#anthropologists everywhere are baffled

[historical-halloween]

Pages 1-2 of “Death Makes A Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween” by David J. Skal

Introduction: The Candy Man’s Tale

Because it was raining on Halloween 1974, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, a thirty-year-old optician in suburban Houston, accompanied his eight-year-old son Timothy and five-year-old daughter Elizabeth on their eagerly awaited neighborhood rounds of trick-or-treat.

Cautious parents knew that Halloween was already the most dangerous night of the year for children, even without rain. Halloween was traditionally believed to be the night when the veil between life and death was at its most transparent. On a purely statistical basis, this was indeed true. Youthful traffic fatalities rose precipitously and tragically every October 31, owing to masked kids’ drastically reduced fields of vision, not to mention the reduced visibility of the children themselves, often dressed in costumes that merged dangerously with the murk.

Ronald O’Bryan was just one foot soldier in a new, nationwide army of vigilant parents who took to the streets with their children each Halloween. It had once been considered safe for children to roam unchaperoned through their neighborhoods on Beggars’ Night, but now parents were wary. They weren’t concerned about the children’s mischief historically associated with the holiday- the soaped windows, toilet-papered trees, and quaintly toppled outhouses were mostly things of the nostalgic past. Most modern children, in fact, would be totally baffled is a contrarian householder demanded a trick in lieu of dispensing the expected sweet. Now, many commentators bemoaned the transaction’s degeneration into an empty consumer ritual without rhyme, reason, or reciprocity. The anthropologist Margaret Mead, observing the decline of any implied threat in “trick or treat” by the mid-1970′s, waxed nostalgic about earlier times when trick-or-treating had a distinct role in the socializing of children: “It was the one night a year when the child’s world and the adult’s world confronted each other and children were granted to take mild revenge on the adults.”

Somehow, Halloween no longer had anything to do with extending latitude or license to children. It was more about the reaffirmation of parental control, a ceremonial reassurance of the family’s integrity and stability in an uncertain world. By 1974, the bright economic promises of the post-World War II era had faded and, for many, even soured. The unsavory Watergate revelations seriously eroded the idealism of many Americans. Supporting a family, much less protecting it, had become acutely difficult for countless young breadwinners. Inflation had reached the worst levels in twenty-seven years, and unemployment was skyrocketing. Gas lines were everywhere. Halloween handouts were just about the only relief available to the working wounded.

Ronald O’Bryan himself was in considerable debt, even threatened with the repossession of his car. Financial problems had already forced him to give up home ownership. But if these things were on his mind October 31, 1974, he didn’t share them with his children. O’Bryan’s only Halloween mask was a happy face- his own.

This day was about the kids. Ronald O’Bryan would see to it. The O’Bryan children eschewed the traditional, homemade guises of mischief-making witches, ghosts, and goblins, and instead wore officially licensed, profit-making costumes inspired by the 1968 motion picture “Planet of the Apes” and its successful franchise of sequels. Corporate authorization and control now seemed to be just as much a part of the new Halloween as the exercise of parental prerogatives.

Want to read more? Find the book here!

[gottagobuycheese]

if this is the last piece of wisdom I am every able to impart upon you, let it be this: 

check your email, and if you ever wonder if your emails have gone through, ask. 

[komahinasecretexchange]

Title: Surprisingly, We Made It!

Author: @thatsrightdollface

For: @namsuuuuuuu

Rating/Warnings: This is probably somewhere between G and T, tbh.  I guess I might tag this for the idea that Chiaki is mentioned as dead?   She’s… A ghost.  This is a fantasy AU!

Prompt: komaeda and hinata both trying to break into the same place on the same night by accident, only to be chased by the police upon meeting and having to hide in a closet/cupboard/safe together until they leave

Author’s Notes: Hi!!!  I hope you enjoy this~ :D  It’s the first gift out of three that I have for you this time, so please be on the lookout for the others!!!  Rounded up, this is about 3,000 words.  

The museum became a different place at night — Nagito Komaeda had known it would, but it was something else to see those bustling halls transformed into a grey-tile tomb like this.  The display cases seemed to watch him pass, waiting and polished, decorated with dead things: mummified hands, chipped pottery, swords people had assured him were definitely haunted when he took the museum’s official tour earlier that day.  Komaeda was good at drifting through places most of the time.  He was sure no one from his tour group would remember him when the museum started looking into suspects the next morning.

