My favorite monsters

Halloween is close at hand, a time when I trot out some of my favorite cinematic and literary horrors.

In the former category is almost every fright film made by Universal Studios in the 1930s and ’40s, black-and-white gems like Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula,” Boris Karloff’s “Frankenstein,” Lon Chaney Jr.’s “Wolf Man” and a boatload of sequels, mostly of lesser quality. They exude atmosphere — crackling bolts of lightning, cobwebbed castles, foggy marshes — and practically define the iconography and conventions of the horror genre.

On the literary side, my tastes run further afield. Many of the early works of Ray Bradbury, especially the short stories “Night Fever” and “The Jar,” eschew the creaky staircases and midnight settings of the Universal front. In the same vein (pun intended), Richard Matheson modernized many of the traditional conventions of horror in the 1950s by finding a pseudo-scientific explanation for vampirism (“I Am Legend”) and placing stories on passenger planes (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”) and highways (“Duel”). Stephen King picked up the torch — not to march on Baron Frankenstein’s castle — and shredded nerves with rabies (“Cujo”), a mutated flu virus (“The Stand”) and psychotic fans (“Misery”), to name just three.

But a short novel I read every year — both because I assign it to students and because it never fails to make me think as well as shudder — is Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Originally published in 1898, the novel avoids most of the conventions the cinema would enshrine as standards decades later and anticipates the psychological suspense that drives modern horror.

Like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” “The Turn of the Screw” is a frame story, beginning on Christmas Eve in an old house where revelers gather to tell ghost stories, a mostly British tradition at Yuletide that I wish would catch on here in the States. The discussion ’round the fire turns to one-upmanship, and a guest notes that ghost stories involving a child give an already frightening subject an additional layer of terror.

“If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw,” he says, “what do you say to two children?”

The story that unfolds from this observation is purportedly from the manuscript of an old governess who, as a young woman, is placed in complete control of two orphans on a rambling country estate. James never gives the governess a name, but allows her story to unspool in first-person, creating a simultaneous sense of familiarity and distance that serves the tale well.

In short order, the governess becomes convinced the children are being haunted by ghosts of their former governess and valet, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, who were having an affair in the months before their deaths.

For years after the novella’s publication, it was accepted as a quintessential ghost story. But critics soon began digging beneath the surface, questioning the mental state of the children’s second governess, who claims to have saved the two from demonic possession by these spirits. Do the ghosts exist, or are they figments of her imagination?

In a parallel interpretation, critics have found much in James’s portrait to support a reading of catastrophic class differences, as the affair between the first governess and the valet required the crossing of several social strata. Further readings have looked at the novella as a prototypical feminist text, a study in sexual repression and possible pedophilia involving multiple characters, living and dead.

While some of these analyses range far afield, they can all be supported, more or less, by the ambiguous — and, to my mind, perfect — narrative techniques that James employs, which allow multiple readings without decisively refuting any.

And the final pages, when little Miles and the governess are alone in the house, fending off what she believes to be the Quint’s final attempt to corrupt the boy’s soul, are among the creepiest in literature. James’s ending, soberingly final, allows readers to see the governess as either hero or villain.

For his part, James stolidly maintained that he had written a traditional ghost story, and that alternate readings should be viewed with suspicion. But writers are notoriously reticent to discuss what their work “really means,” and even when they make such pronouncements, their opinions should be taken with a degree of skepticism. Once a work is published, its interpretation belongs no longer to the writer, but to the audience.

And “The Turn of the Screw” is a many-layered delight, one that thumbs its nose at the conventions ascribed to “traditional” horror stories (including my beloved Universal movies), becoming all the more frightening because its monster, if one even exists, lives not in the attic or the basement, but in the human heart.


If this column inspires you to read “The Turn of the Screw,” I’d love to hear your interpretation. Email me at chris.schillig@yahoo.com or tweet me @cschillig on Twitter.

This was originally published in October, 2015, but I'd still welcome comments today. 

Mixing pumpkins, bread could create cross-cultural nirvana

Two unrelated, food-related stories caught my attention recently.

