ALL THE TRUTH THE DEROS LET ME PRINT.
A blog devoted to books, stories, articles and films related to the Shaver Mystery, The Abandondero takes its name from the degenerate robot-like beings (Deros) first described by Richard S. Shaver in "I Remember Lemuria." If you don't know about Richard S. Shaver, click on the link to the Wikipedia article or watch my cartoon in the top box of the right-hand panel of this blog. To see some of my other writing, click on the link to ExpertsColumn.
Paging through A Man of Misconceptions, John Glassie's new biography of Athanasius Kircher, I came across an illustration from Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus. The picture brought Richard S. Shaver to mind at once. Wanting to share the illustration, I paged through the copy of Mundus on Internet Archive and found it on a fold-out leaf between pages 186 and 187. I took a screen shot and posted the illustration from it below.
The illustration shows a central fireat A heating a system of underground reservoirs, rivers and caves.
I can also see how Jules Verne might have been inspired by this picture.
Is it coincidental that Kircher visited the caves of Malta where part of Bill Ectric's Shaveresque novel Tamper is set?
What, no degenerate evil-doers hiding below ground? No giantesses? No psy rays? What a shock to readers of "Return of a Demon," the first published story credited to writer and visionary Richard S. Shaver. In this story Shaver tells a strange tale of a man, a woman, a doctor and a demon.
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (isfdb.com) lists "Return of a Demon" as Richard S. Shaver's first published story. Fantastic Adventures published the story, a weird tale, in its May 1943 issue. The magazine credits the story to Alexander Blade, one of the house pseudonyms of its publisher Ziff-Davis Publications. Given that twelve other writers used this same pseudonym, how sure can we be that Shaver wrote this story? Mental Illness Indeed, we cannot know with certainty that Shaver wrote "The Return of a Demon," but we should not reject the possibility because it does not fit with the Shaver Mystery. Shaver created the mythology of the Shaver Mystery in part to conceal his own whereabouts during the 1930s. We now know he spent some of that period in a mental hospital instead of visiting a secret underground civilization. Given our current knowledge of Shaver's life, "Return of the Demon" rings true because the story expresses so much anxiety about having a history of mental illness.
Demonology In the story amateur demonologist Hilard Lantry struggles to summon Zedri-Nesu, a human-demon hybrid creature who comes to the aid of lovers. Lantry feels his beloved Rosella distances herself from him because he suffers from depression and what he calls “sleeping sickness.” Lantry makes remarks like “If only I could make my brain really function!” and “What girl would want to marry a--a madman!” and “What girl would love a mental cripple; that's what I am--a victim of incurable psychoneurosis.” Lantry plows through a book of strange symbols trying to figure out how to summon Zedri-Nesu.
Treatment A physician named Ludwig treats Lantry for depression and also attempts to convince him that his interest in demonology is unhealthy. Ludwig explains that Lantry’s strange book about Zedri-Nesu is a hoax and that Rosella disapproves of demonology. Thus, demonology causes Lantry’s romantic problem and will never solve it.
The physician says he will bring Rosella by to see Lantry to “come to an understanding without the help of Zedri-Nesu.” Lantry does not agree with the doctor’s ideas or methods, but he does take a dose of a drug the physician supplies that “accelerates mental processes.”
The drug allows Lantry to interpret the symbols in the demonology book. Lantry now understands he will need a woman’s help to conjure up Zedri-Nesu. Lantry forces the session of relationship counseling that Ludwig arranged to become a rite to conjure up Zedri-Nesu, a rite that appears to fail but later results in demonic devastation.
Themes A history of mental illness stands in the way of relationships. Delusion masquerades as knowledge. Hoaxes spring from the pages of books. The themes of “Return of a Demon” suggest Richard S. Shaver could have written it, for the protagonist of the story struggles with the same demons as Richard S. Shaver. Thus, an examination of “Return of the Demon” supports the claim of the Internet Speculative Fiction Database that Shaver wrote the story.
Zedri-Nesu? The demon Zedri-Nesu puzzles interpreters of the story, but one course of reasoning offers a clue. When Raymond A. Palmer joined Ziff-Davis Publications to edit Amazing Stories, he started Fantastic Adventures, the magazine that published “Return of a Demon,” as a sister magazine. Palmer promoted Shaver’s writing as true stories. Palmer’s promotional assistance often went beyond publicity to manipulation and exploitation. As a result of a childhood accident that damaged his spine, Palmer was a hunchback about four feet tall. The demon Zedri-Nesu is an anagram of “undersize.” How bizarre to find this detail in Shaver’s first story! Researchers may read "Return of a Demon" on unz.org here: http://www.unz.org/Pub/FantasticAdventures-1943may-00088.