Komaeda smiled at somebody’s death mask, sitting propped up on a green velvet display in one of those glass cases.  He wouldn’t be here long.  He’d just take what he needed and be on his way.  The security systems fizzled out as Komaeda wandered by, after all.  Bits of dust formed over the cameras, crawling like mold.  This wouldn’t be the first piece of the puzzle to Komaeda’s life he’d stolen out of a museum. If he unraveled the whole mystery of his good luck/horrible luck curse, the roller coaster balance of his existence, maybe Komaeda would even get to rest someday.  Maybe he’d finally know what any of the ridiculous things that happened to him meant.

Komaeda hummed to himself as he strode through the museum.  He patted a display of a saber tooth tiger on the head and murmured, “Hi, kitty,” in a sing-song voice — he was wearing torn clothes, and the edges of his hair were singed from a fire that’d started out of thin air in his hotel room yesterday morning.  Even the air was subject to Komaeda’s madcap luck, see?  His curse.  Even the air would have to explain itself when Komaeda found the crumbly ancient book he’d come here for.  And, you know, figured out how to read it.  He had an anthropologist contact lined up.  It would be alright.

Things always swung back around, for Komaeda.  The dice rolled into a winning order even if they were weighted to go the other way.  At a cost, of course.  Always at a cost.

Komaeda wouldn’t have to pick the display case lock to get the book he needed, he didn’t think.  The thing would just fall right into his open hands, somehow, and then he’d turn on his heal and head out.  The museum smelled like freshly mopped floors and old, rotting paper.  When Komaeda’d passed a security guard earlier, he had waved cheerfully and pretended to flash a badge.  It worked.  It so often worked, and then Komaeda got arrested for a murder he didn’t commit or something just going out to buy bread.  He was used to it.  As used to it as a person could be, he thought.

When the cop bellowed, “Get back here, you!” somewhere off in the distance, well…  Komaeda murmured, “Oh no,” to himself almost playfully, as if he were keeping up the game.  But then he heard some frantic pounding footsteps right behind him…  The skidding of sneakers  over freshly washed tile, the shattering of a display glass window, all that.  He started to walk a little faster, glancing over his shoulder.

A guy with spiky hair blew by Komaeda, breathing heavily, sneakers squeaking all over the floor in possibly the least-stealthy way possible.  “Get out of here!” the spiky haired guy called.  “Officer Nidai’s not messing around!”

Officer Nidai?  Wonderful.  Komaeda knew Officer Nekomaru Nidai all too well.  Just his luck that guy would be here, wasn’t it?  He’d been suspicious of Komaeda ever since he turned up in town.  Whenever somebody caught Nagito Komaeda in the act, of course he just slipped away again like water between cracks in the concrete.  Like clouds dissolving into the sky.  His luck, eventually, turned.  Always, always.  But that didn’t mean people couldn’t try their own luck at catching him, every now and again.  It was annoying, but Komaeda shrugged off fatal things as “annoying” so often nowadays he was beginning to forget the meaning of the word.

Komaeda sighed and ran a hand through his pale, flyaway hair.  It would’ve been no good to lose this chance — he was so desperately close to another piece of his puzzle.  He stared running, too, and by the time he found an open door to duck inside it sounded like Officer Nidai had been joined by a whole crew of cop-friends in the museum hallways.  They were calling encouragement to each other, or something.  Listening to them might’ve been pretty goofy, under different circumstances.  So tragically earnest. It was like they were living in a separate world than the one Komaeda knew.

“What rotten luck,” Komaeda told the cramped, empty room he’d found himself in.  Or, the room he thought was empty, anyway.

The spiky haired boy who’d been charging through the halls flicked on a desk lamp, peering up at Komaeda with a baffled, frustrated expression on.  He’d been hiding under a table, it looked like, and up close Komaeda could see a whole stash of video game stuff secured in a cutesy canvas shopping bag over his shoulder.  Was that what he snuck in here to steal?  That?  There were so many priceless jeweled glass eyes in this particular museum, so many spells written in actual molten gold ink.  Did this guy seriously just rob the Lost and Found?

“Rotten luck?  That’s, uh, one way of putting it.  I swear I locked that door,” the spiky-haired guy hissed.  Komaeda nodded.  Yes, he probably had.  Locked doors didn’t really have anything on a luck-curse, though, did they?

Komaeda locked the door behind him, again, nodding to the boy under the table with a careful smile.  Testing the door so he could see it didn’t just swing open this time, revealing them both to the hall.  The office they’d ended up in was one of those glorified broom closet spaces, books stacked haphazardly everywhere.  There were pinned butterflies hanging on the walls, and dusty photograph frames buried under paperwork on the desk.  There weren’t any windows or obvious trapdoors leading to secret museum catacombs around — yes, Komaeda had found himself stuck in museum-catacombs before, and he’d nearly starved to death before making his way back to the gift shop.  Not a good chance of that here, though, it didn’t look like.  For better or for worse.

