Yesterday I saw “Night of the Hunter”, a strange, old film with Robert Mitchum in it, and I came up with two half-ideas, which is how I call loose associations which need to be explored further to see if they come to a workable proposition:

(i) the scene where the shadow of the preacher appears on the wall of the children’s bedroom– the way it fills the wall with a dark, overpowering, presence. I’m linking it to the end credit sequence in “The misadventures of the Baudelaire children” in which the cartoon figures of the children run through a décor which keeps taking the shape of the head of their evil uncle. Are these modern stories the faint memories of not-so-ancient times, when children were offered in sacrifice to gods and spirits ? In the 19th century, in the middle of the Industrial Revolution in Germany, two construction workers who found themselves unable to construct a certain building ( I don’t remember what it was) captured a child and offered him in sacrifice – to what ? When I was a small child ( that was thirty years ago, though it sometimes feels like a few minutes ago) my wet nurse would tell me not to go out roaming by myself because there was a bridge being constructed which kept crumbling, and the workers were looking for a child to offer in sacrifice ( there’s this thing about bridges, crossroads and house corners in many cultures, that they are places connected to another world).

(ii) An “American gothic style”. Both the architectural style and the Wood painting would be part of a dark current in American literature, films and paintings, obsessed with the other world. The locale is usually small-town America , mostly in the East Coast, or in the South, sometimes in the Midwest, but not in the West. It has its roots in Puritanism, Baptism and Evangelical beliefs in general. Themes and manifestations : the witches of Salem – Poe’s stories - Lovecraft’s stories ( “The Dunwich Horror” in particular) – David Lynch’s movies and “Twin Peaks” – Mothman, and “The Mothman Prophecies” – “Night of the Hunter” - “The Witches of Eastwick” (? For a lighter take on the idea). I’m surely saying something banal, and well-written about. But how come there is no catch-word for it ? The offshoots– according to me: “Out of the Body” by Robert Monroe – “Sybil” , by Flora Rheta Schreiber – the alien abduction hysteria ( successor of the Salem Witches hysteria)- that superhero with a flaming skull, who rides a motorbike – a certain haunting photograph I once saw, taken on a spot near a Midwest road where three persons had been killed in a accident. You see three crosses, slightly askew, lit by a light from a break in the clouds .

Objection number one to my half-idea: if such a current exists, why are American horror movies generally so gross, dumb and vulgar? Shouldn't it have given a feeling of genuine dread, the way Japanese horror movies are fortified by the old, powerful Japanese belief in ghosts ? Maybe because they come from Hollywood. It seems the “American gothic” style cannot cross the Rockies: too much sunlight, too much neon on the other side. These movies have yet given to a thankful world one priceless movie line, the queen of movie quotes: when, at the beginning of the film, the youngsters (a careful selection of the most superficial and annoying types, so that the onlooker can feel sadistic glee at their demise – hey, that chips in with my half-idea number one) move into the haunted house for a normal teenage night of sex, music and whining, and the heroine takes a thoughtful look at the porch, and says: “This place gives me the creeps” .

When I read “Out of the body” and “Sybil” at fifteen, I could certainly say: “These books give me the creeps”. Those endless Midwest plains, in which, in a wood house in a small town, a mad mother tortured her daughter- and she became a legion. I felt a trembling of reality. Again, in “Out of the body” ( forget about whether it’s true or not, just consider it as a story): that moment where Monroe, having started his astral travels, tells himself: “If I can go anywhere, then why not go to see the President?” But as soon as he starts wooshing to there, he bumps into….a cop ! An American cop, with the cap and the baton and the brass star, who tells him, probably in a low cop voice: “Why do you want to go see the President ?” Man, I loved that book for fabulously surreal moments such as these, where I felt like I was taking my hands off the bar at the Big Twister.

Do Stephen King’s books belong to that current ? He lives in a small town in Maine, and said in an interview that “The small town is the real America”. Well I don’t know, I haven’t read much of him.

