them, and then I leave their corpses there. It works. It reduces their attacks on our plants (the crepe myrtle in particular), because why wouldn’t it? If you saw a breakfast buffet but around it were piled the head-crushed corpses of other diners, you might stay the fuck away from that buffet. The smell alone would turn you off the scramby eggs, I think.

It works. The beetles stay away, mostly. And I get to crush beetles, like a proper weirdo.

Anyway, while there, I glanced over at one of our coral bells, and lo and behold —

A praying mantis, who we will call Zorak.

Mid-size, not fully-grown. Just hanging out. Waiting. I snapped some shots, none of them good.

Later, though, I found a carpenter ant. I took this ant, and I dropped him onto the coral bells.

Less than a minute later, Zorak had the ant and was crunching merrily upon it, and then I was able to capture some shots with which I am particularly delighted. (I also fed Zorak twice this morning, and much faster — drop ant, karate strike, time to eat.)

Before I post those shots, though, some more news-bug bits —

Tor.com has posted an excerpt of Invasive!

And you can find a sample of the Invasive audiobook narrated by Xe Sands here!

Non-bug-related, you will find an interview with me at io9 about Life Debt.

And back to bug-related but not very me-related, guess what? They found a whole new species of ant, and it is the Dragon Ant, and it is spiky and it is awesome. Go check them out here.

(Preorder Invasive: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N)

Now: TIME TO FEED ZORAK

THINGS AND STUFF AND NYAAAARGH

You’ll forgive me — for the past two weeks I’ve been in San Diego, sampling beaches and zoos and the fart-scented, soul-flensing flesh tornado that is SAN DIEGO COMICCON, which was an awesome, energizing, tiring, maddening, and overall fun experience. I met Wiliam Gibson! I marveled at Margaret Atwood at a distance! (Both have comics out, you know: Atwood’s Angel Catbird, and Gibson’s Archangel.) I hung with grand homies like Kevin Hearne, Victoria Schwab, Adam Christopher, Richard Kadrey, Jason Hough, and more. I got to finally meet Cecil Castilucci! It was good. It was tiring. I am dead now, especially since on the last day of travel our nice tidy five-hour flight was diverted at the last moment to Richmond, because some sinister monsoon had nested over Philadelphia like an angry thunderbird. There we waited in the plane for hours before finally getting to Philadelphia — where they had a gate for us but not a jetway. Another half-hour on the tarmac. Then because of all the flights landing, Philly was a traffic-locked mess and we couldn’t get a parking shuttle and then came little delay after little delay until we finally got home just after 2AM. Blergh. And all this with a five-year-old. (A five-year-old who did marvelously well — he was more patient than I was.)

Again: good trip. Bad ending. Am dead.

In the interim, things have happened.

No, no, nothing cataclysmic.

Good stuff!

Newsy stuff!

And so I am here to give you the quick lowdown.

1) Life Debt landed at #9 on the New York Times Bestseller list. AHHHH.

2) We’re just about three weeks out from when Invasive drops. And Booklist gives it a positive review, saying: “The eerie crawling sensation that comes with Wendig’s newest thriller will delight horror fans. Hannah Stander, a futurist consultant, is an expert in predicting how technology might be used for terrorists’ attacks. FBI agent Hollis Cooper, last seen in Zer0es (2015), calls Hannah in to examine a cabin containing thousands of dead bodies. Bodies consisting of one human stripped of his skin and a multitude of particularly aggressive and venomous ants that may have been genetically engineered. Hannah’s investigation leads to an altruistic billionaire known for innovative ideas and a remote island facility whose employees resent her presence and the implication their research has been used to commit murder. The isolated location, limited access to outside communication, and lack of trust make for a perilous situation when someone deliberately puts them all in mortal danger. Clever graphics placed throughout the text enhance the growing sense of terror in this tale of technology taken to a deadly extreme. This roller-coaster survival tale with copious amounts of creepy insects will appeal to fans of Michael Crichton.”

3) I’m doing a launch week event for Invasive at the mighty Doylestown Bookshop. August 17th. You going? You should go! It’ll be rad! I’ll give you some free stuff! I’ll yammer at your face! You can yammer at my face! It’ll be great! Exclamation!

