Add Homonym Attacks! #32
Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse Beyond the Threshold’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)
Introduction
So this is the last AHA! before Halloween. I wanted to write something special for the holiday, but ideas were a long time coming.
I already did a bunch on vampires.
I’ve done a CPO on crafting Zombie survival plans. Twice.
I’ve done a HTMD on how to sharpen a chainsaw.
Maybe I should just go back to the Skeptics Annotated Bible, and use bible quotes to try to pit vegetarians and Christians against each other
Acts 10:9-13
Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour: And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance, And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending upon him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat.Romans 14:2
For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs.1 Timothy 4:1-3
Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils … commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.
Naw… Having Christians and vegetarians gang fight would be funny for me, but wouldn’t be related to Halloween.
Crap.
Maybe I should just link to sites I find funny. A Christian’s guide to Oral Sex.
I guess that really isn’t about Halloween either.
Trick or Treating… Going door to door… Maybe I should talk about the crazy Mormons, and their messages of love.
1. 1 Nephi 1:19 “The Jews did mock him because of the things which he testified of them; for he truly testified of their wickedness and their abominations.”
2 Nephi 5:21 “And he [God] had caused the cursing to come upon them … wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.”
It’s a bit of a stretch, eh?
I could combine Christianity and monsters. I mean the bible does have people like Adam, Moses, Noah, and Abraham living exceptionally long lives. It does advocate ritualized blood drinking and flesh eating. The star of the New Testament does come back from the dead. All of that stuff does sound like something out of a vampire/zombie flick.
Too cliche though.
Maybe I should study the intriguing relationship between the decollete and crucifixes. There is something fascinating about a shiny cross between a woman’s baby-feeders, but that might require a lot of porn-related research on my part. Frankly, the local videos stores don’t have porn, and I dial up to the internet. Besides that is only tangentially related to vampires. But it is sexy.
Maybe a mistranslation column? Pepsi used to have generation obsessed advertisement. “Taste of a New Generation” and so on. At one point they had a tag-line including the phase “the come-alive” generation. Unfortunately, in Germany this was translated to be “the arise from the grave generation.”
Naw, I’d have to Snopes all those to make sure they weren’t urban legends.
Screw it. Let’s talk werewolves…
Lycanthropy
Most of what we think of as “werewolf lore” is actually a cinematic fabrication. I briefly covered the history last year in a CPO, so let’s recap. This is a slightly updated version of something I first posted with my column on The Blair Witch Program.
Werewolf of London is really the first notable werewolf movie, but it is basically told as a non-potion Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story. It’s far from a terrible movie, but probably the most over-rated classic horror film. Our werewolf here is cursed to destroy that which he loves most. The werewolves are bi-peds with big widow’s peaks.
The Wolfman comes around and writes the book of werewolf rules. Lycanthropy spreads via bites, you turn into a werewolf during the full moon, werewolves can only be killed by silver (a property borrowed from vampire lore). According to Wolfman a werewolf will be able to see the mark of the pentagram on future victims. The Wolfman also gives the world the “pure of heart” poem. As with London, instead of a wolf a werewolf is more of a wolf furrie. Actually, it kind of looks like a Lon Cheney’s wearing a coonskin cap while in black face.
Now, The Wolfman rules stay pretty solid, with the addition of moonlight’s ability to resurrect a dead werewolf in Frankenstein meets the Wolfman, and the introduction of working werewolf cure in House of Dracula. Or maybe that was House of Frankenstein, the differences are negligible, and I always confuse the two. At any rate that cure seemed to have worn off by the time of Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, a film which has inspired the likes of Quentin Tarantino to make movies. Also worth noting about that film is that Abbott and Costello never actually meet Frankenstein. Of course, in Abbott and Costello go to Mars the pair travel to Venus. Tricky comedians those two.
The Mad Monster uses a transfusion of wolf blood to create its werewolf.
Cry of the Werewolf and Teen Wolf have lycanthropy being a family curse.
In I was a Teenage Werewolf, werewolfism was caused by a sort of post-hypnotic regression, and Michael Landon release his beastly id.
The Hammer movie, Curse of the Werewolf, seemed to disavow the Universal rules and had lycanthropy caused by being the bastard of a bastard, if memory serves.
The Howling seems to fit pretty closely to the Wolfman rules, with more lupine lycanthropes. In the Howling II, werewolf hunter Christopher Lee introduces titanium bullets as being more dangerous to the creatures than silver bullets. The third Howling introduced MARSUPIAL WEREWOLVES!!!
An American Werewolf in London threw out all the rules except for the contagiousness and full moon aspects. In this film regular bullets can kill a werewolf, and werewolves have four legs. It also pushed the metamorphosis as being quite painful in the greatest transformation scene ever. Fuck CGI.
Wolf had the transformation as a sequence of nightly changes, gradually becoming more and more lupine approaching the state of a pretty normal looking wolf. I believe the change is permanent at that point, and no more transformations occur. That is to say, you are stuck as a dog, but not terribly upset by this thing.
Kate Beckinsale movies will be ignored.
Cursed seems to want to follow the werewolf rules of every movie, leading to its general state of confusion. The film makes werewolves acutely allergic to silver, i.e. it hurts for them to touch it even in human form. It also teases us with the possibility of a Scott Baio werewolf and never delivers. Damn.
Ginger Snaps uses lycanthropy as an allegory for puberty, and is basically a better version of Wolf with teenage Canadian girls in lieu of Jack Nicholson. In it, werewolves really like killing dogs, maintain dog-like features even during the day (like tails!), and are generally antisocial nymphomaniacs. Werewolves can be cured by concoctions of monkshood created by drug-dealers.
Dog Soldiers features a family of werewolves living in a remote house in the UK. Sadly, we don’t get a particularly good look at what their everyday life is like.
So then, what was a werewolf pre-1900? Well, let’s look at a book from 1898, E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. The following is located under the entry for Werwolf (sic)
A bogie who roams about devouring infants, sometimes under the form of a man, sometimes as a wolf followed by dogs, sometimes as a white dog, sometimes as a black goat, and occasionally invisible. Its skin is bullet-proof, unless the bullet has been blessed in a chapel dedicated to St. Hubert. This superstition was once common to almost all Europe, and still lingers in Brittany, Limousin, Auvergne, Servia, Wallachia, and White Russia. In the fifteenth century a council of theologians, convoked by the Emperor Sigismund, gravely decided that the loup-garou was a reality.
See?
Only 1 e in werwolf.
No full moon.
No wolfsbane nor monkshood.
No mention of silver.
BUT a whole bunch of other stuff we never see in movies.
Huh.
