Desire After Dark

Contemporary Queer Cultures and Occultly Marvelous Media

Andrew J. Owens

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253053800
• eBook ISBN: 9780253053848
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Since the 1960s, the occult in film and television has responded to and reflected society's crises surrounding gender and sexuality.

In Desire After Dark, Andrew J. Owens explores media where figures such as vampires and witches make use of their supernatural knowledge in order to queer what otherwise appears to be a normative world. Beginning with the global sexual revolutions of the '60s and moving decade by decade through "Euro-sleaze" cinema and theatrical hardcore pornography, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the popularity of New Age religions and witchcraft, and finally the increasingly explicit sexualization of American cable television, Owens contends that occult media has risen to prominence during the past 60 years as a way of exposing and working through cultural crises about queerness. Through the use of historiography and textual analyses of media from Bewitched to The Hunger, Owens reveals that the various players in occult media have always been well aware that non-normative sexuality constitutes the heart of horror's enduring appeal.

By investigating vampirism, witchcraft, and other manifestations of the supernatural in media, Desire After Dark confirms how the queer has been integral to the evolution of the horror genre and its persistent popularity as both a subcultural and mainstream media form.

1

AQUARIAN ALTERNATIVES

Midcentury Media and the Quest for Occultly Queer Histories

PARIS, 1960. AFTER MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY that witnessed the publication of some of the most influential works in modern Continental thought, including Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), and Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share (1949), two Frenchmen declared that human civilization was approaching the dawn of a new age, one that would have nothing in common with the present realm of “laborious transition in which we have to live for just a little while longer.”¹ Trained respectively in journalism and chemical engineering before embarking on more esoteric endeavors, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier had become increasingly disaffected with life in the modern world. The utopian promises of scientific modernity, they lamented, had been crushed in the aftermath of two cataclysmic world wars. All signs now seemed to point to the necessity for radical change and the reenchantment of a world increasingly secularized and demystified. By turning away from the philosophical lens of structuralism, through which the world could be known, rationalized, and tamed via linguistic analysis, Pauwels and Bergier advocated an alternative route to transcendence: a return to the occult.

Originally published in 1960 and translated into English in 1963, Pauwels and Bergier’s The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des magiciens) quickly became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic, sold over one million copies worldwide by the end of the decade, and became a primer for countless individual and collective journeys into a budding midcentury fascination with all things supernatural. Human beings were endowed with powers “at least equal, if not superior, to any technically realizable machinery, and intended to achieve the same results as any other technique,” the authors believed, “namely the ability to understand and control Universal forces.”² A belief in the dualistic synergy of body and mind, and of the latter’s ability to similarly conquer the rigidities of matter, was no longer rejected as the stuff of fairy tales. On the contrary, both ancient and modern magickal literature was dedicated to “unique and fantastic moments in the life of the mind, thousands and thousands of fragmentary descriptions which ought to be brought together and compared, and which perhaps point to a method that has been lost, or possibly to one that has still to be found.”³ For Pauwels, Bergier, and their devoted readers, human control of occult energies was not anathema to nature, but rather a demonstrative revival of historically neglected natural laws that were produced in close contact with reality “perceived directly and not through a filter of habit, prejudice, conformism. Modern science has shown us that behind the visible there is an extremely complicated invisible,” yet one that is nevertheless intelligible via more esoteric means.⁴

It is on this point, the verifiable legacies of the occult, that The Morning of the Magicians is quite clear. Anticipating poststructuralism’s own project of destabilizing the dichotomy between the real and the phantasmatic, Pauwels and Bergier caution that the supernatural is by no means reducible to the imaginary. However, a “powerful imagination working on reality will discover that the frontier between the marvelous and the actual—between the visible and the invisible Universe, if you wish—is a very fine one.”⁵ Indeed, according to Gary Valentine Lachman, one of the founding members of the New Wave rock band Blondie, who has since transitioned from his musical career to writing popular histories of Western occultism, The Morning of the Magicians brought together “the future and the past, science and mysticism, philosophy and the occult, with a powerful, inspiring optimism and a new vision of human society—just about everything the sixties were about.”⁶ While the image of a swaying flower child wreathed in incense while grooving to the far-out sounds of a sitar might now seem cliché, there’s no question that all things “occultly marvelous,” as Theodore Roszak puts it, were en vogue during this period.⁷ In turn, the popular resurrection of occult figures like the vampire and the witch became laden with the hopes, dreams, anxieties, and fears of a new generation.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Euro-American popular culture became swept up in a revival of esoteric occultism the likes of which hadn’t been witnessed in the West since the fin-de-siècle days of Russian mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society and Aleister Crowley’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.⁸ From Los Angeles to Baltimore, nearly every national news outlet marveled at the resurgence of this phenomenon. “It is one of the stranger facts about the contemporary U.S.,” Time reported in March 1969, that unorthodox conceptions of the universe are being taken up “seriously and semiseriously by the most scientifically sophisticated generation of young adults in history. Even the more occult arts of palmistry, numerology, fortunetelling and witchcraft—traditionally the twilight zone of the undereducated and overanxious—are catching on with youngsters.”⁹ As Paul Steiger of the Los Angeles Times observed, “around the nation, the practitioners of the occult, the mysterious and the mystical are enjoying a heyday unmatched since the Salem witch trials.”¹⁰ And as Penny Kolsrud of the Baltimore Sun detailed within what she termed a flourishing trend of “Aquarian Alternatives,” “the new lifestyle of the young is not merely a matter of marijuana versus martini . . . it’s an unconventional way of looking at the self, the world and the universe. Part of this different way of life is a burgeoning interest in ESP, Eastern religions and the occult—astrology, witchcraft, numerology, [and] tarot.”¹¹

