Taking The First Step
Join me, won't you, in the dance?
Welcome to The Haunted Path, an irregular odyssey through the pricklier thickets of fiction. Whether you consider yourself a horror reader, writer, filmmaker, genre fan or merely count yourself a rubbernecker, then this newsletter aims to pique your curiosity, trigger inspiration, and map intriguing detours down the rabbit hole of malificent dreams.
Postcards from the Pit: Toxic Silhouettes
Graduates of my classes already know that the strangest (and the most strangely satisfying) stories tend to be fact, not fiction. Dig in any historical direction of your choosing and you’ll uncover oddities and anomalies to fuel your creativity for months to come.
This week, my spadework has led me to William Bache (1771–1845), a roving silhouette artist, who made a good living creating and selling silhouettes at the beginning of the 19th century. He used a physiognotrace, an early image capture device, invented decades before the camera, to mass produce silhouettes as he traveled from town to town, up and down the eastern United States, with side trips to the Caribbean and Cuba.
Before photography brought cheap portraiture to the masses, a silhouette was the only way to preserve an ordinary person’s image. Until the 1780s, silhouettes were drawn by hand, but the advent of the physiognotrace mechanized (and democratized) the process. Sitters positioned themselves inside the wooden frame while the machine traced an outline of their head and shoulders, and a pantograph rendered that image in miniature, on paper. When the paper was folded, several copies of the image could be created at once, for ease of distribution among family and friends.
(Martha Washington by William Bache, via the History Picture Archive)
Bache charged 25 cents for “four correct profiles”—around $5 today—putting the silhouettes within easy reach of most purses. Thanks to the physiognotrace automating the tricky part of the process, he could handle an entire wedding party in a single afternoon, or an extended family, a troop of soldiers. His delighted customers saw themselves as others saw them, in profile, rather than as a mirror reflection, for the very first time. The new technology meant you could now carry your loved one in your pocket or locket, hang them on your wall, or tuck them away in a drawer. As the years rolled by, these cherished silhouettes outlived their subjects, providing an eternal record of girlish beauty, military dignity, high collars and low décolletages.
Bache himself kept copies, pasting them into an album that was donated to the Smithsonian in 2002. However, conservationists discovered every page of the album emanated arsenic, making it dangerous to handle. The origin of the arsenic remains unknown, either a component of one of Bache’s many processes, or already present in the paper or glue when he purchased it—arsenic was ubiquitous in manufacturing during this era, most notoriously in the vivid greens used to color wallpaper.
It’s taken two decades, but the album has finally (and safely) been digitized, and the Smithsonian made it accessible via a microsite at the end of March. Flipping through these simple outlines, you can guess so much of the sitter’s character, the solid black shapes conveying details of expression, hair style, age, headgear, heads that droop and chins that tip defiantly. It’s clear, even after two centuries, who these people are.
What does your silhouette say about you, my friend?
If you’re in the business of creating characters, what might their silhouettes say about them?
Either way, never underestimate the impact of a carefully chosen character hat.
Read: “Trust Exercise” by Susan Choi
Those of you who’ve migrated here from The Poplars mailing list already know I’m a sucker for dark academia. Choi’s 2019 novel is a worthy entry to the genre, exploring sexual abuse at a performing arts school in the 1980s and how the consequences play out in the late 1990s. The first half, told from a teen perspective, resonates with the intensity we only seem to feel in adolescence about ultimately trivial things (boys, cars, mascara). The second, adult half, cringes at the self-serving unreliability of the narrator.
For Gen Xers, it conjures the coruscating doubts surrounding any and all sexual activity in a long-before #MeToo era. We didn’t have the words back then to describe our experiences or label our trauma. We just knew it was wrong and right now.
Yeah, it was a different time.
Highly recommend, especially if you’re OK with SA, seedy older men manipulating confused adolescents, the horrors of being a talentless theatre kid in thrall to a teacher who’s a kiss away from being a cult leader, and privileged teens who (surprise surprise!) grow up delusional. Provocative and entertaining.
Watch: Simon, King of the Witches (1971)
In Los Angeles, circa 1970, magickian Simon (Andrew Prine) is so committed to counterculture cool that he lives in a storm drain. He ventures out only to declare his desire to be a god, sell handmade charms to rich hippie women, and befriend a wide-eyed young hustler, Turk (George Paulsin), who’s struggling to, uh, get down. Life is good—until Turk takes him to one of those velvet-decadent Hollywood Hills parties I’ve spent nigh-on twenty years attempting to gatecrash. The event is hosted by Hercules (Gerald York), resplendently queeny in a brocade smoking jacket, and attended by the same strata of privileged, yet counter-curious Angelenos who (allegedly) hung out at Dennis Wilson’s soirées during his ‘roomies with the Manson Family’ period.
Alas, Fortuna hijacks the occasion to give Simon’s wheel a couple of particularly vicious spins. He falls in love with Brenda (Prine’s real-life wife, Linda Rackum), before learning she’s the DA’s daughter. Then, a party-goer passes Simon a bad check for his magickal demonstration, deluding the magicikian into thinking he is, by his own standards, now a wealthy man—a breadhead who can put a deposit down on a basement apartment/alchemical laboratory.
When the bank refuses the check, the landlord challenges Simon, who vows revenge, even though he’s familiar with the Rule of Three and the dire consequences he’s bringing down on his own head. Mayhem ensues, as Simon finds himself at war with ‘The Man’ in myriad incarnations (landlord, cops, mayor, his girlfriend’s DA dad, rich wankers generally). The action culminates in a truly wild optical effects sequence as Simon chases divine power as a means to his vengeful ends. Of course, it goes horribly wrong.
Simon, King of the Witches is one of very few movies written by a practising warlock (Robert Phippeny) so the occult trappings feel as they come from an authentic perspective, rather than half-understood gimmicks presented as carnival spectacle. Prine (RIP) relishes the weird and wonderful leading role, channeling Simon’s intense belief in his powers and potential, right until the end. The supporting cast is marvelous—I wish Paulsin had made more movies—and features Factory leading light Ultra Violet as leader of a pack of local Wiccans. If you can’t find it in your heart to love this movie, then, alas, I will never find it in mine to love you.
That’s all for now folks. Remember, if you need any writing services or story consultancy, I’m available. Developmental edits on screenplays and novels, 1:1 writer coaching and mentoring, idea/IP appraisal, copywriting with an edge, I am here for you. Contact me through the usual channel.
Until next time, stay on the path, no matter how haunted it seems, as there are far worse things in the woods.