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American horror-a scary paranormal experience

While browsing on net I found this scary paranormal story on American horror. It tells about the scary ghost story creepy paranormal experience and scary paranormal phenomena. I hope you all, my paranormal lover friends, like this paranormal research paper on American horror. Here the ghost story follows-

To consider the Native American position in horror demands a look at Native American history in general because, like people of ethnic Jewish origin, genocide has had an overwhelming and catastrophic effect on both past and present. For Native America, horror has been attached to reality for centuries, and many would argue it continues to linger. Obviously the level varies in every individual man or woman, but the socio-historical connection is there. Look at native poet Sherman Alexi’s poem “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”:

I have seen it and like it:
The blood,
the way like Sand Creek
even its name brings fear.

Despite Alexi’s (and, by implication, all Natives’) deep understanding of horror, Native Americans have largely been pigeon-holed or relegated to the background of the genre proper. In more classic horror, or anything from the Lovecraft-Poe-Blackwood literature days, a Native character could only be a superstitious drunk, or some other simple plot device, like an archeological wonder to evoke the dark, mysterious past. Change has not yet come, and we can, essentially, find but two main forms in which Native America shines in modern horror: Monster-Myth and Place-Vengeance.

The Native Monster-Myth strain entails a little diffusion in form, but not much. First, there’s the sort of woodland monsters sub-genre, including werewolf offshoots (Wolfen, Ginger Snaps Back, Wendigo) and other bizarre or fantastic creatures (It Waits, the Masters of Horror episode Deer Woman, the killer bat movie Nightwing, or even the cannibalistic blend of native and white legend in Ravenous). These are monster movies of a violent sort, all a bit incestuous within the entire werewolf-vampire strata of ideas. In these films, particularly in concern to werewolves, we find a great deal of Euro-Native cultural blurring. For the most part, wolves are not negative creatures in Native mythology. European folklore views wolves as horrible creatures, and this may in part come from the plagues that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages, and the huge wolf populations that would thrive on things like devouring the abundant bodies, or even snatching up small children from their village homes. Remember, Central Europe was once an enormous forest, and only in the last few centuries were wolf populations contained and effectively wiped out. But, like the vampire, the werewolf is one of those legends that has seemed universal enough to countless Euro-descended artists, and so it has been blended with the mythologies of distant cultures as though it were. If you want to see something closer to genuine Native American mythology on film, you probably should ignore werewolf cinema; consider instead Dreamkeeper. It is to Native myth, perhaps, what Clash of the Titans is to Greek myth (even if it isn't quite horror).

While Native Monster-Myth films point at the horror of the wilderness and the mysterious (still powerful phobias in North America), the Native Place-Vengeance branch of horror is focused more on actions and consequences, all stemming from the original sin of Columbian conquest of the Americas and European appropriation of Native land. We’ve seen it play out nicely in the Poltergeist films and Pet Cemetery, and even the older Death Curse of Tartu. At this point, in fact, it is a cultural cliché that we’ve seen parodied in the likes of South Park (the pet store from hell), and soon in a full-length feature by Troma titled Poultrygeist (about a fast-food restaurant built on a burial site). Again we see it, slightly altered, in the segment from Creepshow 2 titled Old Chief Wooden Head. This time it’s a Native who’s paying for what he’s done.

So we’ve got the fear and we’ve got the punishment, check and check. Other horror centered on Native America is hard to pin down. There is a very intriguing essay on The Shining as being full of metaphors about white conquest and native genocide. Then, like a one-man band, there’s Lou Diamond Phillips, a guy who’s been in at least a dozen horror b-films and television shows, beginning back in 1990 with The First Power, a cop and Satanism flick that might be best described as part-Se7en, part-Shocker, part WGN Saturday afternoon action movie. Phillips is, in fact, 1/8 Cherokee, along with a little bit of everything else. But hey, while blood quantum counts in government policy, it certainly does not in horror cinema.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have enjoyed reading your blog. Keep up the good work! :)

-TheMrs.

Jay Bethke said...

You copied and pasted this post from a blog called Mutant Shakedown. Not only is this plagurism (because it is not cited), it is also intellectual property theft. Please remove this post, or give it the proper credit, with a link, to Mutant Shakedown.

MrCool said...

yeah, the way you generalize "all Natives" as having a deep understanding of horror is BS, and you can go to hell.