Author: crbernard

(Titled with apologies to Max Cannon)

Stand just about anywhere in the Salt Lake Valley and cast your gaze up at the Wasatch Mountains. You will be greeted by a series of sedimentary shelves that mark the mountains like rings in a bathtub, or the shadow of a puddle on the concrete dried by the sun. When the sun hits the Wasatch just so it’s a beautiful sight, a rich layer cake of color and texture and only one of the innumerable natural wonders of my home state.

This spectacle is the geological fingerprint of Lake Bonneville, a Pleistocene-era paleolake that used to cover most of Utah in its chilly depths. At its largest, about 15,000 years ago, Lake Bonneville was 1,000 feet deep and covered 20,000 square miles, making it easily the largest inland lake in North America at the time. As the geologic eras ambled by and the Bonneville Flood unleashed the ancient lake, draining it forever, it left sediment on more than the walls of the Wasatch. One gift that this sediment gave the world is an expanse of nothingness known as the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Stories are essential to what makes us human. We tell them constantly: to ourselves, about ourselves, and collectively, with other people, the stories we tell and are told make up culture at large. It is thus worth noting which stories we choose to tell and – vitally – how closely those stories map to the real world. This confirmation of our narratives with verifiable reality is a vitally important exercise that has become increasingly rare, and the effects have been especially pernicious on American politics. From the disastrous and counterproductive “War on Drugs” (driven more by Rambo and Miami Vice as by data and research) to the anti-scientific information illiteracy preached by programs like Ancient Aliens and The 700 Club, some political stories have bled into the culture in ways that make us, to be blunt, dumber, meaner, and crazier.

This is an excerpt from our Icons of Horror series, which is available to Patreon subscribers. If you would like to read this article in its entirety, you can subscribe to our Patreon and learn more here.

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“So many people in the neighborhood… I don’t know if they’re very good people.”

–Ween, “So Many People in the Neighborhood”

Starting in 1927, the specter which had allegedly been haunting Europe made its way to China. What followed from 1927 to 1949 (interrupted by the united effort against Japan during World War 2) is known as the Chinese Civil War, a conflict between the nationalist forces of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party; the last phase of this conflict, from 1945 – 1949, is generally known as the Chinese Communist Revolution. Big changes were afoot for China, many of them long overdue (in particular, reform of the nation’s agricultural and property ownership systems) but all of which were executed, at best, imperfectly. One function that the newly empowered Communist Party took upon itself was the wholesale reeducation of “troublesome” elements of the population, a plan which would eventually evolve into the bloody totalitarian nightmare known as the Cultural Revolution. Before the “struggle sessions” of the Cultural Revolution, however, the Party experimented with and perfected a technique known as “thought reform,” although it would come to be known by a more common, less euphemistic term: brainwashing.

The intersection of horror and heavy music – beginning with Black Sabbath and continuing to this day – has produced some sonic gems, many of which can be and are appreciated widely outside of the niche markets for heavy metal and horror culture. Artists like Alice Cooper and KISS brought theatrical horror tropes to mainstream rock audiences, although there was much clutching of pearls and swooning about Satanic influences at the time. For anyone interested in this particular chapter of music and pop culture history, I’d recommend George Case’s engaging Here’s to My Sweet Satan: How the Occult Haunted Music, Movies and Pop Culture, 1966-1980, which outlines some of these horror trappings and predictable conservative religious responses thereto.

In a previous post, I talked about horror’s influence on popular music, starting with (for the purposes of my discussion) the blues in America and continuing through the development of rock and heavy metal. I argued at the conclusion of that piece that Rob Zombie, in my opinion, represented the zenith of the heavy horror sound from underground: the ultimate intersection of music and horror, in part due to his excellent musical projects and in part due to his also-excellent career as writer and director of horror cinema. As is so often the case, I regret nothing. I remain a huge fan of Zombie’s work (both in film and in metal) and think his body of work represents a potent distillation of many trends and tropes in horror that I love. With that said, I’ve had time to think about the subject since then, and I believe that the intersection of horror and “heavy” music – a phenomenon I call “the heavy horror sound from underground” – is a subject much broader than can be fairly summed up in one post. Therefore, this post is the second in what will be an ongoing series about heavy music and horror culture.

Researchers from Denmark’s Aarhus University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Chicago have released a preliminary study which indicates that fans of horror have demonstrated greater psychological resilience during the coronavirus pandemic than the general public. (A major caveat is that this study hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet.) While correlation is not causation, these findings are interesting and remind me of research that has been conducted regarding chronic pain and exposure to very spicy food, which, as it turns out, can help increase your body’s resilience when it comes to physical distress. Could the same principle apply to the “safe” psychological stress produced by horror?