I'm reading Bill Ectric's "Tamper," a Shaver-related novel where the hero visits the Hypogeum, a vast and ancient system of underground tunnels and caves on Malta. Some of the tunnels are thousands of years old. Ectric shows the Hypogeum makes a great setting to evoke "the fear down below."
Before I read Ectric's book, however, I always thought the cave monastery of Vadzia in Georgia (not the one where I live, the other one) would make the ideal setting for Shaver-inspired fiction. Since it’s hundreds as opposed to thousands of years old, the 12th century monastery is not as mysterious as the Hypogeum. The pictures I've seen of the monastery evoke claustrophobia. Unused for centuries, the bare rooms have the look of a dungeon.
My mental images of the Deros using the monastery as a resort aren't at all serious. I can see the most daring of them coming out of the caves to bask in the harmful rays of the sun. Perhaps a few take dust baths before returning inside for fun with stim rays.
The pictures below are from Wikimedia.
A panoramic view of the cave monastery
Image by Kotasik (CC by SA 3.0) via Wikipedia
Closer view showing the Church of Dormition
Image by David Holt (CC by SA 2.0) via Wikimedia
Another wide view
Image by David Holt (CC by SA 2.0) via Wikimedia
A room in the interior
Image by David Holt (CC by SA 2.0) via Wikimedia
Tourist descending the escape tunnel. He is not claustrophobic.
Image by David Holt (CC by SA 2.0) via Wikimedia
It's a long way down.
Image by henribergius (CC by SA 2.0) via Wikimedia
***
In June I worked on several articles that will be ripe for posting this month. Expect to see a review and analysis of "The Return of the Demon," Shaver’s first published story (or at least the first story listed on isfdb.com). Shaver used the pseudonym Alexander Blade when he published the story in the May 1943 issue of Fantastic Adventures. A review of Bill Ectric’s book that I mentioned above should follow close on the heels of “The Return of the Demon.” I’m completing my research for “Magnetism, the Brain and Richard S. Shaver.” That title should appear soon as well.
In the coming months this blog will also present Shaver-related books and gifts from Amazon. Amazon will pay me a small commission on each item I advertise that’s purchased when someone clicks through to their site from my site. Buying an item from Amazon through the The Abandondero will allow me to purchase more books to review.
In my previous post I wrote about Winthrop Sargeant's discussion of the Richard S. Shaver and the Shaver Mystery in a Life magazine article of May 1951. I expressed the opinion that Sargeant may have helped Shaver remain an influence in science fiction without intending to because Sargeant's article ran a cover of the June 1947 Amazing Stories issue that featured the Shaver Mystery.
Readers looked at Life, but didn't read it.
I want to expand on my reasoning since many of my readers are unfamiliar with Life magazine in its old weekly incarnation. Life wasn't always a special-issue magazine focused on one topic. It was a large-format People magazine. The cover story of the May 1951 issue promised a review of the latest in women's beachwear. Most readers paged through the magazine, checked out the pictures, and skimmed an article or two. Thus Shaver benefited from the article because the Amazing Stories cover was the only cover of a science fiction magazine shown in the article and because many readers only skimmed the article.
Life describes cover illustration, created by Robert Gibson Jones, in a caption:
The "Deros," subhuman cave dweller, decorate cover of Amazing Stories' issue devoted to their evil doings. Dero statues look down on human who has driven into their cave while live deros at entrance (bottom, right) fire at him. ( Life May 21, 1951, p137 caption)
Nothing critical of Richard S. Shaver or the Shaver Mystery appears in the caption. The criticism is buried in the text.
June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories (PD-US via Wikimedia)
How strange was the Amazing Stories cover?
The bizarre statues with their grotesque facial expressions certainly arrested the eyes of casual newsstand customers. The image, although weird and outlandish, wasn't distasteful. Readers saw such illustrations, or illustrations that used some of the elements of the Amazing cover, almost everyday. Robert Gibson Jones drew well within the bounds of standards of popular illustration prevalent in the 1930s and 1940s.
Readers saw faces similar to those of statues in the work of the very popular Boris Atzybasheef. Artzybasheef's illustrations frequently appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the sister publication of Life. You can see a few of Artzybasheef's ads here:
http://gogd.tjs-labs.com/gallery-view?illustrator=BORIS*ARTZYBASHEFF.