More than individual searches for spiritual transcendence, however, this revived interest in all things occult translated into big collective business, particularly in the entertainment industries. On bookstore shelves, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Robert Bloch’s The Skull of the Marquis de Sade (1965), and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) promised to enthrall horror-seeking readers. On television, series like The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–64), Thriller (NBC, 1960–62), The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963–65), The Addams Family (ABC, 1964–66), The Munsters (CBS, 1964–66), and Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966–71) turned supernatural screen narratives into staples of network programming. And in film, Black Sunday (1960), Black Sabbath (1963), The Crimson Cult (1968), Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Roger Corman’s cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations at American International Pictures (AIP), and the Gothic revival at England’s Hammer Studios made occult storylines some of the most successful offerings in 1960s screen horror.

Indeed, this pop culture revitalization of interest in witchcraft, vampirism, and other occultly marvelous phenomena quickly ascended to the heights of 1960s counterculture, a movement composed of young people around the globe who became “deeply critical of and disengaged from the values of white middle-class suburban family life” vis-à-vis experimentation with mysticism and mind-altering drugs.¹² In the United States, such antiassimilationist and antiestablishment beliefs were both dissected and disseminated in best-selling works like Timothy Leary’s The Politics of Ecstasy (1968), Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture (1969), Jerry Rubin’s DO IT!: Scenarios of the Revolution (1970), and Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book (1971). This countercultural epoch ushered in by the peacefully innocuous hopes of Pauwels and Bergier would eventually turn, however, to what Lachman terms the “dark side of the Age of Aquarius,” epitomized by Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, the rise of Charles Manson’s (oc)cult of personality, and the Helter Skelter murders of August 1969.

Yet, as demonstrated throughout this book, the very fact that certain value-laden binaries (e.g., light vs. dark, good vs. evil, sin vs. sanctity, normal vs. queer, etc.) have been historically mapped onto supposedly self-evident hierarchies of spiritual belief is itself a manifestation of intermingling normative regimes working in tandem to curtail the influences of alterity. And nowhere have such efforts to restrain the unorthodox, the dissident, and the queer forces of the occult proved more contentious than in the arenas of gender and sexuality, wherein magickal practitioners have embraced “morally deviant and socially transgressive acts such as homosexual intercourse, masturbation, sadomasochism, and bestiality” as the most powerful means of unleashing supernatural powers that might dismantle the machinations of heteronormativity.¹³

Queer Hauntings of the Sexual Revolution

While the postwar period in both the United States and beyond ushered in a new age of unprecedented economic, social, and political change, the decade following such landmark events as the rise of mass suburbanization, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s political witch hunts, and the widespread domestic installation of television is often remembered not only for the rise of far-reaching countercultural energies but also for those shifts in medicine, media, and cultural mores known collectively as the sexual revolution. First used by the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich during the 1920s, the term “sexual revolution” has come to stand in for a constellation of watershed moments whose influence reached their peak during the 1960s, among them the release of the Kinsey Reports in 1948 and 1953, the inaugural publication of Playboy magazine (1953), the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of oral contraception (“the pill”) in 1960, the publication of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962), the release of Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response (1966), and the Stonewall riots of June 1969. Yet popular mythology surrounding the sexual revolution has tended to blur the lines between fact and embellished fiction. As a corrective, many cultural studies scholars have recently refrained from focusing solely on the events of the sexual revolution and have instead turned their attention to questioning just how revolutionary the sexual revolution really was and exactly whose interests were served by it.¹⁴

Existing historical records leave little doubt that the 1960s and early 1970s brought both material and discursive changes, aptly described by Linda Williams as a societal transition from obscenity to “on/scenity,” the progression through which a culture “brings on to its public ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Blood, Sulfur, Sex, Magick
• 1. Aquarian Alternatives: Midcentury Media and the Quest for Occultly Queer Histories
• 2. Le sexe qui parle du surnaturel: Supernatural Sexualities and Satanic Subcultures in the 1970s
• 3. The Blood Is the Life/Death: Queer Contagion and Viral Vampirism in the Age(s) of HIV/AIDS
• 4. “Now Is the Time, Now Is the Hour, Ours Is the Magick, Ours Is the Power”: Casting as Coming Out in Millennial Media
• 5. “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”: The Ambivalent Queer of Occult Cable TV
• Epilogue
• Index
• About the Author