danielswise.substack.com/p/these-wood...
06.01.2026 13:51
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A new Christmas-themed Substack post. Why do some people claim that Christmas is actually a pagan holiday?
danielswise.substack.com/p/christmas-...
Well, I started a Substack. It sort of feels like trying to become a DJ for people who went to grad school. Anyway, here it is. The first real post is about ghosts!
danielswise.substack.com
Barnes and Noble (at least the one I was at in a suburb of Austin, TX) is now calling its New Age/metaphysical section "self-transformation" (not to be confused with the "self help" section).
Was in the Ithaca, NY region for a wedding. Is the northeast or maybe just Upstate NY more into Halloween than the South? So many pumpkins on porches, more Halloween events advertised, and a Holiday Inn Express decked out for the holiday by the manager.
Just sent off my entry on "contemporary paranormal beliefs" for Oxford University Press's online research encyclopedia of religion. Now awaiting editing and peer review.
Compare that to now. Mainstream critics line up to praise body horror movies. Intense gore is seen as fun and necessary. If a major horror director left the majority of brutal deaths to the imagination in a film nowadays, they would be shoved off a cliff by horror fans.
Though Cronenberg's 1970s body horror films are widely praised now, the early critical response was not great, with a lot of critics essentially saying that cheap, gross images muted the films' interesting ideas.
"...in the twin mantles of Art and Commerce, and deny any contributing responsibility for the violence, crassness, and sub-literate idiocy that are gradually eroding what we optimistically refer to as our culture."
Another example. Horror critic and historian Bruce Lanier Wright in 1995: "I don't propose to say much more about gore film here...Personally, I'd rather be boiled in owl urine than write about this stuff. The makers of gore movies, predictably, have wrapped themselves..."
"...shock the reader into submission. They indulge in cheap tactics...Yet shock is a visceral experience, a sensory overload from which most of us recover quickly. Great horror fiction is not about shock...it digs beneath our skin and stays with us."
Just to give some examples of what I mean, we have writer and horror critic Douglas E. Winter writing in 1988: "But I question the recent trend toward explicitness in horror fiction...Too many purveyors of the 'gross-out' work from the proposition that the purpose of horror fiction is to..."
Can anyone tell me how and why intense gore and body horror went from being dismissed as lowbrow and lazy by critics and horror snobs to widely embraced and praised by the same audience? I would say that this sort of acclaim for gore in horror media probably didn't begin before the 20 years.
Putting out a call for Halloween enthusiasts: I need to conduct more interviews for my book in progress. If you love Halloween and are willing to be interviewed via phone, video call, or email, please send me a message.
This looks great. Too bad I live in the US
Putting out a call for Halloween enthusiasts: I need to conduct more interviews for my book in progress. If you love Halloween and are willing to be interviewed via phone, video call, or email, please send me a message.
I hear there is a great piece on Halloween in this one.
So...I actually haven't listened yet. But I read Ocker's book on Salem before I visited for the first time, and I used to read the blog during Halloween season.
Great guest!
Another horror trope we can take a break from for a while: humanity is the real monster. It's an important idea to explore, but we've explored it so much that's it's hard to think of recent horror films that haven't explored it.
To be clear, it's not like I slam my computer shut whenever I see anything politically conservative on social media. But the stuff presented to me immediately over there was just so dumb.
I have quite a few complaints about Bluesky, but the nature of X seems glaringly obvious from my first 5 minutes with a new account.
I saw that some people I respect are still on X and I saw other people saying they get better engagement there. So I thought maybe things have chilled out over there and I decided to go make an account again. Immediately my feed was flooded with nutty rightwing garbage as the default. Nvm, I guess.
The reason historians don’t now use the term ‘witch hunts’ as a generalised term for the prosecution of people for witchcraft is that it implies witchcraft was always prosecuted in a different way compared to other crimes - it wasn’t
Equally troubling are the multiple posts around the internet I've seen from people indicating that they regularly rely on the ai summaries for information and find it unnecessary to view search results.
Just saw Frankenstein (1931) for the first time. Amazing work by Karlov in the central role. But how the heck did a monster who seems to not have enough dexterity to use his hands much at all manage to hang Fritz?
With Summerween-specific merchandise on big box store shelves this summer, it is definitely a good time for my book (which will have a chapter on consumerist Halloween celebration).
www.businessinsider.com/summerween-h...
Unfortunately, progressive legal activism organizations consistently ignore religious freedom issues
Found the next 2 today at @austinbooks.bsky.social still out in the main horror section. Glad I saw the first one in a box at a rural antique mall (of all places). I had to roll the dice for $1.
Does anyone else find the beginning section of John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies pretty condescending toward southern Appalachians? "These country bumpkins were so backwards that if a man IN A SUIT with a BEARD came to their door after his car broke down, they would assume he was the devil!"