Komaeda sized the spiky haired guy up for a second — he was cute, in a flustered, running-headlong-through-a-museum-at-two-AM kind of way.   His hands were broad and warm-looking; his eyes were challenging and proud, as if he were half-convinced Komaeda was a double agent for the museum or something.

“Looks like we’re stuck,” Komaeda said.  “Don’t worry.  I’m sure they’ll go away soon.”

They didn’t, of course.  Just his luck.

…

Hajime Hinata had only been messing around with supernatural nonsense for a handful of weeks, now, and even he could tell the guy he met on his poorly-planned-out museum heist was soaked in weird old curses.   They clung to this dizzy-eyed stranger same as his own skin, same as his shadow.  Hinata would’ve guessed the guy’d been born with those curses already latched on, honestly, and they were at least part of the reason he could slip locked doors open without even trying.  Part of why his smile looked wrong, too, somehow, like Hinata would always be looking at him through a funhouse mirror.

From the stolen-back bag of video game stuff slung over his shoulder, Hinata’s friend Chiaki Nanami said, “We should keep an eye on this guy, maybe, Hajime.  Everyone he loved died…  Messy.  They’re whispering about it right now.”

Chiaki had died so recently, it still didn’t feel real.  She had hung on to pieces of her life without really meaning to, so…  Of course Hinata was doing his best to gather her back up.  Chiaki had been his best friend since they were learning to count, after all.  They had played a few of the games in her old canvas bag together, but not all of them by a long shot.  It was better Chiaki speak through these clunky things — through her old hair ribbons and photographs and commemorative game art books — than disappear completely, if you asked Hinata.  The museum people hadn’t been willing to give him the bag during the day, so this was what had to happen next, right?

He’d tried this the easy way.  At least he had to give himself that. Hinata shifted Chiaki’s bag a little way out of the cursed guy’s view. If anything, the stranger looked softly amused by his efforts. He shook his head.

“I’m not interested in your prizes,” he told Hinata, voice swaying and almost, almost prim.  A former rich-kid’s voice.  “I’m sure you have your reasons for everything, just like I do.  Right?”  After a few moments of awkward, waiting silence, the guy drifted over to the far wall of that tiny office — maybe it was Hinata’s imagination, but it looked like he was feeling through the stacked book piles there with his eyes gently closed.  Trustingly closed.  Eventually, the stranger pulled back, holding a notebook full of dark green pen scribbles that seemed to squirm over the pages.  His rattling laugh was low and muffled in his chest — still a little too loud for Hinata’s comfort though.   Obviously.

“The beginnings of a translation…!” the dizzy-eyed boy murmured. He had to know Hinata had no idea what he was talking about, didn’t he?   “What are the odds, what are the —”

“Could you shut the hell up?  Seriously?” Hinata said.  “Don’t you hear Officer Nidai’s buddies down the hall?”

“Oh, yes,” said the stranger, turning to Hinata with wide eyes and a shaky smile.  “But they won’t hear me unless they’re supposed to.  I’m sorry — you don’t know that…”

“No, I don’t,” Hinata confirmed.

The stranger considered this.  He said, “It was good of you to tell me to run back there.  You’re probably a kind person, aren’t you, Mr. Pointy-Hair?”

“Hinata,” said Hinata, before immediately kicking himself. You’re really, really not supposed to tell people your actual name if you’re trying to rob a place!  …  Even if they’re trying to rob the same damn place, apparently?  Or at least they’re getting weirdly excited about the chance to snoop through somebody’s spooky notebook?

“His name is Komaeda,” Chiaki offered from the bag at Hinata’s side. “Nagito Komaeda. If he gives you a different name…”

But Nagito Komaeda didn’t throw around any fake names at all.  He grinned, amazed and warm and slightly mocking, like he couldn’t believe Hinata had actually handed him his name so earnestly.  He stepped over to sit in front of Hinata, moving gingerly, sitting cross-legged on the ground.  He said, “You’re new at this, aren’t you?”

“I’m not exactly making a career out of sneaking into museums, no,” Hinata said, glaring.  “I’m not some comic book supervillain, or anything like that.”

