Most Gothic Place Names in the United States--Michigan

[For previous entries, click the "Most Gothic Place Names" label under Features in the right sidebar.]

Wolverine country is a den of great place names, such as Paines (expect neither rest nor relaxation here), Covert (there's much more to this scene than meets the eye), Killmaster (try getting hired as a servant in this town!), Duel (don't enrage any truckers on the roadways), Ash Acres (a capacious wasteland), Devils Corner (doubtless a suburb of Hell), Hard Luck (a place where your ill fortune has been pre-ordained), Bates Location (I'm guessing in that creepy house up on the hill), and Tallman (sounds like a Phantastic destination).  All worthy contenders, but I couldn't help but choose the following as this week's winner:

Windigo.  I swear that this was a happy accident; I had no idea beforehand that this post would end up part of Wendigo Week.  In any event, the name (doesn't "Windigo, Michigan" just roll off the tongue?) evokes a town with a taste for the taboo, a wintry community where the cannibals can be found by the cabin-full.  The kind of place where the phrase "eat your heart out" is hardly an idle boast.

Cruel Tees Meets Wendigo Week

What a shock: a heavy metal band drawing on horrific imagery!

Care to wear it?  The "Wendigo" T-shirt can be purchased here.

"Skin and Bones"--And He's Always Eating!

The episodes from the aborted first season of Fear Itself were hit or miss, but "Skin and Bones" definitely falls within the former category.  Directed by Larry Fessenden (who also helmed the feature film Wendigo), the episode focuses on the terrible appetite a rancher has developed while lost in the mountains for ten days.  Now Wendigo-possessed, Grady returns home determined to have a nice, family dinner--with his wife, children, and cuckolding brother serving as the main courses.  The plot is pretty standard, but what makes "Skin and Bones" memorable is the nightmarish makeup (and antics) of Doug Jones as the emaciated, cadaverous cannibal Grady.  He forms one of the most gruesome and unnerving figures ever to appear on network television.

"Skin and Bones" can be viewed in its entirety here.  And for a brief behind-the-scenes look at the episode, check out the YouTube video below.

Dark Passages: Pet Sematary

In the following excerpt from Stephen King's Pet Sematary, protagonist Louis Creed encounters the Wendigo while bearing the corpse of his young son Gage to the Micmac Burial Ground.  The passage is masterfully written, creating and sustaining suspense as it chronicles an ominous approach.  Notice how King grounds the scene in realistic detail, focusing on the impact of the Wendigo's approach on the natural landscape and registering Louis's multi-sensory experience (the author also presents a bit of Faulknerian inner monologue, parenthesized and italicized).  At the same time, King manages to convey an air of mystery, to strike the Lovecraftian chord of terror from beyond:

Something was coming.

Louis came to a total halt, listening to that sound...that inexorable, approaching sound.  His mouth fell open, every tendon that held his jaw shut simply giving up.

It was a sound like nothing he had ever heard in his life--a living sound, a big sound.  Somewhere nearby, growing closer, branches were snapping off.  There was a crackle of underbrush breaking under unimaginable feet.  The jellylike ground under Louis's feet began to shake in sympathetic vibration.  He became aware that he was moaning

(oh my God oh dear God what is that what is coming through this fog?)

and once more clutching Gage to his chest, he became aware that the peepers and frogs had fallen silent, he became aware that the wet, damp air had taken on an eldritch, sickening smell like warm, spoiled pork.

Whatever it was, it was huge.

Louis's wondering, terrified face tilted up and up, like a man following the trajectory of a launched rocket.  The thing thudded toward him, and there was the ratcheting sound of a tree--not a branch, but a whole tree--falling over somewhere close by.

Louis saw something.

The mist stained to a dull slate-gray for a moment, but this diffuse, ill-defined watermark was better than sixty feet high.  It was no shade, no insubstantial ghost; he could feel the displaced air of its passage, could hear the mammoth thud of its feet coming down, the suck of mud as it moved on.

For a moment he believed he saw twin yellow-orange sparks high above him.  Sparks like eyes. (328-329)

Work Cited

King, Stephen.  Pet Sematary.  New York: Doubleday & Company, 1983.

DVD Review: Ravenous

Ravenous (Dir. Antonia Bird, 1999)

This weird Western reveals its quirky sensibility right from the outset, when it follows up an epigraph from the renowned philosopher Nietzsche with the Anonymous quote "Eat me."  The fact that this film has its tongue (or should I say, its teeth?) set in its figurative cheek is also signalled by the choice of actor to play the commander of the mid-19th-Century army fort situated in the Western Sierra Nevadas.  Perhaps best known for his work in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and the HBO series Deadwood, Jeffrey Jones portrays a bumbling colonel that could have been right at home with F Troop.  Even the music that provides the soundtrack for Ravenous strikes a discernibly whimsical note, in deliberate discord with the drama unfolding on-screen.

All this is not to suggest, though, that Ravenous forsakes horror for comedy.  The oddball chaplain Toffler (played by Jeremy Davies) elicits shivers as well as giggles when he wakes up screaming, "He was licking me!"  The "he" here is the mysterious, Machiavellian (yet also campy) figure Colqhoun, who has insinuated himself into the company of soldiers stationed at Fort Spencer.  It seems that the exigencies of frontier life in the wintertime have forced Colqhoun to develop some taboo dining habits.  Now he has an insatiable, unnatural appetite for human flesh (once you go cannibal, you never go back).  In short, he has turned Wendigo, and now plots to gorge himself on his fellow man--and to turn some of the soldiers into cohort cannibals that will then prey upon unsuspecting travelers who visit the fort.

Robert Carlyle excels in the role of Colqhoun, as does Guy Pearce as the dubiously-decorated soldier John Boyd, who gets his first taste of blood (literally) during the Mexican-American War.  Whereas Colqhoun is a gory glutton, Boyd is a cannibal with a conscience; the conflict that unfolds between the two Wendigo-touched figures drives the second half of the film.  Their climactic battle is wonderful to behold, full of destructive mayhem and bloodshed.  An intriguing moral dilemma also arises at film's end (I don't want to spoil the fun by saying any more about it in this post).

Ravenous is not for the weak (or empty) of stomach, but fans of gleeful grotesquerie will find plenty to feast on here.  Never has the Wendigo theme been incorporated more smoothly or cleverly into a motion picture.  This one is a must see, during Wendigo Week or any time of year.

Kicking Off Wendigo Week...

Last Thursday, I spotlighted Nancy Collins's short story "From Hell's Heart," which employs the Wendigo as its antagonist.  The story got me thinking about the supernatural, cannibalistic entity, so I decided that I would hold a Wendigo Week here at Macabre Republic.  Over the course of the next five days, I will publish posts dealing with the Wendigo's manifestations in fiction, film, and television.

First up, a link to the text of the seminal novella written by Algernon Blackwood: "The Wendigo."  This weird tale (the first to take to the mythical Wendigo as its subject) is a masterpiece of steadily-mounting dread.  H.P. Lovecraft has extolled its virtues in Supernatural Horror in Literature, noting how readers "are confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest daemon about which North Woods lumbermen whisper at evening.  The manner in which certain footprints tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship."

For further background info about the Wendigo, you can check out its Monstropedia entry.

I'll be back tomorrow to review the best movie to ever draw upon the Wendigo myth.