4) Hyperion #5 is out today!

5) So is The Force Awakens #2!

6) So is How To Bombproof Your Horse! Okay, I didn’t write that one. Just checking to see if you’re still listening.

7) Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go start the writing of the fifth and penultimate Miriam Black book: The Raptor & The Wren. Hold still — this will only hurt a little…

I went on a bit of a ranty-pants tear the other night on Twitter whilst coming down off the high that was SDCC, and so I’ve gone ahead and Storified it here, with some additional thoughts added below for your amusement, edification, or irritation —

This election is really something special.

And it’s something special in the way that watching a dog eat a baby is special. It’s not a special you want, but it’s the special you get, and you really can’t look away despite your greatest desire to do so. It should be awesome and unparalleled because Clinton represents for all the girls and women in this country something they have not yet seen before, but it’s also unparalleled because we have Orangutan Mussolini, because we have the cult of Bernie gone rogue from Bernie the man in order to worship the ideals of Bernie the imago, and because somehow, third parties are gaining some traction here.

I feel like that’s so, so bizarre. I just — I cannot comprehend what’s happening.

Let’s just get this out of the way: I like Hillary Clinton. I do not consider her the lesser of two evils. I do not consider her evil. I do consider her a politician, which is sensible because she is one. She is a progressive politician who knows how to play the game, and I want someone like that on our side. I know some liberals have railed at her for changing her tune and getting on board with certain progressive causes — but that’s actually how it’s supposed to work. Her opinion and policy is not supposed to be fixed to the table with a nail. She’s supposed to duck and feint — when we tell her, “Hey, get on board with this shit,” and then she does it, that’s not waffling, that’s not an act of prevarication — that’s called her listening, responding, and course correcting. Now, as a politician, I also recognize that she is far from perfect. But we lionized Obama and while we got an amazing menu of accomplishments, we also got, yanno, drone strikes. I know it sounds pedantic, but I like to think I live in the real world where ennnh, this shit is going to be messier than I like, and I’m really not capable of even imagining the burden it must take to lead not only the country but to take that country out and to face the chaos of the world beyond it.

So: Clinton. I like her. She’s progressive, legitimately. She’s imperfect, but imperfect in the direction I prefer. No scandal has stuck to her because the evidence doesn’t mount. It just doesn’t work. Sure, sure, “where there’s smoke,” you say, except you’re ignoring the fact that the GOP has been at her feet since she stepped into the White House, lighting a kindling of newspaper under her shows and fanning the smoke up all around here — again and again.

And yet, I see a lot of progressives who hate her.

Like, fucking hate her.

And I see them believing all the stuff that isn’t even true. (And yes, I know there are very real and very fair criticisms of Clinton, too — again, see Obama and drone strikes, or FDR and internment camps, or or or.)

And I see them still championing Bernie, like he will somehow split his flesh and his spirit will separate from it, becoming the MANY-HANDED SOCIALIST ANGEL they believed him to be all along — taking us all to a magical promiseland where the tickets only cost $27.

And I see them championing Jill Stein or Gary Johnson — and that latter bit is especially puzzling, given how far apart Johnson and Sanders are politically. You jump from Bernie to Gary and, yeah, maybe you’re not that fucking progressive, hoss. All this in the face of the fact that voting for a third party is a literally worthless endeavor. Like I said above: you get two boxes. You have the illusion of more, but you drop your vote into one and it goes into this series of tangled pneumatic tubes and ends up in Trump or Clinton’s box. We do not have a system that rewards third parties. We just don’t. That’s unfortunate, but it’s a little late to change that now. Change it over the next four years. Stack the decks with candidates up the chain. You don’t start with the presidency.

All this is completely fucking baffling.