The dizzy-eyed stranger chewed on his lip, thoughtful.  Hinata wasn’t entirely sure he got the joke.  He said, “In that case…  Please, call me Komaeda.  It’s the least I can do.”  His voice was so wandering, hazy and formal both at once.  The notebook disappeared into a pocket inside his long, tattered coat; up close, Hinata realized this stranger — Komaeda — smelled like burning.  His skin was a crisscross of faded scars.

The office/closet doorknob rattled furiously, about then.  Somebody grunted, “Keys’s not working…!” and then, louder, “Wait — damn key snapped off in my hand!”  They stalked away, and Komaeda nodded, again. Serene as anything, as if stuff like this happened to him every day.

“They‘ll come back,” he said.  “Officer Nidai is a persistent one.”   He might’ve looked self-conscious for a second — realizing he sounded like a hardened crook, or something — because he added, “Or so I’ve heard.  But we have a little while yet, I think.  Are those games in your bag any good?”

“These are my friend’s —” Hinata protested…  But Chiaki shushed him.  Gently.

She said, “They’re your games, now, really,” and “This isn’t my body, Hajime.  Only a window…  You know that.  I can look away, sometimes.  I’ll look away for a little while now, if you want.”

Everyone Nagito Komaeda loved died messily, Chiaki had said.  She didn’t say it again now, but Hinata thought maybe she was reconsidering this dizzy-eyed stranger.  At the very least, he might know how to hurry out of a museum in the middle of the night without getting caught.  He might know what it was like to lose a friend, too, and to want to believe that couldn’t be true with all his heart.  Hinata might get something out of talking to a person like him.

“Be careful,” said Chiaki.  “And be nice, okay?  Unless he turns out to be a jerk.  A cursed jerk.”  Hinata could’ve sworn she was snickering.  “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Komaeda’s already giving you ‘I-like-you’ eyes.”

“He is not,” grumbled Hinata.

Komaeda tactfully ignored that last bit.  He said, “Ooh, your friend has ‘Void Escape 2.’ I like that one.”  Komaeda glanced at the door, and then back to Hinata.  “I’ve…  Never played two-player mode, actually.   We could kill a little time?”

This was absurd. This was a million-to-one chance meeting.  This was…

This was Hinata hiding in some musty middle-of-the-night museum office, offering a cursed, supervillain-y stranger snacks from his bag. Trying out a video game together.  What the hell?!

Hinata should’ve known better. On so many levels, he should have known.  But, apparently…  No.

When Officer Nidai finally got that particular office door open, Hinata and Komaeda huddled together under the tiny desk, close enough that the smell of burning felt everywhere for a little while.  Close enough that Komaeda’s wavy singed hair brushed Hinata’s cheek. They’d draped Komaeda’s coat over the both of them in some sort of effort to look like just another lumpy pile.  Maybe books, or crinkled papers, or whatever it was museum researchers wore out in the field.

The notebook Komaeda had been trying to smuggle away felt cold against Hinata’s skin, twitching like a living thing.

Officer Nidai didn’t find them.  Somehow.  Honestly, they made such a terrible pile of paper/field clothes/random crap that Hinata was fairly surprised.  Komaeda, though…  Komaeda shrugged it off and said, “Alright, then.  That’s our cue: time to go!”

They snuck out the museum’s dusky hallways together, then, with Komaeda holding Hinata’s sleeve and guiding him down what he claimed was “the luckiest” path to the parking lot.  The sky was huge and hollow-looking up above them, when they finally made it. Hinata had parked his car at the grocery store down the road — he gave Komaeda a ride back into the city, even though Komaeda’d assured him he would have found his way no matter what.

Just before dropping Komaeda off down some lonely backstreet — one of those tipped-over-garbage-can-alleys, without a proper street name anywhere — Hinata asked something he knew would haunt him whether he managed to choke it out or not.  He asked for Komaeda’s phone number, whatever his curses.  Whatever a weird night this had been.  He tried to ask casually, the way Chiaki might have.  Like he only wanted to be friends. Like he was just a little worried about him, even though…  Huh.

Something had felt right and warm, so familiar, about Komaeda’s hand on Hinata’s sleeve.  About Komaeda’s spinning, smothered laughter.  Whoever he was, whatever he’d done.  Whatever exactly had been translated in that notebook waiting tucked against his heart, just then.

Komaeda shook his head no, and Hinata muttered something embarrassed.  Said to forget he asked; glowered at the road.  Komaeda watched him, apparently baffled.  He folded his arms around himself, leaning the back of his head against Hinata’s car door window.  He would leave dark ash smeared on the glass, when he left.