The Robert Gibson Jones's source for the illustration, however, may have been the Captain Marvel adventures that appeared in Fawcett comics in the early 1940s. On the pages below from Whiz Comics #25 (Dec. 26, 1941 Vol 25 No 5), Billy Batson visits the wizard Shazam. (This comic book is now in the public domain and available for free download from Digital Comics Museum.)
In his Amazing stories cover, Jones appears to have fused the pictorial elements of three panels. He found the inspiration for the car, at least in part, in the "weird vehicle" that Billy Batson enters in a "a forgotten section of the subway." The composition of Jones's cover reproduces the colors and some of the forms of the "fantastic cavern-like pathway." The panel showing Batson running in a dark passage decorated with statues of the seven deadly sins inspired Jones's depiction of the dero statues.
Shazam!
The photo editors at Life adhered to exacting standards. They chose to illustrate a Sargeant's article with a cover of Amazing Stories because the cover would interest their readers without violating canons of taste. Moreover, the editors knew the strangeness of the cover was familiar.
To illustrate the material the editors may have passed over, consider the following pin-up style cover. It's available as a poster from Amazon. (Mouse over the image to learn price and click to order.)
In 1932 a factory worker named Richard S. Shaver thought he heard distant voices whenever he turned on his welding machine. Hearing these voices sent him along a strange path that led to the publication of more than three thousand pages of strange stories about the deros, degenerate survivors of an ancient civilization who dwell in caverns deep inside the Earth. The deros, according to Shaver, wield powerful weapons that broadcast thoughts and commands to humans living above ground. Beginning in 1945, Ziff-Davis science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures published this material either as true accounts of events or as fiction based on a true story--and increased their circulation by doing so.
The Shaver Mystery
Shaver began this body of work, known as the Shaver Mystery, with a letter to Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories. In the letter Shaver claimed to have discovered the alphabet of Mantong, the original language. In 1943 Palmer published the letter and was astonished by how much it interested his readers. When Shaver sent him another manuscript, the enterprising editor rewrote it as a fact-based novella titled "I Remember Lemuria!" Enlisting the aid of other writers to help Shaver, Palmer continued to publish stories of the Shaver Mystery in issue after issue.
Hostile Fans
Not all the readers of Amazing Stories found the stories believable or even amusing. Many science fiction fans, notably Harlan Ellison, decried the Shaver Mystery stories as hoaxes and publicity stunts. Raymond A. Palmer brushed off the criticism by the science fiction faithful because his magazine was receiving numerous letters from new readers outside the in-group. The Shaver Mystery stories provoked little interest outside the readership of science fiction magazines until the controversy surrounding them spilled onto the pages of Life, at the time the leading magazine of photojournalism in the US.
In 1951 in the May 21 issue, Life ran an article, "Through the Interstellar Looking Glass," that covered the rise of the science fiction genre in magazines and movies. Written by music critic Winthrop Sargeant, the article identifies science fiction as a fad. Sargeant characterizes science fiction fans as members of an in-group with their own aesthetic standards and jargon. In the article he suggests science fiction fans might be "a manifestation similar to the jitterbugs of the hot jazz era."
The Shaver Hoax
Sargeant devotes several paragraphs to "the most celebrated rumpus that rocked the world of science fiction--the Shaver hoax." Shaver and Palmer, according to Sargeant, blame everything that is wicked--or even inconvenient--on the interference of the deros on humans. Sargeant says Shaver Mystery believers blame flying saucers, the disappearance of Judge Crater, infestations of fleas and stuck typewriter keys on the deros. He also reports that some science fiction fans, angered by the publication of fiction as fact, tried to scuttle Amazing Stories by bringing the Shaver Mystery to the attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice as a danger to sanity, by petitioning the Post Office to forbid the mailing of Amazing Stories and by bringing their complaints to the publisher. This last attempt may have succeeded.
Sargeant's humiliating attack prompted Shaver to reply. He wrote letter to the editor, which Life printed in its issue of June 11, 1951. Life redacted the letter, inserting two sets of ellipsis periods. We may never know the full text of the original. In the letter as it stands, Shaver writes:
Sirs, In your recent article on science fiction you describe the "Shaver hoax." ... Deros are a fact, and one does have to be a cavern dweller to be one. Dero is an ancient word from Mantong meaning detrimental robot, or, in English, "habitual thinker of evil thoughts" (which naturally result in only in evil deeds). Hitler was a person whose thoughts and actions resulted only in harm.... The hoax began as an attempt by me to get Mantong (that language which is the mother tongue of most earth languages) into the hands of men able to force its recognition and study for the important key to the past which it is. Before Egypt the origin and history of the human race is still exclusively in darkness. I cannot help it if you will not make the effort to understand. It takes perhaps an hour's honest study and thought to begin to realize that Mantong is not a silly invention but something very, very big.