Even if you don’t like Clinton, what the shit? You’re really okay with a Trump presidency? Are you? Because, lemme guess — you’re white. Probably straight. Maybe a lad. A Trump presidency won’t hurt you all that much. Maybe in some off-chance it’ll even help you. But women? LGBTQIA? People of color? Who do you think is going to be likelier to believe that Black Lives Matter — Hillary, or Trump? Who do you think is going to actually work for LGBTQIA rights? Who do you think will protect Planned Parenthood, or abortion rights, or women in the workplace? Trump sees women as a series of tits all just lining up for him to ogle and squeeze. And never mind the fact that Trump has a de facto alliance with Putin — sure, that’s not terrifying at all, that the Russians are actively trying to put Trump on the throne. It’s fine. That’s all fine. Nothing weird about that. I’m sure the country will be in great hands. Tiny-fingered, tanner-smeared dictator hands. The best hands. So good, those hands. Anybody who doesn’t have those hands?

Sad!

The politician versus the plague.

One is imperfect. But the other will lead us all to ruin.

It’s like —

Imagine a garden.

This garden will be our food source for four years.

We all voted on what foods will go in that garden and we voted to plant eggplant, okra, kale.

And you’re like, “But I hate those.”

And we’re like, “No, yeah, sure, I get that, but they’re healthy, even if they’re not ideal to you personally — and we all voted and this is the garden we’re going with. It’ll keep us alive, it’ll maintain the soil for the next gardener, it’ll give us energy to continue on not just surviving but growing our community.”

And you’re like, “But I hate them. They’re gross.”

And we say, “Yes, but please understand — it’s this garden or we instead have to go into the woods to eat like, random mushrooms. They’re quite likely to poison many of us. And they won’t really sustain us. There’s no evidence at all that we can survive if we go out there.”

“But I hate eggplant.”

“Buuuuuut toxic mushrooms.”

“Okra? Ew, no.”

“Toxic. Motherfucking. Mushrooms. Not fun trippy mushrooms. Not healthy, edible mushrooms. The kind you eat and then you get stomach cramps and then you shit out your own bowels on the forest floor. And also Dave saw wolves out there. Wolves, man. Here we have a garden. It’s safe.”

“Kale, though. You hipster shit. Kale? I vote we burn the garden down and salt the ground and go into the woods because the giant question mark about how well we will fare against poisonous shrooms and starveling wolves is better to me than having to suck it up and eat my vegetables.”

“But you can’t just vote for yourself to leave. You’re voting for the tribe. If you vote we all go, we all have to go out there. And we all have a pretty good idea what’s waiting out there for us, so please, no. It’s not just about you. It’s about us.”

“Meh, it’s about me. It’s about what I want. Personal liberty trumps the needs of the community. Now excuse me as I take a scalding dump on this bag of seeds, because seriously, vegetables are really gross. YUCKY FACE. Let’s blow this pop stand, nerds!”

It’s not that I don’t understand the people who really want a kind of revolution — the problem is, if you just want revolution in any direction, you’re dangerous. You want revolution in a progressive direction, fine — but we’re not going to get that. We’re going to get pragmatism. We’re going to get compromise. And I think those can be features, not bugs. Sure, I understand that incremental progress is not as sexy as FLIPPING TABLES AND DEMANDING JUSTICE, but progress is still progress. And Trump is the antithesis of that. Trump genuinely wants to dismantle everything. He wants to wipe his ass with the Constitution. He wants to destroy social programs. He doesn’t even want the fucking job, really. He just wants the chair and the sash and the crown. Pence will be our “manager” while Trump takes the mantle of Trumpmerica, then when we’re bankrupt he’ll sell us off to Russia and fuck off to some island where he can cavort with the rest of his Greasy Marmoset People until death. Everything we are and everything that aids us — he wants it gone. Your third party vote will never elect a third party president. It really, seriously won’t. I know! That’s a huge bummer. I mean that. I get that it’s very upsetting that the political system has delivered unto you the illusion of many boxes when all you get is two. And I get that Bernie woulda been your guy, and now he’s Hillary’s guy instead, and I understand that upsets you, too. But incremental progress is better than setting fire to everything. Moving forward — even more slowly than we’d like — is better than than shoving everything we’ve gained into a cannon and then firing that cannon at a line of porta-johns.

I need you to hunker down. I need you to toughen up.

I need you to vote for the conscience of the tribe, not for you.

We all need it.

Don’t send us out into the dark forest.

Let’s grow the garden together.

Let’s keep the ground fertile.

Let us maintain what we have and build on it.