“I…  Have no idea why you’d want to call someone like me,” Komaeda offered, after a moment of tension, the dark city passing by all around them.  After he’d apparently hunted around his mind for the right words and come back feeling empty-handed.  “I don’t even have a phone.  Never keep any number for long…”  He cleared his throat.  “If you want, though, you can give me your number. I’ll check in with you, until it gets…”  An awkward laugh, here.  “Until you tell me to stop, I guess.”

Maybe that should’ve been enough to scare Hinata off, but he scribbled his number down on a scrap of paper torn out of that cryptic, slithering-ink notebook Komaeda’d stolen anyway.  He couldn’t believe he was doing it, even as his pen slipped and Komaeda clarified, “Is that an eight or a four, Hinata?” in a soft, wondering voice.

Hinata told him, and Komaeda murmured the full number back, very solemn.  Like a promise.

Hinata took a long, roundabout way home, that night, and Komaeda waved after him until he’d disappeared off to kinder streets.  He turned around on the worn-slick heel of his shoe and started humming again, the way he had back in the museum.  It was a hopeful song, maybe.  It was almost morning.

[homiegeesus]

The Year of Magical Thinking, Ch. 2

Summary: Francis Sinclair believed Arthur Morgan had not finished living. In a second chance at life, Arthur discovers what it means to love himself.

At the edge of a precipice and nowhere to run, Arthur concedes defeat. In an extraordinary turn of events, he is sent through the ether to another time where his path crosses with a group not too unlike his own family. After discovering the fate of those he loved before, he races to find a way back. But what if he realizes that there is something worth staying for in this new world? Can two people separated by nearly a hundred and twenty years of living find their happily ever after?

AO3 Link

The Year of Magical Thinking

Chapter 2 - Spelunking, and Other Wacky Ideas

Somewhere in East Texas – August 2018

It was hot. Typical for this time of year, but this heat was on another level oppressive. Surrounded by tall pines and thick shrubbery, there wasn’t much of a breeze. Dr. Steven Nichols removed his aviators and wiped his brow. God, what he wouldn’t give to work in a cubicle with glorious air conditioning right now. As it were, he was stuck on a worksite at a cave in the middle of bumfuck-nowhere Texas. Deep down, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

An anthropologist by trade, since leaving graduate school he had been researching a series of interesting rock carvings discovered in the late 1930s to early 1950s. Found all throughout the country, one even in Mexico, they had baffled the most seasoned scientists. Originally abandoned and nearly forgotten, that is until a mysterious benefactor funded their little department at Blackwater College. With that funding came a series of government grants that had the operation surviving somewhat comfortably. It became apparent that whoever this person was, they were well connected.

Grabbing the front of his white t-shirt, Steven tried fruitlessly to generate some cool air. Nick was going to flay him alive for most likely ruining yet another shirt. His fiancé was nothing if not particular about his dressings-down. Tempted to grab the closest water bottle and pour it down his front, he watched as one of his student-assistants walked towards him.

“Got the lights set up if you want to go in.” Sweat dewing at his upper lip, Jeremy looked about as miserable as Steven felt.

“Thank you, sir,” Steven replied airily as he hopped up from his perch on a picnic table and tucked his sunglasses into the collar of his shirt. He squinted. “Is it at least a little cooler in there?”

“More humid, but yeah, quite a bit cooler,” Jeremy shrugged.

Steven just smiled, “Take what you can get, am I right?” He placed a hardhat on his sweaty mahogany-haired head then began the short trek to the cave entrance.

“Oh,” Jeremy called out, and Steven turned to face him. “I’m gonna head into town real quick to grab some lunch. You want anything?”

“Uh –,” Steven furrowed his brow and bowed his head in thought. He looked back to Jeremy, “Ooh, get me somethin’ from Taco Bell. A, uh – oh, a big burrito. Doesn’t matter which one.”

Jeremy laughed, “Nick gonna be alright with that?”

Steven just gave the kid a bright smile and said, “Nick can kiss my ass.” He turned again towards the cave.

Jeremy called after him, “You sure you’re gonna be okay alone?” Steven just raised an arm with a thumb’s up.

“I’ll be fine. Now, go get lunch.”

