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The Witching Hour @ Your Library

What with vampires, monsters, and ghosts taking center stage, it’s really kind of amazing how much there is out there on witches! For those of a witchy bent, here’s a brew of fictional witches of all kinds. Some of them are good witches, some are bad and even evil, and some fall somewhere in-between. Got someone looking for a spellbinding reading or movie-watching experience? Here are some suggestions. Note, these are all over the map, so take care before making your recommendation.

    The Witching Hour is the first book in the Mayfair Witches series. Sure, it’s long, and it has a gigantic, annoying expository chunk in the middle, but I still find the story addictive and, well, bewitching. Par for the course with Anne Rice, in the next books (Lasher and Taltos) the story gets pretty twisted. But for gothic and erotic supernatural horror, it’s a slam-dunk.

 

 It’s impossible to write about witches without at least a mention of  Shakespeare’s literary creations, as they toil and trouble, making predictions that can lead only to disaster. Just as with The Crucible, the play-that-shall-not-be-named has been made into a movie– actually, more than once. The most recent production stars Patrick Stewart (formerly known as Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise) who is a brilliant Shakespearean actor and only gets better as time passes. If you really want to make required reading of this play a killer experience, there’s no better way than with a live (or filmed, anyway) performance, right at Halloween.

 

        The ultimate American fairytale is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and from the book, and especially the movie, come some of our most memorable depictions of witches. Who can forget the evil, green skinned, hook-nosed Wicked Witch of the West, in her black dress and pointy hat? When most of us picture witches today, or go shopping for that evil witch costume (as opposed to the sexy witch costume) her face is the one that comes to mind. The recent but mostly forgettable Oz movie spectacular did kick that look up a notch, giving the wicked witch green claws and a truly hideous expression, and was probably the most memorable part of the entire film. Taking a different perspective, Gregory Maguire penned Wicked, a novel sympathetic to the Wicked Witch’s point of view and life. Wicked has a sequel, Son of a Witch, and also spun off a Broadway musical, complete with soundtrack. Seek them out and put them togethe with some of the gorgeous new editions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and you’ve got a great-looking display that will attract library users of all ages. 

 

 I’ve just discovered Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan books and am really enjoying them. It’s not so much that I like Rachel, but she really shows ingenuity in getting out of some crazy scrapes, and she makes friends and allies in the oddest places. Rachel, a witch, lives in Cincinnati in an alternate world where paranormal creatures have “outed” themselves and live in a separate area of the city called The Hollows, with a legal structure parallel to the human legal system. Naturally this leaves a lot of room for chaos, much of which centers on Rachel and her supernatural business partners, who are a hoot, when they’re not being dangerously lethal. Readers who are looking for a fix after finishing the Southern Vampire Mysteries might very well enjoy Kim Harrison. 

 

      Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed are both great television series that had witches as either main or important secondary characters. One character arc follows Willow (one of Buffy’s two closest friends, for the uninitiated) as she grows as a witch, becomes addicted to magic, and overcomes her addiction. Season Six is the season that, while she grieves over her great love’s senseless death, she dives deeply into the black arts to seek vengeance. While not all fans of the show appreciate this season, it’s a very powerful and heart-wrenching television watching experience. Charmed follows the lives and decisions of three adult sisters who discover that they are witches and must work together to defeat evil wizards and demons. There’s no debate over whether these are good witches or bad witches, but their choices aren’t always so black and white. It’s a fun little show, but not one where you can expect chills and thrills. 

 

     The Witches of Eastwick and Practical Magic are both adaptations of literary works. The Witches of Eastwick is based on a novel of the same name by John Updike, and Practical Magic is based on a novel of the same name by Alice Hoffman.The movie of The Witches of Eastwick has a fantastic cast, with Jack Nicholson playing the devil and Susan Sarandon, Cher, and Michelle Pfeiffer playing three very bored women stuck in a small New England town, who are ready to rock and roll. Dramatic, sexy, and funny, it’s a wild ride. Completely opposite in nature,  Practical Magic is the story of two sisters who are also witches, with an unfortunate family curse that leads any man they fall in love with to an untimely death. This is a gentle, magical, and well-acted movie that definitely does not fall into the category of horror, and could be watched not only during the Halloween season but at any time of year.  Those who like Practical Magic might also like the novel The Weird Sisters. 

 

    There’s just something claustrophobic about small towns, whether they’re isolated in the mountains or gated communities.  Once you’re in, it’s hard to escape the supernatural… or the neighbors. That’s what happens in both Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers and Susie Moloney’s Thirteen. In Bohjalian’s novel, a guilt-ridden pilot moves his family into a mountain village only to find that the unfinished basement is haunted by the deceased passengers of the plane he crashed. In addition to his personal ghosts, though, there are hidden dangers to his family from members of the local community as well. In Moloney’s book, the adult daughter of a woman who has recently died returns to settle the estate, only to find herself entangled in the lives of the people living in the suburb in which she grew up– a place where there seem to have been an unusual number of “accidental” deaths, and finds her beliefs tested by the people around her. Where are the witches in an isolated area, when a stranger moves in? Why, they’re all around you.

 

       So now let’s talk movies. The Craft is a mildly scary movie targeted at teens, with four misfit girls discovering they have supernatural powers and one of them deciding to use them for evil purposes. It has Neve Campbell and Fairuza Balk, and probably would appeal to fans of Charmed.  Hocus Pocus is about three witches resurrected by a teenager who spend most of their current Halloween also trying to capture children’s souls. While that sounds positively horrific, the child-chasing witches are played by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker, so it’s entertaining as well. This might be a little much for younger children, but the comedy and horror balance out nicely to make this one work as a good Halloween movie for families with older children.