Let’s help each other instead of kicking it all into dust.

In other words: eat your damn vegetables.

Paul Tremblay is an asshole. He’s an asshole because he’s supremely talented, and really nice, and actually not an asshole at all, which makes me think he’s secretly an asshole. His two newest novels — Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock — are so good, they make me mad at him and make me mad at myself that I’m not him. Like I said: asshole. And then he goes and gets praise from Stephen King? Okay, let’s not gild that lily, dude. Jesus. Anyway. He writes these novels that, like the first season of True Detective, are what I call “supernatural-adjacent” — they live in a world where people believe in the supernatural, but you’re not quite sure how much of it is real or not. That they believe it is enough. Anyway, I said to Paul he was free to take the keys to terribleminds any time he wanted, and he wrote something that falls right in line with what I’m talking about. Please to enjoy. Oh also he wrote 23 footnotes.

* * *

(Or, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Fear the Bomb, and Cultists? Don’t Forget the Cultists…”)

Was I shouting, “Hail Satan¹,” dressed in cute little paisley bellbottoms, while eating breakfast cereal and watching Saturday Morning cartoons? No, of course not. It wasn’t that kind of satanic childhood. I was just your normal child of the 1980s who grew up watching 1970s satanic horror movies on TV. Okay?

I was a painfully skinny, quiet, not all that popular, and overly sensitive oldest child who kept to himself. From ages 9 through 14, my afternoon routine consisted of walking home from school by myself and then camping out in front of the TV. I’m sure some of you imagine life before Netflix, the Internet, and DVDs as akin to a digital dark age². In those wild-wild-west days of early cable television the movie menu of HBO was hardly an exhaustive cataloguing of our vast cinematic culture. Most of the movies HBO broadcasted were crap, and those crap movies ran in an endless loop just in case you hadn’t seen Seems Like Old Times³ fourteen times already. Besides Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn movies, I watched satanic horror movies; semi-classics like The Omen⁴ (1976), The Omen II⁵(1978), The Amityville Horror⁶ (1979), and the weird and terrifying Phantasm⁷ (1979).

Luckily, that new fangled cable TV was far from the only place for a kid to get his satanic horror fix. On Saturday afternoons a local UHF channel⁸ ran a program called Creature Double Feature. Score, right? But there was also plain old network television. Yes, I know, it’s now hard to imagine the three major networks filling the horror movie viewing void, but they did. After their morning game shows and soap operas, mid-afternoon network TV was the dumping group for so many movies, and 1970s horror movies in particular. One such afternoon TV mainstay was Race with the Devil⁹. Produced in 1975 and starring Peter Fonda, the underrated Warren Oates, and Loretta Switt¹⁰, two young couples are vacationing in the desert in their groovy RV when they stumble upon (oops!) a satanic cult ritually sacrificing some shmoe. Sort of a live-action Scooby Doo, they spend the rest of the movie on the run from Satanists. The movie is goofy and hokey, yes, but its ending with their RV trapped in the middle of the desert at night and suddenly encircled in a ring of fire and the Satanists chanting as they closed in, aye that scene still works. Another afternoon network favorite was the made-for-TV masterpiece Devil Dog: The Hound from Hell¹¹ (1978). It’s sort of like The Omen, but with a dog. A nice suburban family adopts a, well, devil dog. Cue the Satanists in robes¹², and a devil dog transformation scene in the climax that’s the special effects equivalent of a flying saucer on a string.

Despite my full-fledged scaredy-cat status¹³, the satanic movies weren’t as scary to me as movies about hauntings, invading aliens, sharks, and psycho killers¹⁴. The satanic movies featured clearly delineated sides in their portrayal of good vs. evil. It was obvious who was good and who was evil and what team you wanted to be on. In that way those movies were like so many of the comics and cartoons I also enjoyed. Even in the movies where the evil won or wasn’t destroyed, there was the promise that good would always be on the right side of a robe-less history. It really didn’t matter if Satanists were afoot, plotting their flawed plots because, thanks to the movies, I would always be able to tell who was good and who was evil, and I would surely prevail. Plus it was kind of fun pretending to be chased by hapless satanic cult members while out on my bike heroically completing my paper route¹⁵.