In California, organizers of the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off logged a new North American record. A pumpkin grown by Travis Gienger, a horticulture teacher in Minnesota, came in at 2,560 pounds. That’s only 143 pounds shy of the world record, set by a squash in Italy just last year.

I’ve always had a soft spot for pumpkins, even if the quintessential Thanksgiving pie made from the gourd isn’t my favorite. (I prefer apple or cherry.)

Each year, my wife and I gawk at the size of pumpkins at the Canfield Fair, usually in the 1,500-pound range. This is still large enough to warrant an appreciative whistle and, despite signs that admonish visitors not to touch, a fond caress.

Oh, and a selfie.

Why I need a picture standing in front of some anonymous farmer’s accomplishment is something I haven’t analyzed too deeply, but I snap one every year.

The first thought I had when I heard of Gienger’s prize-winning effort was how I could get my photo with it. Isn’t that weird? I mean, I don’t scamper around snapping pictures of myself with other produce − man, look at the size of that cumquat, I gotta get a picture with that! − or holding up gigantic ears of corn. Well, just that once.

Seriously, though, I’ve always been into David and Goliath-like size differentials, where the natural order of things is upended. I love movies where giant bugs stomp on hapless humans. Or where people are reduced to the size of your average under-the-bed dust bunny. To this day, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” who battles a housecat and a spider among other normally inconsequential trappings of suburbia, is a favorite.

So super-sized pumpkins? Yeah, I like those.

I once thought of raising my own giant pumpkins and bought seeds that promised larger-than-average results. But I never got around to planting them. I was probably too busy watching “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”

Anyway, I gave the seeds to my in-laws. If they shepherded any pumpkins bigger than a Volkswagen Beetle, they didn’t bother telling me.

The other food-related story, also in California (imagine that!), involves a bakery in San Francisco. Workers there created a 6-foot bread sculpture of Han Solo encased in carbonite.

For those who need context, Han Solo is a Star Wars character played by Harrison Ford. In “The Empire Strikes Back,” Solo is captured by the bad guys and freeze-dried before being carted off to Jabba the Hutt’s palace, where he’s displayed like a deer’s head. Later, he gets better.

Anyway, “Pan Solo,” as the bakers christened their sculpture, is composed of “wood and two types of dough, including a type of yeastless dough with a higher sugar content that will last longer,” according to the Associated Press.

A mother-daughter duo, Catherine Pervan and Hanalee Pervan, worked on their masterpiece after regular business hours for several weeks as part of the Downtown Benicia Main Street Scarecrow Contest.

As Homer Simpson might say, “D’oh!”

Imagine living within driving distance of the world’s largest pumpkin and a bakery that displays a Star Wars character made from bread. The mind boggles.

Then I realized the two events are almost cross-curricular. What if the giant-pumpkin people dressed up their offerings to look like members of the Hutt family, those large, sluglike beings in Star Wars with fat tongues and excess saliva?

Heck, Hutts are practically begging to be pumpkin-fied.

Far off in the background, so faint nobody else can hear it (I understand there are meds for this), I discern the drumbeats of destiny, calling me to organize a cultural mash-up between horticulture and geek culture, jack-o’-lanterns and Jabba, Squash Wars and Star Wars.

And me, out in front, taking a selfie with it all.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Dogs deserve respect, but owners must use care

Family pets mauled two siblings, ages 2 and 5 months, last month in Tennessee.

The attacks left the children’s mother with grave injuries after she threw herself on top of the older child to shield her. Nevertheless, both children died.

The dogs were pit bulls.

According to the mother’s friend, quoted in USA Today, the animals had been with the family for eight years and had given no indication of being aggressive. Authorities are investigating, and both dogs have been euthanized.

America has a love affair with canines. The American Veterinary Medical Association says some 38.4% of American households have dogs, but other sources estimate almost twice as many.

Whatever the exact number, millions of dogs and dog owners live in the United States, with the vast majority going about their business without incident.

Pit bulls, many owners would say, have been unfairly vilified and singled out as “dangerous.” The AVMA notes on its website that “any dog can bite: big or small, male or female, young or old.”

