James Hynes

I really wasn't going to do another Halloween list this year. It all started when Maud Newton asked me for a list of Halloween reading a few years ago, and then I did a couple more lists on my own, in 2008 and 2009. Lately, of course, as the handful of you who still come here know, I've been pretty much AWOL, blogwise. But then a friend of mine hinted that maybe I should do another one, and since I'm easily suggestible, and I had a little time on my hands, here it is.

I'm also, however, lazy. I don't keep up with contemporary horror fiction as a rule—well, not at all, to be honest—and if you look at the stuff I've written about in the past, hardly any of it dates from any later than 1970 or so. Which means that, up until now, I've basically been trawling the depths of my adolescent reading, so that this year it was either a) read some new stuff, or b) start digging around in my dusty old paperbacks for stories I didn't  remember the last two times around. But since, as I say, I'm lazy, and since a middle-aged midlist novelist wants nothing more than to prove how au courant he is, I decided instead to go straight to YouTube (au courant, that is, circa 2005).

Each of these entries (except the Disney and Tim Burton ones) has a direct literary antecedent, so that, by the skin of my teeth, I'm clinging to conceit that this is a literary list, and that Cultwriter is still a literary blog. But lest you think I'm doing a half-assed job here—to be fair to myself, I think it's at least a three-quarter-assed job—bear in mind that everything here (with the exception of the Tim Burton clip) is something I remember from my dank, gloomy, melancholy, Halloweenish adolescence, and is submitted here—as Rod Serling, another ancient influence, might say—for your approval. Happy Halloween! 

1. "The Golden Arm," by Mark Twain. This story, which is not original to Twain, appears as an example in his essay "How to Tell a Story." It is (fair warning) a "negro" dialect story, but in the hands of the right storyteller, it's lots of fun, and genuinely spooky. Ideally, you need to hear it live and in person, and probably from Mark Twain himself, who used to include it in his lecture tours. But since that's not possible (so far as I know—it is Halloween, after all), the next best thing is to hear it told by the great Hal Holbrook, during the course of his epic one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight. It's a testament to Holbrook's performance that I still remember this story vividly, having seen it only once before, when Mark Twain Tonight was televised in 1967, when I was 12 years old. I've only just watched it again today for the first time  in (ulp!) 43 years, and it's even better than I remembered it. Somehow, copyright be damned, the entire TV production of Mark Twain Tonight has ended up on YouTube, and "The Golden Arm" starts at 5:04 in part 8, continuing into part 9.

2. "Tailypo." This is another classic American oral story (essentially the same story as "The Golden Arm," in fact), in a version by some film students from the University of Georgia. I first heard it, live, during a one-man show performed by a touring actor whose name I no longer remember, who did a Holbrookish one-man show of American folk tales at the college where my father taught, Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Michigan, sometime in the late 60s. Whoever he was (and I'm truly sorry I don't remember his name), he put on a great show, and despite my only ever having heard it once, I remember the story in every detail more than 40 years later. In fact, I used to tell it myself (and pretty well, if I do say so myself), when I was a young man, and when I could get my friends to sit still and be quiet for it. Again, like the Twain story, it doesn't work quite as well on screen as it does on person, so I suggest doing what I did, namely, learning it and trying it out yourself on a willing audience, and see what kind of reaction you get.

3. "The Raven," by Edgar Allan Poe. "The Raven," read by Christopher Walken. Nuff said.

4. "Night on Bald Mountain," from Walt Disney's Fantasia. This is still one of the spookiest things I've ever seen, the last great effort from the golden age of Disney animation, before the company entered that long, anodyne period in the 50s and 60s when it was afraid to frighten or disturb anybody. Unlike "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence in the same film, there's nothing jokey or cute about this: it's pure nightmare stuff, with a demon of (literally) mountainous proportions summoning ghosts from their graves, calling out demons and harpies, and casting damned souls into the fires of Hell (which is kinda like actually working for Disney, or so I'm told). Not only is there genuine terror and some rather European grotesquerie in this piece, there's also a perverse eroticism that appears nowhere else in the Disney canon (unless you count Britney Spears on The New Mickey Mouse Club, or certain Haley Mills movies). Naked women are summoned out of flame, and nude harpies with deathly pale skin and shocking pink nipples rush right at the camera. The demon himself has a raw erotic power as well, and I'm about 90 percent certain that he scared the crap out of a young Peter Jackson, who grew up to recast him as the Balrog in Lord of the Rings. And all of it set, of course, to the witches' sabbath music of Modest Mussorgsky, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

5. "Vincent," by Tim Burton. This is the ur-text of the entire Tim Burton canon, his first short film, made when he still working (unhappily, see above) for Disney. In seven and a half minutes you can see, in embryo, nearly every obsession, trope, and idiosyncracy that Burton would display in later films—with more time and bigger budgets, but not always as effectively as here. Already it expresses, fully formed, the jokey-macabre sensibility that would inform not only Burton's work, but the work of a generation of filmmakers since. Still, after all these years, Burton's one of the few who can get the balance between jokes and creepiness just right, and it's pitch perfect here, aided immeasurably by the voice of the late, great Vincent Price himself.

6. "Whistle and I'll Come to You," by Jonathan Miller. This is the only film version I know of "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad," the second greatest story by M. R. James, the greatest ghost story writer in the English language. The film was made in 1968 by the polymath writer, actor, director, and physician Jonathan Miller, best known as a member of the Beyond the Fringe comedy troupe. It's a fairly faithful adaptation, with one serious quibble: Miller insists on making the ending more psychological, in the manner of a Henry James ghost story, instead sticking to the unambiguous, uninflected ghostliness of M. R. James's original, which works better. That said, this little film is extremely well made and well worth watching, for two things in particular: the wonderfully spooky black-and-white cinematography by Dick Bush, and the perfectly twitchy central performance by the great English actor Michael Hordern. And PS,  Shameless Plug Division: I stole the climax of James's original story for a moment in the final novella in my book Publish and Perish, "Casting the Runes," which is a retelling of M. R. James's short story of the same name (which, if you're keeping score, is his best story).

There you go, this year's Halloween list, a multimedia, interactive lollapalooza. I see by looking back at last year's list that I was already beginning to whine about writing these things, that I had no intention even then of doing one every year. And I still don't. Really. So don't expect one next year. I mean it.

So, once again, until next year--d'oh!—Happy Halloween!