Of course when I was a kid I had no idea that these movies were a reflection or a symptom of the satanic panic of the 1970s and 1980s. The fundamentalist Christian fear that there was in fact an underground network of Satanists secretly controlling society went totally mainstream. Satanists were to blame for a rise in secularism, the decline of morals, and for wild, logic-defying tales of ritual child sexual abuse and even sacrifice. It sounds downright silly now (I hope) but there were police departments in the US giving talks and departmental instructions about how to deal with the heinous crimes committed by upwards of 50,000 Satanists operating in the United States¹⁶. Of course the 50,000 number has no basis or foundation in factual data, just as repressed memories of Satanic ritual abuse were faked/coerced/debunked and many people who were accused (some convicted¹⁷) of crimes supposedly linked to Satanism were innocent.

As I got older and became a teenager in the Reagan 1980s, my interest/obsession evolved away from satanic horror movies and instead I became fixated on the idea that the world would almost certainly end in a nuclear war. That fear wasn’t as much fun. At times it was near incapacitating. My nightmares no longer were populated with sharks, monsters, and creepers, but a boom, a blinding flash of light, and the earth rumbling beneath my feet¹⁸. I remember adults and classmates discussing the geopolitical climate of the Cold War in the cinematically clear lines of good-vs.-evil. We were the good guys and the Soviets were the devils with their finger on the button. Americans were as certain and fervent in our righteousness as zealots. Our president even said we were the good guys. Ronald Reagan famously dubbed the USSR and the spread of communism as the Evil Empire and he referred to the age old struggle between good and evil.¹⁹ An awkward new-teen, I couldn’t articulate it then, but I knew the simplistic reduction to good vs. evil that I so enjoyed in my movies was more than wrong in practice, it was disastrous. The good-vs.-evil reduction removes empathy and tolerance from the equation, which leaves us only with enemies and hateful, dangerous acts and decisions, and it helped push humanity to the precipice of nuclear annihilation. Yet somehow, despite all of the Satanists scurrying around and the Evil Empires in our midst, I managed to survive the 1980s. Phew.

Circling back to the movies, I didn’t watch the most famous and popular 1970s satanic horror movie of all time, The Exorcist (1973), until I was a young adult safely ensconced in the early 1990s. I had yet to see it because my parents had deemed it too scary for the kid-me²⁰. By the time I watched that iconic movie my understanding of good vs. evil had evolved, thankfully, and I realized that those lines were blurry if they were there at all. The movie was shocking and frightening but in not quite the same way as it would’ve been if I’d seen it as a kid.

There were scores of other 1970s movies featuring Satan or with the words devil or hell appearing in the title even if Satan wasn’t actually in the movie²¹. As an adult I’ve returned to many of those films from my childhood and I’ve watched other classic and not-so-classic occult, or what people now call ‘folk horror,’ movies from the 1970s that I’d missed.²² There are, of course, more recent satanic/occult revival films being made today that are well worth your time, and I highly recommend House of the Devil (2009), Kill List (2011), and A Field in England (2013).²³

All those movies I watched as a kid, though, they’re still there. They blend together to form this cumulative kaleidoscopic memory, a mishmash of garish colors and psychedelia, blinding sunlight filters that were supposed to be gritty and realistic, religious iconography and the reddest blood you’ve ever seen, those musical cues and chants, those wonderfully over-the-top arias of occult insanity, and the hoards of robe-wearing wild-eyed cult members. Those movies are not at their scariest when the devils or the dogs or the devil dogs are finally on screen for the climactic battle of good vs. evil. It’s the blinding as a nuclear-bomb-flash fervor within the cult membership that is the scariest part because it’s so recognizable. The lazy, soothing irrationality of the us-versus-them mentality, the seething anger and hate of our currently toxic political climate, and the unwavering ecstasy in the madness of righteousness and belief is what terrifies the adult-me now.