Walking through the entrance, and true to Jeremy’s word Steven felt the cool, damp air wash over him. Stopping at the fork where the cavern split into two directions, he took a moment to wipe the sweat from his face with the bottom of his shirt. As he prepared to restart his journey, he heard what sounded like a gust of wind come through the narrow corridor to his right. Odd, he thought, since the hall led to a small chamber with no exits or vents. Brushing it off, he began his walk through the passage. This time, a sound, unnatural in its characteristics, entered his ears causing him to halt. Steven quickly reached to turn on the headlamp attached to his hardhat. Seeing nothing except thick electrical cables and darkness beyond the scope of his light, he held his breath and turned his ear fractionally toward the source of the noise. Again, a tinkling sound reverberated lightly along the cave walls.

Thoroughly creeped out and thinking of turning back, Steven called out unsure, “Hello?”

When the echo of quick shuffling sounded out, Steven shrinked back. “Who’s there?” In a series of jerky movements, he tried to shine the light anywhere and everywhere. Then, as if in cadence with the beating of his heart, heavy footfalls combined with the same tinkling noise inched quickly closer. Steven’s fight or flight instinct seemingly left him at that moment, as he stood rooted in the spot, unable to move. Until a shadowy figure appeared in his line of sight.

“Jesus Christ!” Shocked, Steven jumped back, falling against the cave wall behind him. The shadowy figure, a man to be precise, then became more detailed. Steven first noticed his peculiar attire. Dressed in dirty western wear, the man at first glance looked like a John Wayne caricature. If not for the setting, Steven would have laughed at the absurdity. “What the hell, man! What’re you doing in here?!” Then, he noticed the gun. “The hell – ”

The man seemed to catch on and slowly raised his hands halfway. “I ain’t gonna hurt ya,” a deep voice echoed through the corridor. “I jus’ – well you see, mister, I am slightly confused.”

Steven scoffed, “You? You’re ‘slightly confused’? How in the hell did you get in here? We’ve had it closed off – ”

“Mister, I do not rightly know. I cannot even begin to explain.” The strange man looked around, and then back to Steven, “Where we at?”

Confused, Steven replied, “Wha – ”

Cutting him off, the man tilted his hands forward slightly, “Jus’, please, humor me.”

Growing even more uncomfortable, Steven responded, “Uh, Texas. We’re in East Texas.”

“Texas?” he questioned, sounding disbelieving. “Tha’s impossible. I was just in Roanoke Valley, in New Hanover – ”

“New Hanover?” Steven exhaled a laugh. “There hasn’t been a New Hanover in like, a hundred years.”

Silence engulfed the hall. The stranger audibly swallowed and shifted on his feet.

“What, uh – what year is it?” He asked quietly.

“What are you playing at, man? Is this a joke, or something?” In obvious frustration, the stranger took a step forward and Steven shrunk back once more. Seemingly noticing the frightened look on the other man’s face, the cowboy raised his hands higher and curled each into fists. He closed his eyes and clinched his jaw.

“Jus’ please.” Feeling an odd sense of sympathy, Steven relaxed slightly at the small desperate tone.

Steven responded in a similar way, “It’s 2018. Um, August.” A little louder, he expanded, “August 15th, 2018.”

The cowboy looked to the side, his clinched jaw slackened.

“Jesus Christ,” he sighed.

Not knowing what to say to that, Steven went for the basics. “What’s your name?” He offered lamely.

“Arthur Morgan,” he replied, distracted.

Without thinking, Steven joked, “Right, and I’m Billy the Kid.”

The man finally turned his eyes to him. “I seen Billy the Kid, an’ you don’ much look like ‘em. Additionally, I believe he is dead,” he shot back, tone dripping with sarcasm.

“Right,” Steven nodded and volleyed the sarcastic tone back at him. “If you’re the –,” he gestured wildly in the air, “famed outlaw Arthur Morgan, then how did ya end up here?” Maneuvering his arms into a questioning stance, he awaited an answer.

The man’s eyes narrowed fractionally. Steven’s confidence dropped with his arms. ‘Arthur’ just let out a sigh, “Look, I’ll tell ya everythin’, can ya jus’ please get that light outta my eyes? I’ll show ya the carvin’s I – “

“Wait, carvings?” Steven said quickly.

“Yeah, ‘car-vings’,” he enunciated. “I’m assumin’ that’s what yer here for, considerin’ the lights I saw back there?” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder towards the chamber behind him.

“Uh, yeah it is.” Steven’s brow furrowed, “I meant, what do they have to do with – ”

“Mister, like I said,” he gritted out, patience obviously wearing thin, “I’ll tell ya everythin’; show ya what happen’d.”

All was quiet as Steven studied the man. “Look, my assistant is coming back soon, and – ”

“Please.”

Said so quietly, Steven could feel as desperation came off the man in waves, and something inside said to hear him out.