Objection number two: in any culture, there is a current of interest in the other world, in spooky stuff. You’re just stating the obvious.Well, maybe, but let me go back to that feeling of “trembling of reality” which I felt when I read “Sybil” and “Out of the Body”. I felt something much the same when I read James E. McDonald’s 1968 testimonial on UFO activity to the US Congress ( Mc Donald was a Professor of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona. He said that he saw a UFO while driving on an Arizona desert road in 1954, and he afterwards devoted all his spare time to investigating these phenomenon). He focused his research on US Air Force members who had seen the objects, either from the air, or on radar screens, or while they passed near Air Force bases. It’s pretty scarey, at first read, I must say ( it’s easily available on the Net) . But once you’re through with it, the memory of that report gives you a powerful, eerily beautiful feeling: the vast desertic spaces in which these Air Force bases are located, with what must be gorgeous sunsets. And on the middle of them, those Air Force men looking at something strange in the sky: and Mc Donald’s interviews, later on: I imagine those men, probably well-kept, straightforward men, with a close-cropped haircut, their eyes taking on a strange glint as they talk of what they saw. That’s where I mostly get my tingle from that report: the idea of those men, from the heart of our new, industrial, world, the American towns with their candy stores and comic books and big cars, from a busy pioneer world of engineers, businessmen and soldiers, describing something weird “ a wobbly oval shape, moving too fast to be a plane” : the trembling of reality.

I felt it also one day as I struck through that motherlode of American mythology, the Kennedy Assassination. By the time I was through the first policeman’s report, and the second one, and what the other one heard through his motorcycle radio, and the gunshot from the grassy knoll – by the time the body had reached the Dallas Airport and the doctors’ reports were disagreeing about the number of bullet wounds – I felt my mind slipping, saw the great airport with the jets of those days, their wings quivering under the sunlight as they were being filled up with fuel – but it was not just the optical effect , it was as if I had reached a moment in the past where we slipped out of “normal” reality, into “another” reality in which the bullet wounds had shifted on the President’s body, and the motorcycle policeman’s radio said something else.

Another, more intense moment: while reading E.J. Hobsbawn “The Age of Industry”, I came upon the part where he describes the ways by which, during the Industrial Revolution, workers tried to find psychological relief from the unbearable conditions in which they were living and working. It gets pretty harrowing, which is saying much considering the previous chapters in which he explains how peasants were uprooted from a feudal system which was itself pretty harsh, but to which they were at least used to, and suddenly became workers in a young, naked and fierce capitalist system. He describes the growth of powerful evangelical churches, with their trances and self-mortification, and in a scene of bottomless horror, quotes a local American chronicler describing a mass prayer scene in that old pit of misery, the Appalachian mountains, “where hundreds of men, women and children roll on the ground, walk on all fours, yelp, growl, howl, foam at the mouth”.

But the time where I really felt myself going out of my mind, was one night when I was reading about Scientology on Wikipedia. I read about Xanu and the starplanes –there was even a painting of the scene, a 1950’s DC 8 flying through the stars, with the star and the two laurel branches on its tailfin – and I felt a fever swell up through my brain. The insanity of the whole idea was so monumental that , looking at that painting of the starplane, I felt I was looking at the true screaming face of madness. That’s what Cruise and Travolta believe in ? I had a fit of panic. Fortunately, my wife told me to go to bed, or I think I would have gone mad.

Tocqueville said that suicide was rare in America, but that madness was common. Visionaries must be common too, in that case. During the start of his seven months in Sri Lanka, Nicholas Bouvier noted with disquiet that he was no longer on the Eurasian continent, on which he had been travelling for so long, but on an island. “Islands are the place of metamorphosis” he wrote, “Where Circe turns man to swine. Whatever we bring in from the continent, is changed to mysterious shapes”. I imagine Eurasia as the Mother Continent of Thought, and America to be a giant island on the other side of the sea. There, three groups settle, the Puritans in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Baptists and Evangelicals in the South. Forget about the amicable Quakers, those softening agents in the great washing machine of America. The Puritans and other fire-and-brimstone crowd start shooting their way through the wild ranges of that giant land. Others do come, Irish, Germans, French, but the Bible belt holds the country tight. From the smouldering imagination of those preachers –still doing very well nowadays, piling up fortunes with their media empires, even – America spouts forth new mythologies – the Mormons , astral travelling, alien abduction, split personalities – so that, even as the pioneers conquered new lands to the West, and even upwards, to the Moon, the American imagination boldly goes where none has gone before. Beam us up, Scotty.