Screenwriter Carey Hayes, who co-wrote the 2013 horror flick The Conjuring, discusses “the religious supernatural,” his term intended to distinguish his work from other scary movies:
I coined the term to identify a certain framework, and, I suppose, to suggest a history. Today there is a lot of focus in popular culture on the supernatural or the paranormal. It’s almost all secular. In the past, the supernatural and paranormal occurred within a worldview that allowed for the supernatural but within a religious framework. People had tools like prayers to deal with the supernatural, which, you have to admit, is scary.
We wanted, in our movies, to return to that. We thought that, in many ways, religion deals with the big questions, and the supernatural is usually a scary thing that interrupts daily life and causes people to think about the big questions. So, we wanted to pair the two, religion and the supernatural, and remind audiences that this is, ultimately, what scary movies are about: ultimate questions about life.
Halloween is a kind of Rorschach test of our common fears, and the available evidence suggests our nightmares fall into different categories. For example, we are afraid of murderous people and monsters, but we find them particularly frightening if they have some kind of extra deficit.
So, for example, zombies (an entirely fictional concept), as portrayed in contemporary movies and television shows—are fearful because, in addition to having the single motivation of gobbling up humans, they are amoral, soulless creatures, machine-like in their unwavering pursuit of flesh. In the case of common horror film villains, an additional creepiness is derived from a mixture of evilness and madness—amoral blankness and psychopathology. Thus the most successful of horror villains, such as Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, combine both the absence of a moral anchor and the unpredictability of mental illness.
Of particular interest to me is the portrayal of scientists as fearsome crazies.
Science and reason are supposed to be the antidote to paranormal beliefs, and yet fictional scientists often appear as villains of paranormal horror films. Why? Part of the explanation must be the addition of madness to the character of the conventional scientist stereotype.
Romm: In other realms, we don’t find the combination of genius and mental illness to be as threatening—there’s no “mad artist” trope, for example. Van Gogh isn’t scary. What is it about science in particular that makes the mad scientist frightening?
Vyse: It’s the idea that they have powerful knowledge. As an example, I’m an experimental psychologist. I’m a scientist. But if I’m traveling on an airplane and somebody asks me what I do for a living, if I say I’m a psychologist, they sort of become nervous and worried that I’m going to analyze them. There’s this sense that you have knowledge, that you’ll be able to find out things about me that I don’t want you to find out. And I think in the case of science, that’s exactly the case—that genius, combined with the power of science, is frightening, is potentially something that could be used against you in an evil way. If you think about it, there are a number of horror films in which the villain is a psychiatrist or a psychologist. It’s combining this idea of special knowledge that can be used powerfully to make that person frightening.
(Image: Young Frankenstein screengrab from Flickr user twm1340)
Adrienne Raphel reveals some fast food items on secret menus you’ve probably never heard of:
In-N-Out Burger, the West Coast chain, has perhaps the most notorious fast-food secret menu. Since the nineteen-seventies, customers have been ordering Animal Style fries (fries smothered in sauce that resembles Thousand Island dressing and topped with melted cheese and diced grilled onions) and 3x3s (burgers with three patties and three slices of cheese), along with several other modifications that don’t appear on the menu. The corporate Web site now acknowledges some of these options as In-N-Out’s “not-so-secret menu”; they’ve trademarked “Animal Style,” “Protein Style,” “3×3,” and “4×4.” Yet, Carl Van Fleet, the company’s vice-president of planning and development, told me, “We don’t see ourselves as having a secret menu at all.”
These kinds of denials have been successful enough at presenting the impression of secrecy to attract a fair amount of attention. Liz Childers, in a Thrillist article, describes her mission to request secret-menu items at eight chains; J. Kenji López-Alt, the managing culinary director at Serious Eats, ordered every possible item at In-N-Out; and BuzzFeed provides list after list of secret-menu items. Web sites like HackTheMenu aggregate user contributions, encourage customers to rate items, document successful finds, and add new discoveries.
In another area of food secrecy, Phil Daoust test-drives some dessert recipes with an unsettling substitution, and one that’s perfect for your Halloween baked goods today:
Back in January, in a report that British bakers have shamefully ignored, the Copenhagen-based Nordic Food Lab explained how pigs’ blood can replace eggs in sweet dishes. Both ingredients, it pointed out, contain a similar mix of proteins, and both will coagulate when heated. This was great news, it declared, for all those suffering from egg-white intolerance.
The accompanying recipes ranged from pigs’ blood ice-cream to pigs’ blood pancakes. … [Elisabeth] Paul’s recipe was for chocolate sponge cake, which she recommends as the basis for “blood forest gateau”. But that sounded a bit involved for cooking with kids, so I decided to make fairy cakes instead, adapting a recipe from that culinary authority Dr Oetker. I combined 110g of butter with the same weight of caster sugar, 75g of self-raising flour, 25g of cocoa powder and two medium eggs – or rather, 130g of pigs’ blood. According to the NFL, 65g of blood will do the work of one medium egg, while 43g of blood can stand in for an egg white. (To put it another way, since a slaughtered pig yields between 2.25kg and 4.5kg of blood, a single porker can replace three to six dozen eggs. And, come to think of it, you can get bacon, sausages and egg substitutes from the same animal. Isn’t nature wonderful?)