Richard S. Shaver
Amherst, Wis.
Outsider Artist
Today Shaver is remembered more for his outsider art than for his writing. Outsider art is a term used by critics for the work of artists who are insane. Richard S. Shaver concealed part of his life by claiming he spent years in the caves of the deros. Prior to his writing career, he had in fact spent time confined to a mental institution. After his career as writer came to a close, he began to make paintings based on the images he "read" from rocks he broke. He thought these rocks were books from the ancient civilization he wrote about in the pages of Amazing Stories.
Influential Writer
Richard S. Shaver was an outsider as a writer as well. He was never a member of the science fiction in-group Sargeant described, and at least some members of the group called Shaver a paranoid schizophrenic. His contribution to science fiction is now undervalued. Shaver had an original paranoid vision that continues to influence books, movies, and television. He's used as a source of ideas by other writers in the science fiction genre. For example, Harlan Ellison, Shaver's fiercest critic, borrowed the idea of elevators that travel below the basement of building in "From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet," which he wrote in 1976, the year after Shaver's death.
Despite Sargeant's attempt to humiliate Shaver, the Life article may have increased his influence. Life magazine was mostly pictorial. Most readers skimmed the articles. Sargeant's article is illustrated with still shots from the science fiction movies then in theaters: "The Man from Planet X," "The Thing," "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "When Worlds Collide." The only cover of a science fiction magazine pictured in the article is the June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories. The cover bears the words "The Shaver Mystery." Shaver and Palmer continued to publish Shaver Mystery material for two decades after Sargeant’s article.
Sources, Asides, Notes and Further Reading
The 21 May 1951 issue of Life is available on Google Books.
In the same Life article, Sargeant makes fun of another system of beliefs first published in a science fiction magazine. This other system of belief became a religion of Hollywood stars.
A good place to start reading about Richard S. Shaver is the Wikipedia article Richard S. Shaver.
We have constructed everything we think of when we talk about flying saucers from rumor, imagination and a tiny bit of science. Even the term "flying saucer" came from the media and not from an observer. Nevertheless, flying saucers figure in books, stories, movies, television and websites. Who started this cultural phenomenon? Who invented flying saucers?
PD-US A screenshot from "A Trip to the Planets" (1925) via Internet Archive
The First UFO Flap
On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold saw objects in the sky that resembled “a big flat disk.” He reported this sighting and started the media frenzy of the first UFO flap. At first Arnold neither hypothesized the objects had an extraterrestrial origin nor called them flying saucers. The term flying saucer was coined by journalists, and the extraterrestrial hypothesis bubbled up from the imaginations of writers and from the memories of Orson Welles’ broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” The media attention to the sighting was intense. A Gallup poll the following August showed that 90% of Americans had heard of flying saucers.
The Origin of Flying Saucers
Others in history saw mysterious disks in the sky before Kenneth Arnold. Why did his sighting result in so much publicity for so long? How did flying saucers become a modern myth? John A. Keel, author of “The Mothman Prophecies,” attempted to explain in his essay “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers."
According to Keel, Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of the science fiction magazine “Amazing Stories” and co-founder of Fate magazine, prepared the suggestible public for the extraterrestrial hypothesis with lurid magazine covers featuring the flying saucer image. Keel claimed that Palmer encouraged his artists to make illustrations of circular flying machines. As an example, he cited an article “Circle-Winged Plane” in a 1946 issue of Amazing Stories by W.C . Hefferlin. In Keel's belief, once Palmer found that people were seeing the objects he and his writers had made up, he redoubled his publicity for flying saucers, and the media hysteria grew. Keel identified Raymond A. Palmer as the inventor of flying saucers.
Where are the Flying Saucer Magazine Covers?
Palmer was keen to capitalize on the UFO craze. Indeed, Palmer often claimed he’d learned of flying saucers before 1947 from his writer Richard S. Shaver. Nevertheless, Keel may have given too much credence to Palmer’s own claims. Palmer had little influence outside the readership of his magazines. Collectors of issues of Amazing Stories find no covers depicting circular airships or spacecraft in the year before Arnold sighted the saucers. Moreover, the covers of Amazing Stories that illustrate scenes from Shaver’s stories don’t show flying saucers. Before the Arnold sightings, the overwhelming majority of science fiction artists drew cigar- or rocket- shaped spacecraft.