The organization does not support breed-specific legislation. Instead, it recommends laws that designate specific animals as dangerous, based on that animal’s history.

This position is sensible. A dog that bites is a dog that bites, after all, meaning that if an animal attacks once, it is likely to do it again. Protecting the community from that animal by requiring the owners to take certain steps, up to and including euthanization, is warranted.

However, for a particular dog to be designated as dangerous, a dangerous incident must occur. Here is the problem with waiting for an attack − someone gets hurt before the animal is identified.

The nonprofit DogsBite.org says that pit bulls contributed to 67% of the 568 American deaths from dog bites from 2005 to 2020.

Some readers will see such numbers as a scare tactic, pointing out that dog-attack fatalities over a 16-year period are minuscule compared to the 647,000 U.S. deaths annually from heart disease or 1,670 per day from cancer. No argument there.

The AVMA also notes the challenge of correctly identifying dog breeds, especially with mixed breeds. It can be hard to tell a dog’s breed by the way it looks, so some dangerous dogs may be incorrectly labeled as pit bulls. That’s not fair.

So, these statistics should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

Still, the numbers would be enough for me, if I had small children, to think long and hard before introducing a pit bull into the family. Or to allow a pit bull to remain, even if it were a long-standing part of the household, once I had children.

Yes, there may be a prejudice among the public regarding the breed. And perhaps pit-bull attacks have gained greater traction in the media than attacks by other breeds. I have no doubt that many pit bulls are gentle, lovable and loyal toward family and friends, just as some terriers and toy poodles are vicious.

Despite what the law in a particular community might or might not dictate, is it worth the chance?

Pit bulls feel too risky, like having an open well on the property but not fixing it because nobody has fallen in yet.

I can’t imagine the pain of owners who shrug off the risks or pooh-pooh the warnings, only to have their pet attack a passerby or a family member. Did they look at the numbers and still convince themselves that their case was the exception?

Because it’s better to be unfair to a dog breed a million times over than to a child even once.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Luring customers to McDonald's with adult Happy Meals

Folks needing another reason to eat badly have one: McDonald’s is selling adult Happy Meals.

I’m doom scrolling through a series of stories that place the promotion somewhere between Dante’s third level of Hell and the Second Coming. Apparently, nothing is lukewarm where McDonald’s is concerned. Except the food itself, of course.

Anyway, the fast-food giant announced adult Happy Meals this way: “One day you ordered a Happy Meal for the last time, and you didn't even know it.” 

If that statement is designed to make people feel horrible about aging, then mission accomplished, Mickey Dee’s.

I mean, what’s next? A funeral-home promotion that begins, “One day, you kissed your grandmother goodbye for the last time, and you didn’t even know it?”

Gosh, better Biggie Size that sentiment, dontcha think?

Once consumers shake off the impending sense of doom that comes from corporate recognition that youth is fleeting and the grave is closer than they think, they can take a look inside the festive red box.

But remember Nietzsche 101. When you stare into the Happy Meal, the Happy Meal stares back.

The choices for adults are consistent with the fact that people with mortgages require more calories and won’t be content with a mushy burger and a few carelessly tossed fries.

No, the adult version of Happy Meals includes options like a 10-piece McNuggets or Big Mac. Enough calories to clog whatever arteries are still semi-open after a regular diet of pizza, beer and Skittles. Maybe it comes with a $100-off coupon for a good cardiac specialist.

But let’s face it, Happy Meals were never about the food. They were always about snorkeling through the grease to find the prize at the bottom.

Here’s where the McDonald’s promotion gets really strange. Because the toys are designed in conjunction with Cactus Plant Flea Market. If this name means nothing to you, don’t feel bad.

CPFM is − and I’m copying directly from Google here − “a fashion label crafting original streetwear with signature dye treatments and lettering.” So, this partnership of opposites is somewhat like the Vatican releasing Madonna’s next album. I mean, what’s next, Versace teaming with Walmart?

The toys feature the beloved (?) McDonald’s characters from past generations — Grimace, Hamburglar and Birdie the Early Bird. But here’s the kicker: They all have four eyes instead of two! How clever! How cutting edge!