Meanwhile, Roberto A. Ferdman praises John Oliver for pointing out in the above segment how much hidden sugar is “in everything from fruit drinks to salad dressings, cereals, crackers, and ketchup.”:
The FDA, for its part, has proposed a new nutrition label that will better communicate the amount of “added sugar”—how much of any given food’s sugar content wasn’t in the food before it was produced and packaged. But the proposal, which was first put on the table at the beginning of the year, has met fierce opposition from the cash-rich sugar industry. “Being forced to reveal how much sugar you are adding to people’s food might seem pretty mild, but there is no way the food manufacturing industry is going to let that happen,” Oliver said.
A woman dressed as a zombie entertains people waiting to see the show “la Peste” at the Manoir de Paris haunted house in Paris. By Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown recently questioned the effectiveness of the Democrats’ War on Women rhetoric. Seth Masket asks for more evidence:
One of the races frequently singled out for the failure of the war-on-women strategy is the Colorado Senate race, where Democratic Sen. Mark Udall (or “Mark Uterus,” as some have taken to calling him) is running a few points behind Republican Cory Gardner despite a blistering series of ads portraying Gardner as trying to destroy all forms of contraception ever. Yet Udall is running at almost the exact same position in the polls as Sen. Michael Bennet (D) was at this point in 2010. Bennet’s come-from-behind victory was attributed by some to his aggressive war-on-women rhetoric, portraying his opponent Ken Buck as a retrograde sexist. Indeed, the gender gap in that particular race was an impressive 16 points. So if both Democrats were trailing by two points right before the election, and both were employing the war-on-women strategy, why was it deemed successful in one case and a failure in the other? …
Given the geography of this year’s election, it was always going to be a tough one for the Democrats. But it’s not clear whether focusing on abortion and birth control this year has made their task harder or easier, or whether it’s done anything at all.
Suderman focuses instead on the issues Democrats aren’t campaigning on:
Democrats are winning on issues like contraception, but Republicans are now more trusted on higher priority issues like the economy and the budget deficit. As Gallup concluded, “it has become pretty clear that Republicans have a distinct and emerging issue advantage in the 2014 campaign.”
Part of what’s fascinating is that this is happening despite how thin the GOP agenda continues to be. Republicans have campaigned heavily against Obama this year, but have been reluctant to offer specifics about what they support. Democrats are running on the wrong issues; Republicans are running on no issues. Yet voters seem to prefer whatever it is the GOP stands for to what Democrats have already done and still have to offer.
By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed that more or less the entire developed world was shopping and cooking and dining out in a way that was given over to self-definition and self-expression and identity-creation and trend-catching and hype and buzz and the new new thing, which sometimes had to do with newness (foams! gels! spherification!) and sometimes with new ways of being old (slow food! farm-to-table! country ham!).
My mother was thinking about food like that from the start of the nineteen-sixties. I have spent a fair part of my working life writing about food, and have often been asked how and why I got interested in it. I was never able to give a full answer, because the pattern became apparent to me only years afterward. By now, it’s clear that my interest in food came from growing up with someone to whom food mattered the way that, to a great many people, it matters now.
Most of the energy that we put into our thinking about food, I realized, isn’t about food; it’s about anxiety. Food makes us anxious. The infinite range of choices and possible self-expressions means that there are so many ways to go wrong. You can make people ill, and you can make yourself look absurd. People feel judged by their food choices, and they are right to feel that, because they are.
In terms of abandonment, ghost towns get all the love — there are a spooky 160 of them on Atlas Obscura as of this writing. These gaping remains of human activity departed are both unnerving and often beautiful, but what about ghost islands? Around the world whole island communities have been evacuated and deserted, leaving the landmasses to nature and the atrophy of time. Here are eight of these ominous places on the water, and the details on why people left, and if you can visit the isolated ruins.
On the one seen above – Hashima Island, Japan:
Abandoned: 1974
Eerie Elements: Derelict, fortress-like compounds on Hashima Island once housed workers for a coal mining facility. The island was nicknamed “battleship” (“gunkanjima”) for its typhoon-resilient architecture that’s now crumbling like a dystopic wasteland.
Can You Go? Yes, tours have been operating since 2009. You can also explore it digitally through the ominous Hashima Island: A Forgotten World interactive project.
Shannon Palus investigates eco-alternatives to traditional burial:
There all kinds of green practices and products available these days on the so-called “death care” market. So many, in fact, that in 2005 Joe Sehee founded the Green Burial Council—a non-profit that keeps tabs on the green funeral industry, offering certifications for products and cemeteries. Sehee saw a need to prevent meaningless greenwashing in the green burial world. “It is a social movement. It’s also a business opportunity,” he said. So what’s the most environmentally friendly way to dispose of a body? It all depends on your preferences.
For those who still want to be be buried, a greener approach may include switching out the standard embalming fluids made of a combination of formaldehyde and rubbing alcohol, with ones made of essential oils. And instead of a heavy wood and metal box that will take years to degrade and leave behind toxic residue, there are now Green Burial Council-certified biodegradable cedar caskets.
Others are choosing to forgo the casket completely and opt for what’s called a “natural burial,” involving only a burlap sack buried in the woods. If you don’t have a forest handy, in some cities bodies may soon be placed in an industrial sized compost bin, and turned over to create fertile soil.
The Dish 