He sighed, “Okay, just please – please don’t shoot me or attack me or whatever a crazy dude in a cave might want to do to me, okay?”

The cowboy stood straighter and cocked a slight one-sided grin, “I ain’t gonna hurtcha.”

Steven stared a moment and then nodded. “Alright then,” he stuck out his hand in an abortive gesture. “Lead the way.” With a nod, the stranger turned and started walking.

“You gotta name?” He asked unexpectedly.

“Uh, yeah. Steven. Steven Nichols.” He amended, “Dr. Steven Nichols.”

The man hummed, “Doctor, huh?”

“Yeah,” he quickly elucidated, “I have a doctorate in anthropology.”

“What’s that now?” He sounded confused.

“Anthropology. Um, it’s the study of humans, in a broad sense. There are multiple fields,” Steven explained.

The cowboy just hummed in reply.

Steven continued, “Like I, personally, am an archaeologist with a focus in parietal – um, cave art.”

“Heh, I knew a scientist once. Well, a couple, but this lady in particular was somethin’. Kinda batty but meant well. She was diggin’ up dinosaur bones.” The man shook his head, “Wonder if she ended up findin’ ‘em.”

Curious, Steven asked, “What was her name?”

The cowboy pondered, “Oh, MacGuiness somethin’ or other.”

Steven laughed and looked over at the other man, “MacGuiness? Deborah MacGuiness?”

He nodded, “Yup, tha’s the one.” The corridor gradually gave way to a larger but still intimate room. Work lights cast the flowstone in the rear of the chamber in a muted orange tint. The pièce de résistance, however, was the large carving illuminated on the wall sat between two rock columns. The men stopped within feet of the insculpture. Steven removed his hardhat and looked back at him.

“You know of Deborah MacGuiness?” He asked incredulously.

“Mmhmm,” the stranger ran a thumb over the stubble of his chin. “Met ‘er, oh, I reckon it was in New Hanover thereabouts.” He looked to Steven, “In 1899.”

Deborah MacGuiness was ‘batty’ by all accounts but well respected by modern paleontologists. Unfortunately, women of the time were not taken seriously in a field dominated by men. She may have had some outlandish ideas, but many of her hypotheses were proven in the decades that followed her death from Spanish flu in 1918. Steven still could not believe this man actually knew her. He was a scientist, for Christ’s sake. He needed proof.

Steven started, “So, you were going to tell me how you ended up here?”

The other man nodded. “Well –,” he looked to the carvings, “I was knockin’ on death’s door, dyin’, an’ this feller I met awhile back showed up from God knows where. He took me to a cave with these carvin’s o’er near Roanoke Valley. Don’t know wh – ”

“Wait, what?” Steven interrupted. He furrowed his brow and held up a hand, “A carving in Roanoke Valley? In Appalachia?”

Arthur nodded, “I reckon.”

Steven huffed out a humorless laugh, “There aren’t any carvings in the southeast. Well, I mean, we haven’t found any, at least.” He was quiet a moment, and the other man just looked at him in waiting. “Ok, so let’s say that I maybe – maybe,” he emphasized, “believe you. Would you be able to find this cave on a map?”

The cowboy again nodded, “I reckon I could. I don’ know exactly whereabouts it is, but I reckon I could look.”

“Okay. Okay,” Steven replied, more to himself than Arthur. He glanced from the carving to the man beside him. “What else happened?”

Arthur continued, “So, this feller took me to this cave. Again, I’m dyin’, an’ he drags me to this carvin’. I remembered it lookin’ like the others I found for ‘em.”

“Do you remember what it looked like?” Steven asked.

“Like I said, I was very sick an’ waitin’ to die. I ain’t sure – it ain’t too clear.” He looked to the carving in front of him and shook his head, “It looked a lot like this, but different, ya know?”

Steven just nodded, “So, what happened when you got to the carving?”

“Well, Mr. Sinclair,” he looked to Steven. “That was the feller’s name, Francis Sinclair. Odd feller, with red hair an’ a birthmark over his eye.” He briefly pointed to the side of his face. “Had a funny way of talkin’. Said a bunch o’ words I ain’t never heard before. Anyways, he grabbed my wrists, an’ – now I’m in an’ out, can’t really understand what’s happenin’ or what he’s sayin’, but he grabs my hands an’ puts ‘em up against this carvin’. I dunno what in the hell happened or what he said, but –,” he then placed his hand against the wall, “this all started glowin’, like a blue color.” His arm dropped to his side. “Ain’t never seen anythin’ like it. Then, everythin’ went black.”