A fourth character, Cactus Buddy, is also included in the image McDonald’s is using to promote this gastronomic trip down memory lane.

How to describe Cactus Buddy? It looks a little like Pac Man devoured the woozy-face emoji and then slipped on the hat and shirt a McDonald’s employee left behind when she stormed out of the restaurant for better opportunities across the street at Subway.

I mean, why Cactus Buddy and not Ronald? Why is McDonald’s downplaying the role a clown had in its worldwide success?

It couldn’t be that clowns have become super-scary, associated with homicidal killers in Stephen King novels and showcased in urban legends where they’re spotted walking around in the woods, could it?

To be fair, Ronald is hanging out on the periphery of a McDonald’s shirt from Cactus Plant Flea Market, but he looks to be just one of the guys, no more prominent than Mayor McCheese or Officer Big Mac, secondary deities in the fast-food pantheon.

And this is one reason the promotion will struggle, because McDonald’s won’t embrace the essential … uh, cheesiness of its former mascot. Many 20- and 30-somethings would like an edgy McDonald’s to lean into the creepy clown factor.

If your company has an iconic children’s character who has become synonymous with sewer grates and razor-sharp teeth, don’t hide it. Flaunt it.

Give adults a McDonaldland that looks more like a haunted house, and they’ll make the successful Monopoly promotion of years gone by look feeble in comparison.

Heck, a scary Ronald McDonald might even make them eat an adult Happy Meal.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Are light-bulb moments dead or just evolving?

Steven Johnson wants to replace the “you” in “eureka” with “we.”

The author of “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation” and a related TED Talk that has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, Johnson argues that the light-bulb metaphor of creation − where one person, often working alone, is struck by a moment of blinding insight − is inaccurate.

Instead, Johnson believes many good ideas come as the result of conversation and cooperation. Even something as revolutionary as Darwin’s theory of natural selection is more likely to “fade into view over a long period of time” than be the product of a single a-ha moment, according to his research.

Johnson credits the creation of the coffeehouse as an impetus for many modern ideas. It is, he argues, a place where folks come together and talk about pressing issues and, presumably, find solutions. (He is silent on whether many moments of inspiration are lost to a barista who shouts out orders and mispronounces names, or to customers who grouse over the high price of the latest venti concoction at the neighborhood Starbucks.)

Johnson’s book and TED Talk are 11 years old, but they are poised for a re-examination today.

For one thing, the world has invested heavily in the collaborative model, either because of theories like Johnson’s or as part of a larger communal push that Johnson’s work reflects. In education, where I spend most of my time, it’s hard to find a contemporary lesson that doesn’t feature some element of discussion.

“Work with a shoulder partner” and “get into groups” have become common teaching directives, far more so than in previous generations, when the main instructional mode was lecture and the primary way to demonstrate understanding was working solo.

These are tough times for students to be introverts, for sure. The world favors the extrovert or at least the ambivert, that rare bird at home in solitude and a crowd.

Another reason for Johnson’s work to come back into vogue is more obvious. Society is lurching toward some semblance of normal after several years of forced isolation because of the coronavirus pandemic.

During much of that time, coffeehouses, along with most everything else, were closed or operating on a heavily modified business model, one that kept people apart rather than together.

Some of the workarounds for face-to-face transactions, such as ordering by app and contactless deliveries − are here to stay, further minimizing the sorts of interactions that Johnson argues are essential for new ideas to percolate.

Nor were restaurants and coffeehouses the only businesses affected.

In every area of communal life, similar losses were felt. Businesses large and small transitioned to work-at-home models, and Zoom meetings replaced gathering around the conference table. Churches began to congregate via video feeds. Physical classrooms were replaced with virtual ones.

And while each of these substitutes still carried opportunities for collaboration, few people would argue that the replacements were equal to the originals. Nor has the return to “normal” been seamless. With some folks preferring to work from home, will their potential innovations also be AWOL?