1. That most famous of lines, equal parts camp and terror, was uttered at the end of Rosemary’s Baby, released in 1968. I know but it might as well have been the 1970s. Work with me, people.
2. Sans bubonic plague. My childhood was rat-free generally, except for the water rats my cat killed and left on our doorstep. So there were rats after all. My bad.
3. Not satanic. At least not overtly.
4. Gregory Peck and Lee Remick adopt Satan’s kid. He had the number 666 etched on his head and everything. I used to look for those numbers on my brother’s noggin. This is all for you, Damien!
5. More Damien, this time getting his antichrist on at a military academy. I’ll admit I was rooting for Damien in that movie.
6. Terrible “based on a true story” claptrap starring Margo Kidder and James Brolin’s beard, plus a fly covered priest. Get out, indeed.
7. The creepy mortuary and the Tall Man and his flying spikey ball of death gave me nightmares.
8. UHF was not just a Weird Al Yankovic movie, but a real thing! A radio frequency designation on which local stations would broadcast and… Okay, it’s a Weird Al movie.
9. Check out the glorious trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqv6PIH_ymY
10. I had no idea until the writing of this essay that M*A*S*H’s Major Houlihan was in this movie. Ten bonus points awarded to RwtD.
11. It starred Richard Crenna and Kim Richards, and it’s not really a masterpiece. It barely qualifies as camp. You can watch the movie in its entirety on YouTube if you wish. Why would you wish that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSAmUDlUUhQ
12. They always wear robes. But it totally slows them down in chase scenes, and fist fights in those things? Forget it. There should be a The Incredibles-esque no capes! rule for Satanists. Except, you know, it would be no robes!
13. Seriously. I wouldn’t go in the basement by myself. I always forced my younger brother to go up the stairs to our shared bedroom first as bait? an offering? just in case? I slept with a fortress of stuffed animals built around my head to help protect me; a sleep strategy that I employed for more years than I care to admit.
14. Burnt Offerings (1976), the Donald Sutherland Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Halloween (1978), Trilogy of Terror (1975), and Jaws (1975) were among the movies that gave me nightmares for years afterward.
15. As opposed to imagining the real-life serial killer and purported Satanist the Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez)—thousands of miles away, mind you, in Los Angeles—had somehow dropped in on the east coast to terrorize my paper route.
16. 50,000 Satanists Can’t Be Wrong! That’s a record by that Elvis guy, yeah? The number 50,000 mysteriously first appeared in the cultural consciousness during the Satanic panic. It was nothing but an imaginary scare figure, a figure Geraldo Rivera bumped up to a cool one million during one of his embarrassingly shoddy and sensationalistic TV specials. Others claimed that 50,000 represented the number of children slaughtered by Satanists. Yikes! Oddly enough, no one ever claimed it represented the number of cans of Deviled Ham sold or consumed in a fiscal year. Anyone remember the “It’s a devil of a ham!” catchphrase, anyone? Anyway, the very same 50,000 number appeared again in a less supernatural form in the early 2000s as major network news breathlessly and erroneously reported that 50,000 pedophiles were prowling Internet chat rooms and attempting to prey on our children. Read Dan Gardner’s excellent book The Science of Fear for more on the odd cultural role of 50,000.
17. re: The West Memphis Three http://www.wm3.org/
18. Watching the nuclear war aftermath films The Day After (1983) and Testament (1983) remain two of my most scarring pre-teen experiences.
19. “Let us beware that while they [Soviet rulers] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination over all the peoples of the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world…. I urge you to beware the temptation …, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of any evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.”—Ronald Regan March 8, 1983— in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/reagan-quotes/
20. They were right.
21. The Legend of Hell House (1973) is a fine example. It’s really a weird haunted house story (based on a novel by the excellent Richard Matheson) with a self-amputated dude in lead-lined room. Seriously!
22. Not-so-classic: The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1973), oddly earnest and trippy, but ultimately disappointing. Classic: The Wickerman (1973). The ending with the villages signing a folk song while Edward Woodward’s unflappably pious police Sergeant reciting Psalms as he burns inside the giant man made from wicker is one of the most horrific scenes in film history.
23. House of the Devil, directed by Ti West is made to purposefully look like a 70s/80s satanic panic film and it’s fantastic. Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and A Field in England both turn to occult/folk horror but in different ways. Kill List is a brutal hammer blow. A Field in England isn’t trippy, it’s the trippiest.