 

               On to scarier stuff. These you won’t want to watch with the faint of heart or queasy of stomach. The Blair Witch Project, is, well, the Blair Witch Project, a movie that’s well-known by now. Supposedly an actual film taken by college students on a trip through the woods as they explore the legend of the Blair Witch, it’s shaky looking and the camera is unreliable as a storyteller, making it incredibly creepy. I don’t know how scary people find it today, but it had me shaking in my seat when I first saw it in the theater. The last movie, Suspiria, is about an American dancer who arrives at her new ballet school to find that it houses a coven. Suspiria is an Italian horror film by filmmaker Dario Argento, who is not well-known here but is considered a master in horror filmmaking. It is extremely vicious, violent, and gory, with a creepy soundtrack, unsettling atmosphere, bizarre colors influencing the set, and disturbing camerawork. In other words, if you have someone looking for an average, mainstream movie, this is not the ticket. But if you have a hardcore horror fan walk in looking for something different, this is it. 

Really, there’s a witch for everyone, be it from fantasy, paranormal fiction, comedy, children’s books, non-fiction, or horror in its various permutations (and you can see from this list that there are a lot of those). Have a great time connecting readers and viewers with the right witchy title for the Halloween season, or, really, at any time of year!

              

 

 


 


 

Posted on October 11, 2013 by , Reply

30 Days Until Halloween!

It’s the best month of the year here at MonsterLibrarian.com! With all the excellent books, blogs, and giveaways in libraries and on the Web, how can we not love it here?

The Horror Writers Association presents us with Halloween Haunts, where a different horror writer will be blogging every day.  Here’s a link!

Becky Siegel Spratford, author of The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror Fiction, presents for the third year her 31 Days of Horror. Here’s a link to that!

And FEARNet, focused on television and movies, presents us with FEARtober: 31 Days of Treats (link here) and a daily “free stuff” sweepstakes (link)

Check them out, and check back with us to see what we might have here in honor of our favorite month, too!

Posted on October 2, 2013 by , Reply

Unmasking The Phantom of the Opera @ Your Library

        

      

(Can you find the phantoms pictured above mentioned below?)

When I was in high school, the frenzy over the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera was in full sway, at least for the theater geeks. In the days before there were places to share fanfiction online, my friend Mindy filled legal pads with stories that put her in the role of Christine Daae. I cannot ever begin to tell you how many times I listened to the music, forwarding and rewinding to the best parts (yay for audiotapes)!  I saved money for six months to go on the drama club field trip to New York where we stayed in a ratty hotel near Times Square and saw Broadway shows every night, of course including Phantom of the Opera. That show, in what I remember as an enormous, elegant theater, pulled us in to become a part of it. I’ll never forget the giant crystal chandelier over the audience crashing down onto the stage (not over me, because I was in one of the cheap balcony seats high up in the back– but what a view)! That show, along with The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which I also saw on that trip, slammed home to me the power of live performance. I loved musicals before, but I’ve been an opera fiend ever since.

But I am a reader. And having learned that the musical was based on a book, I tracked down my own copy of the novel by Gaston Leroux and read it cover to cover, including the introductory notes. I must have a shorter attention span these days, or maybe it’s trying to read it while also putting the kids to bed that made it difficult to get through the first pages, but as with Frankenstein, it’s worth it. You can get lost in Leroux’s Paris Opera House, where the novel is set.  It’s not difficult to see how the superstitious could come  to believe their theater was haunted.  Lloyd Webber couldn’t replicate the details of Leroux’s book, but in a theater, suggestion is a powerful element in establishing setting. I looked forward to seeing how the musical would translate to film. And it didn’t, really. Trying to include the minute details that work so well in the book onto the screen just didn’t have the power of either the story or the musical, and it failed them both. The sad truth is that, as much as book lovers often say that the adaptation failed because it wasn’t true to the book, sometimes the adaptation fails because it tries too hard.

The classic horror film is a totally different creature. I have to admit I have never seen it all the way through. I have seen the unmasking scene, though. There is something about black and white that strips a story down to its basics, and Lon Chaney, Sr. is terrifying, with makeup, lighting, and camera shots combining to make some very scary moments. I was introduced to this short video of the unmasking scene that shows two different versions of the unmasking scene, the original and the one most of us are familiar with, and in the original, it appears that he is looking straight out at us as his disfigured face emerges from the shadows in a very menacing way.

Since I haven’t seen the entire thing I can’t say for sure how it compares to Leroux’s novel, but I can say this, just from watching these two versions of the same scene– it doesn’t take much to alter the look, meaning, and feel of  a story or character. Small changes make a big difference.

It’s kind of astonishing, the ways the Phantom of the Opera has morphed through our culture, taking its place in the pantheon of iconic monsters we learn about even from picture books and poetry (like Adam Rex’s Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich). There are references and appearances everywhere, from video games to music, romance novels to children’s series books(the Bailey School Kids strike again!), comics to television cartoons. While sometimes he’s still presented as a frightening monster, he’s not threatening to most people today in the way he once was.  The Phantom doesn’t get the kind of press the major monsters do, so librarians take note: tis the season to find those variations and give them the spotlight. There’s something there for everyone, from Twilight-loving teens and tweens, to horror fans, to seven year old monster lovers (I’m not going to list them here, but Amazon shows at least a dozen adaptations for children at varying reading levels).

Whether he’s presented as a disfigured monster, a romantic antihero, or a rooster who dreams of singing opera, though, the masked Phantom can awaken imagination, and, I hope, draw them in to his world, opening eyes to the many forms of the music of the night.

Posted on September 20, 2013 by , Reply
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