He was quiet a moment as if pondering something. He turned his eyes back to Steven and continued, “I saw my entire life flash ‘fore my eyes, like one a them picture shows.” A rueful smile formed on his face, “Trust me, Mister, I know how this sounds. Like somethin’ you’d read in a book by that English feller, but this is the God’s honest truth. Dunno how else to convince ya.”

Steven stared at him, slightly awed, as he absorbed the information. Then, something occurred to him.

“Your – Arthur Morgan’s,” he amended, “grave is a tourist trap on an interstate in Kentucky, or wherever. If you’re him, then –”

“Mister,” the cowboy laughed humorlessly, “I don’ know anythin’ ‘bout that, but I guaran-damn-tee ya there ain’t no body in that grave.”

Steven placed a hand over his eyes and held the other in the air. He sighed, “I gotta think.” He turned around and began the trek out of the cave, not caring if he was being followed.

[adamwatchesmovies]

Night Claws (2012)

From second one, it's obvious. Night Claws is absolute trash but it turns into the kind of garbage you have fun wallowing in. This movie is plagued with so many issues we're going to have to go through it scene-by-scene. It's a spoiler-filled review!

The film begins like every unimaginative slasher movie: with two teenagers getting randy in the back seat when they hear a noise. After being told by his girlfriend that “he’s not getting any of THIS until he goes and checks out what the noise is”, the sap gets reduced to chunks of hamburger but not before his girlfriend tears off his feet while trying to prevent him from being pulled out of the car window.

The incident baffles police. Two dead teenagers, torn to shreds by some kind of wild animal... but what kind? That’s when anthropologist Sarah Evans (Leilani Sarelle) arrives, intent on proving Bigfoot's the culprit. Along with Sheriff Joe Kelly (Reb Brown), she begins investigating.

Meanwhile, more future victims for the killer Sasquatch are introduced. Two couples are on a boot camp-style camping trip with an instructor, a group of teenagers ignore the police's warning and go to the woods to party. These characters add nothing to the plot, but Bigfoot demands blood damn it! Night falls, which means trouble for the humans, and for the audience. Day-for-nights shots are everywhere and the blue filters don't fool anyone, particularly not when even the campfires are tinted! As the civilians reach their apex of annoyance, the body count resumes. It's about time, as the actors' performances are dreadful. Two of the campers are left, shaken... and are then promptly captured by a trio of rednecks who want to use them as bait for Big Foot. MORE meat for the grinder?!

Night Claws takes a break from adults and switches to the teenagers. In my favorite scene of the movie, we see this party consists of 6 people, three guys, and three girls, with a third being off-screen. One of the boys figures it’s time to inject additional nudity into this movie and walks over to where the girl he’s lusting after is sitting. She’s acting kind of strange though, really quiet. As he goes to nudge her and asks what’s going on, her head comes off! It’s one of those legendary Big Foot pranks where the creature decapitates someone, cleans up the blood and then places the head back onto the body. As the surprised teen is torn to shreds and we hear his blood-curling scream, his friends confuse the sound for him and blondie getting it on. Awesome.

Following a bloodbath, the three rednecks using the couple as bait prove themselves the dumbest, most easily tricked gun-totting specimens I’ve ever seen. The police, meanwhile, are so eager to split up and get themselves killed it's a wonder the killer skunk ape can keep up. And then we’ve got the ending. This is one of those movies where the planets must have aligned, it’s New Year’s Eve, 1999 and the date also happens to fall both on a Friday the 13th and February 29th. We discover that the biggest, most nonsensical set of coincidences have set this movie into motion. Just when you thought the writing couldn't get any worse, there it is.

Night Claws is filled with painful demonstrations of acting. The special effects are laughable, the dialogue makes petrified wood look fluid, the script abysmal, and characters shallow. The whole thing would've been dated if it had been made in the eighties. It’s not even a movie anymore; it’s an experience. You can’t believe how bad it gets until you have seen it for yourself. The good news is that it’s laugh-out-loud hilarious. So many things are done wrong you can always find something new to poke fun at, and seeing it with someone who has no idea what they’re getting into is a gleeful experience. Unfortunately, the DVD release lacks subtitles, meaning you're likely to miss some of the juiciest dialogue as the audience talks and laughs throughout. As a movie, Night Claws is embarrassing. As something you can play on your TV during a party or a film you can watch with your friends and laugh at, it’s what you want in a movie that’s so bad it’s good. I urge you to rush out and tear it apart like a Yeti tears apart a teenager. (On DVD, September 12, 2014)