It will be interesting to see if the world experiences an “idea crash” in the next few years as an intellectual echo of the various supply chain and financial woes cycling through now. Or maybe we will see instead a reflowering of various creative endeavors driven by individuals instead of groupthink.

Perhaps physical presence doesn’t matter as much in a world where social media sites have become the coffeehouses of a new age. Who is to say that the next great idea won’t come as the result of a Twitter thread with hundreds of contributors or a series of Wattpad entries that a group of readers interprets in a slightly different way?

The coffeehouse may look different, but the creative outcomes may be the same. The spirit of innovation could be experiencing its latest evolution.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

@cschillig on Twitter

Does 'undo send' make e-life even harder?

I usually don’t get excited about iPhone updates, but iOS 16 might be the exception.

The new operating system allows users to do two things that are really awesome, he said in his most breathless voice. One might even be life-changing. That is, if your life doesn’t involve skydiving naked from an aero plane or a lady with a body from outer space, as Vince Neil sings.

First things first − the cool, non-life-changing update. If you hold down your finger on a dominant figure in one of your photos, Apple’s new operating system automatically removes the background.

I tried it first with a photo of my dog. Boom! The camera fairies traced him with a white line that looked a little like a firecracker fuse. When I opened social media, I could paste just his image, minus the half-dozen Wilson tennis balls he’d strewn around the floor and the mountain of unread books on my nightstand.

Don’t write to me saying that Android phones have been doing this since Obama was president or that some 99-cent app does it better. One, I’m an unrepentant Apple snob, and two, I like the convenience of having nothing to install and just holding down my finger.

Now for the life-changing … uh, change. The new iOS gives you the option to edit or even delete a sent text message. Ever send a break-up text to the wrong significant other? Or had a glaring typo in a text to your boss that changed “oh fudge” to the word that got little Ralphie’s mouth washed out with Lifebuoy soap in “A Christmas Story”?

No? Me either, but I needed something dramatic to convey how indefatigably cool it is to be able to “edit” or “undo send.”

Because maybe at some point in your life you’ve been having two simultaneous text conversations, one with a colleague and one with your spouse, and accidentally told your colleague you loved him and your spouse that a Thursday morning meeting would be terrific.

Not an apocalyptic mistake, but still.

But here comes the small print − and as always, the devil is in the details. You can only truly edit messages to other people who are using the same iOS 16 operating system. If they have an earlier version or an Android phone, they’ll just get a new message with the edited text, so your gaffe or inelegant wording (“I think your boyfriend is a schmuck”) remains.

Even if you’re chatting with people using the new software, they can still press down on the edited message and see the original, so the “schmuck” message is just a fingertip away.

Which raises ethical, Pandora Box-y type questions. If I see an edited message, will I press down on it and see what the person said originally? Or do I respect their revision process and stick with the second draft?

You gotta know I’m pressing down on that edited message. Every. Single. Time. If you aren’t, then what’s wrong with you? (Editor: please edit that last sentence to read, “If you aren’t, then you are a far better person than I am.” Thank you.)

Better to use the “undo send” feature, which blows up the message on the screen with a little puff of blue, much like Wile E. Coyote hitting the desert floor after falling off a cliff.

Even there (the deleted text, not the desert floor), a few caveats remain. “Undo send” works for only two minutes after a message is sent.

And if the receiver has even one Apple device, like an older iPad, that still uses an earlier operating system, the message remains, even if it’s deleted from other devices.

I’m waiting for some wit to come up with a name for the daredevil practice of sending a scandalous text and then trying to delete it before the receiver reads it. Destined to become the next TikTok challenge, it could be called e-sendiary.

These changes may prompt iPhone users to have frank conversations among themselves. Have you updated yet? Will you peek at edited messages? How quickly do you generally check texts?

Plus the angst of wondering if your poker-faced friends read your rant about their lack of parenting skills after their little darling doodled with a Sharpie on your living room walls, or if you deleted it in time.

On second thought, maybe this second new feature isn’t life-changing and indefatigably cool. It’s more like a pencil with an eraser that still lets people see what’s been erased.

But hey, at least I can still drop out the backgrounds on my dog photos.