Thus, the image of the flying saucer was not preloaded into the collective imagination by Raymond A. Palmer and his magazine covers. Few Americans saw circular flying saucers on the covers of magazines before the Arnold sightings. In fact, Americans were more likely to have seen a flying saucer in a movie.
The Photo
The large still picture at the top of this article is a screenshot from "A Trip to the Planets," a public domain film in the Internet Archive. The title cards of the film describe the vehicle as an airship with powerful electric engines. Despite the description of the vehicle as an airship, the craft leaves the atmosphere and travels to other planets This early spaceship representation resembles the flying saucers in subsequent illustrations, movies and fakery.
The German film industry made a variety of popular science documentaries between 1918 and 1945. These films are known as Kulturfilm. "A Trip to the Planets" was an American re-cutting of the German Kulturfilm "Our Heavenly Bodies."
Director Hanns Walter Kornblum made "Our Heavenly Bodies" for Colonna-Film GmbH and UFA, and the film was released in 1925. The German title is "Wunder der Schöpfung." A restored version of the German film is available from the Munich Film Museum. The restored version is a 93-minute film. "A Trip to the Planets” runs slightly longer than 16 minutes because the film was cut to one reel for American audiences.
The Launch Scene
The American distributors retained the vivid launch scene in their cut-down version of the German film. The vehicle appears to be a disc-shaped craft enclosed in a bubble. The vehicle could be a cigar shape viewed sideways, but the "airship" is never shown at any other angle, at least in the American version of the film. The spacecraft of the film certainly looks like it could be a flying saucer.
Was Kornblum the Man Who Invented Flying Saucers?
Could the spacecraft in the 1925 movie "A Trip to the Planets" be the origin of the iconic flying saucer? Could the film have made an impression on viewers that might have later prejudiced their observations or ordinary atmospheric phenomena? Consider the following:
The first sighting of unidentified flying disks by a pilot (which set off no media frenzy) occurred in 1926, the year after the film's release.
We don't know if Kenneth Arnold ever saw the film, but in 1925 he was an only 10 and perhaps impressionable. In the same year Richard S. Shaver and Raymond A. Palmer were teenagers of 18 and 15.
Other Art Deco images from German films of the era have become cultural icons. For example, the robotic Maria from "Metropolis." ("Metropolis" and "Our Heavenly Bodies" were both films from UFA. Theodor Loos appears in both films.)
Although Raymond A. Palmer does deserve credit for his part in publicizing flying saucers, the evidence that Hanns Walter Kornblum created the iconic image of the flying saucer is as strong, if not stronger, than the evidence supporting the contention that Palmer was responsible for the image. Thus, the director of the film "Our Heavenly Bodies," may have originated the image we know as the flying saucer--in 1925.
Sources
More details about the film are available on the Internet Archive page for "A Trip to the Planets," on the page for for "Wunder der Schöpfung" on the Edition Filmmuseum site and on the Internet Movie Database page for "Our Heavenly Bodies." Information on Hanns Walter Kornblum is scarce. According to IMdB.com, he directed no more films after the 1925 “Our Heavenly Bodies.” He died in Berlin in 1970 at age 91.
I first learned of the film "Marebito," a Japanese horror movie with a chilling, paranoid atmosphere, from some other Triond writers. Postpunkpixie, for example, included this film in her article “13 Unusual Vampire Stories.” Yawara mentions it in “The Best Asian Horror Movies of All Time.” Intrigued, I found the film online and watched it. Fifteen minutes into the film I understood well how the film achieved cult status after release. After watching it, I wanted to learn more about the movie and the ideas behind it.
The Trailer
(Trailer uploaded to YouTube by asianwack)
A Bit of the Story
Masuoka is a freelance videographer who yearns to feel the fear he sees others experience. He sees a terrified man commit suicide in the Tokyo subway and captures the scene with his camera. Reviewing the video, Masuoka realizes the man saw something before he took his own life. But what? He heads to the subway station and seeks to find out. When Masuoka steps into the subway station, he slips into an unusual mode of thought: “They [the terrified people he has seen] didn't see something that terrified them. They saw something because they were terrified.” A homeless man he encounters in the tunnels below the subway warns him of the deros, a degenerate underground race who suck their victim’s blood. Deep beneath Tokyo, Masuoka finds a pale, naked woman chained to the wall. He frees her, takes her back to his apartment, and names her F. She lives on blood.
