mark mclaughlin
FOUR-LETTER WORD BEGINNING WITH `F'
Mark McLaughlin's fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared/are forthcoming in more than 650 magazines, anthologies, newspapers, and websites, including Horror Garage, The Black Gate, Galaxy, Black October, Gothic.Net, Space & Time, Writer's Digest, FilmFax, The Best of Palace Corbie, all three Bending the Landscape volumes, The Book of All Flesh and its two companion volumes, and two volumes each of The Best of the Rest, The Best of HorrorFind, and The Year's Best Horror Stories. Forthcoming appearances include Cemetery Dance, Dark Arts, Midnight Premieres, and In Laymon's Terms. Collections of his fiction include Slime After Slime, Hell Is Where The Heart Is, Motivational Shrieker, and At the Foothills of Frenzy (with co-authors Shane Ryan Staley and Brian Knight). Also, he is the co-author, with Rain Graves and David Niall Wilson, of the poetry collection The Gossamer Eye, which won a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry. Many of his works can be purchased at www.shocklines.com Visit Mark on the web at www.myspace.com/monsterbook
THE CURSE OF LOT'S WIFE
OR, JUST A PEEK CAN'T HURT
The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...
Lewis Carroll's wacky sea-mammal chatted up a storm about a number of topics, but the one thing he didn't talk about was --
Fear.
But you and I, we will make up for the walrus' conversational shortcomings.
Today's fear is the fear of looking back. Now, why should anyone be afraid to do that? Because it can bring back bad memories. Regrets. Or at a minimum, embarrassment. It isn't easy to look back -- and yet sometimes, like Lot's wife, you have to. You simply
Lot's wife should have resisted the urge (after all, we all know that too much salt can be bad for you), but you and I, we shall be brave. We shall conquer our fears and look back at some of fright cinema's most regrettable moments -- some funny, some sad, all utterly bizarre.
King of the Zombies (1941) is a tale of American special agents who crash land on a Caribbean island where a weird German doctor is turning folks into zombies. One of our American pals has a black valet who the movie's writers have weighted down with negative racial stereotypes. His eyes pop wide with cowardly fear at the slightest provocation. His every scene will make you wince.
One has to bear in mind that this movie was a product of its times. You'll find some racial stereotypes in a few H.P. Lovecraft stories from the 1920s and 1930s. Magazines of that era often featured unflattering racial stereotypes, like “yellow menace” tales about sinister Asians. Mind you, none of that is an excuse: just an explanation.
The Corpse Vanishes (1942) treats women as poorly as King of the Zombies treats its black cast members. In the middle of the night, a female reporter staying in a creepy old house is bothered by an insane imbecile – later, she witnesses his murder and finds some dead bodies tucked away in the basement of the house. When she reports these findings to her editor, he instantly dismisses her ordeal as ridiculous dreams. Apparently authoritative males in that fictional universe think women have such fragile minds, they simply can't tell dreams from reality.
The villain in the movie harvests young brides to keep his old, evil, crabby wife looking young. Most of the women in this not-so-Grand Guignol are either victims or witchlike crones. The reporter is a strong female character, but in the end, she gives up her career in journalism to become a stay-at-home wife. Considering that the man she marries is one of the guys who dismissed what she witnessed, I think she'd have been better off staying single.