The Director
Takashi Shimizu: Clothing designed by deros?
(Photo by Saskia Batugowski via Wikimedia)
Director and fashion victim Takashi Shimizu made “Marebito” in digital video between making his movies “Ju-on: The Grudge” and “The Grudge.” He and his crew spent eight days shooting this project. The film cost 5 million yen, roughly $60,000, to make. As a comparison, Ed Wood filmed “Plan 9 from Outer Space” in five days, but in 2012 dollars his budget was $135,000. “Marebito” is a much better film than the famous Ed Wood turkey. Since Takashi Shimizu proved with “The Grudge 2” that he could make a terrible movie for $20 million, we know his directorial talents alone can’t produce a good movie. The leading actor and the screenwriter, Shinya Tsukamoto and Chiaki Konaka, make this film worthy of a cult following.
The Leading Actor
Takashi Shimizu has won two awards, including one for “Marebito”; on the other hand, Shinya Tsukamoto has garnered more than a dozen. Tsukamoto is an established director of horror and science fiction in Japan, and it’s hard to imagine him taking direction from a young duffer like Shimizu. Tsukamoto portrays Masuoka sliding down a slippery slope from a career as a videographer to a life as an obsessed outcast. The character remains believable as he grows more and more involved with the underground world of the deros. In a key scene where Masuoka goes to the subway to seek the deros, the hypnotized look Tsukamoto gives to his character perfectly fits a man who just threw away his Prozac to help himself focus.
The Writer
Chiaki Konaka based the screenplay for “Marebito” on his own novel of the same name. The novel isn’t available in English. Konaka is best known in the West as a one of the writers of “Serial Experiments Lain” and “Digimon” He openly acknowledges his debt to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, but he borrows little from that source here. “Marebito” draws on the world-building mythopoesis of another writer, Richard S. Shaver.
The Shaver Mystery
An American original, Richard S. Shaver sent a letter to “Amazing Stories,” a science fiction magazine, about the Mantong Alphabet, which he claimed formed the basis of the original language, a language much older than humanity. Raymond A. Palmer, then the editor of “Amazing Stories,” asked for more information. Shaver mailed him “A Warning for Future Man,” a lengthy article about his memories of a past life he lived thousands of years ago in a strange underground civilization. Palmer saw value in Shaver’s work, but did not publish the article. Instead, he turned it into the short novel “I Remember Lemuria,” which Palmer presented to his readers as a fact-based story. The story appeared in the March 1945 issue of “Amazing Stories.” The issue sold out. Having tasted success, Palmer and Shaver began a long collaboration, turning out dozens of stories about what Palmer called “the Shaver Mystery.”
According to Shaver, the deros, degenerate offspring of an ancient space-going race, live in caves deep inside the Earth. They spy on human beings, influence them with mysterious rays, and sometimes kidnap them. These ideas reek of paranoia and delusion, and Shaver did in fact spend eight years in a mental hospital before he contacted Palmer. After publication of the first stories of the Shaver Mystery, “Amazing Stories” received numerous letters from readers who claimed to have spent time underground as prisoners of the deros.
Recommendations
I can’t predict who will enjoy a film as idiosyncratic as “Marebito.” Nevertheless, I can identify some groups that may not like it:
“Marebito” is rated R in the US. The movie is not suitable for children. They will be either frightened or bored. Parents who allow their children to see this movie may have to answer many uncomfortable questions.
Teenage horror fans may be disappointed with a film that relies so much on atmosphere and dramatic tension. The ending of the movie may not satisfy them.
Those who can't bear to watch a film with a few plot holes will hate "Marebito." For example, exactly how do you sneak a naked woman out of the Tokyo subway system? The film skips over this detail.
The film is in Japanese with subtitles, so those who prefer dubbed or English-language films should avoid it.
In Japanese folklore a marebito is a divine being who arrives in a village bearing gifts. “Marebito” makes little use of this bit of folklore. Indeed, the film is “not Japanese enough” for some purists, who insist the Japanese films they view not draw on the culture of other countries.
“Marebito” is an atmospheric horror-thriller. Movie buffs who enjoy puzzling out mysterious and understated films will love it. Adults who regularly watch art house films or who are fascinated by Richard S. Shaver or who appreciate Shinya Tsukanoto will want to own it.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
