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Lurking Musings

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Tag Archives: The Demon Child

[AW Blog chain] Devil Child

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Film, Musings

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Childs Play, Devil Baby of Hull House, devil child, Hellboy, Ira Levin, Jane Addams, Old Wives tales, pregnancy experience, Roman Polanski, Rosemary's Baby, The Demon Child, The Omen, Urban Legends


So, after a long absence I am finally back on the old AW blog chain gang, picking up litter from the highways and turning it into readable blogs while men with sunglasses, police uniforms and guns watch us… it’s a hard life. but someone has to do it.

This month the Blogchaintopicomogrifier (patent pending) has beeped and churned and made flashing lights to produce the title of ‘Devil Child’ on its little tickertape printer thing*. At least I think that is what it read. That tickertape font is hard to read sometime, what with all the +++++’s in the middle of everything.

So, ‘Devil Child’. It conjures up several images. The juxtaposition of the traditional root of all evil with something that is considered to be innocent is an intriguing one that does generate a lot of interest. Films have been known to play on the perceived innocence of children. The Omen franchise, for example, bases its entire horror premise on the fact that awful things happen to people, such as sheets of glass decapitating them, quite by accident while a cute, small child smiles happily and entirely innocently several miles away with a perfect alibi. Not to mention various ‘creepy doll’ concepts such as the Childs Play series in which the doll Chucky (coincidentally voiced by the same chap who played Grima Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings) becomes possessed of the devil and wreak murderous havoc.

One film in particular, however, really ramps up the creepy with this concept. Rosemary’s Baby. This film is the perfect example of sixties occult cinema***, filled with some very sinister satanic imagery and derives most of its horror from the psychological effects such things have on the protagonists. It is also filled with various not so subtle references to things linked to pregnancy – cravings, abdominal pains and so on – to the extent that it could be interpreted as a metaphor for the darker aspects of the pregnancy experience. You could also discuss the quite nasty rape implications inherent in the film. In a dream sequence after she faints, Rosemary is raped by the devil and this is bad enough but worse than that when she wakes up and finds she is pregnant her husband tells her that while she was unconscious he decided to have sex with her anyway because he did not want to waste the chance. That to me does not sound like the actions of a concerned husband. Or even a decent human being.

But differences between a ‘happy household’ in the 1960s and today aside, I really wanted to talk about the urban legend that allegedly inspired the book by Ira Levin which inspired Roman Polanski to make Rosemary’s Baby. The Devil Baby of Hull House.

Jane Addams

Hull House was opened by Jane Addams in 1889 as a Chicago based community to help provide social and educational opportunities for working class people. It achieved this by providing lessons in everything from academic subjects such as art and literature to domestic tasks such as sewing. They also provided free concerts, discussions on current affairs and clubs for children and adults. However, far from being known as a place of egalitarian and charitable education and social mobility, Hull house came to be known for something far more sinister. One story goes that the atheist husband of a Catholic wife refused to allow an icon of the Virgin Mary (some versions say Jesus Christ) to be hung on their wall, declaring that he would rather have the devil himself in residence. Another version, the Jewish version, claims that the husband, for want of a son, declared he would rather have the devil himself than another daughter. Whatever the husband declared, whether he cursed god or the prospect of a daughter, the wife gave birth to a creature that has been described as follows:

“The doctor stood and revealed the child cradled in his arms. A monster writhed within the scratched and bloodied arms of the terrified physician. It was larger then a one year old child, its skin like a reptile’s, both scaly and rough. Sharp horns jetted out of its head on either side and a thin, long object swayed in the air, the tip shaped like a two-pronged fork, swayed about the infants head.” (Daniel Cumerlato, founding partner of Haunted Hamilton).

And:

“No amount of denial convinced them that he was not there, for they knew exactly what he was like with his cloven hooves, his pointed ears and diminutive tail; the Devil Baby had, moreover, been able to speak as soon as he was born and was most shockingly profane” (Jane Addams, The Long Road of Women’s Memory, Chapter One, p3)

Jane Addams allegedly had the child locked in the attic of Hull House and made attempts at having it baptised and rumours about the child ran amok in Chicago. Addams strenuously denied the rumours, claiming (quite rightly) that there was no evidence for it other than hearsay. She did later talk at length about the incident in her book, The long Road of Woman’s Memory. Chapter one is subtitled ‘Women’s memories – Transmuting the past, as illustrated by the story of the Devil Baby’ and in it she talks about the ‘power of an Old Wives’ tale’, describing what we would now refer to as an Urban legend in the many visitors who had come to the house to see the baby, convinced that it existed. She gives a fairly involved memoir about her recollections of some of these, including a list of the phrases she had to repeat endlessly to throw off these sightseers and their bizarre counterarguments. However, it seemed as if the more she denied it, the more convinced her visitors were that she was hiding the baby somewhere in one of the many rooms of the house.

Addams makes a lot of good points in that chapter. This story is the perfect example of an Urban legend where a rumour spreads and so many are convinced of it they cannot be persuaded of the truth. The only variations noted by Addams are religious ones – she mentions there are slight differences between the Italian catholic versions of the story and the Jewish ones – so there is a lot of consistency in the legend which only adds to the veracity of it as more and more become convinced of its truth. There is also no way to tell how this story began – no real evidence of any of the variant origin stories.

So, the Devil Baby of Hull house is an example of the power of human imagination gone wild and stories like this have not only inspired films like Rosemary’s Baby, playing on the fears of potential parents over the nature of their offspring, but also such franchises as Hellboy. Can you think of any similar stories, maybe from your local area? Feel free to comment below.

*We could fit it to a proper printer and even a decent LCD screen. Frankly, we could even turn it into a smartphone app but if you are going to have something called a ‘Blogchaintopicomogrifier’ it has to have valves, and Jacobs ladders and switches and flashing lights and steam coming out of it and, yes, print any output onto a tiny slip of paper in a hard to read font that is destined to eventually be thrown at Astronauts coming home from space **

** Yeah, you see America only created NASA and the associated space program because it needed some method to dispose of all the waste tickertape that Wall Street was producing. Clearly the most environmentally friendly and efficient method was to spend billions of dollars to send men to the moon so you can then drive them through the streets of some city and throw waste paper at them. Note how there seems to be no money for a space program now that everything is ‘paperless’ and we have smartphones and LCD screens and decent printers? Coincidence? I think not…

*** And I really, really, really, hope that no one is planning a modern remake of this. They’d do something silly like use CGI and completely miss out the tension…

Now, this is a blogchain and there are rules. The rules are that you must go and look at the other articles in the chain. If you don’t, there will be dire consequences, possibly of a gynaecological nature… List of links to the other blogs is below:

Participants and posts:
ishtar’sgate – http://chickenscratchbc.blogspot.ca/ (link to post)
orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to post)
BDavidHughes – http://bdavidhughes.com/
Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/
articshark – http://www.drslaten.com/blog
pyrosama – http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/
Anarchic Q – http://anarchicq.com/
meowzbark – http://www.lizzylessard.com/
MsLaylaCakes – http://www.taraquan.com/
grace elliot – http://graceelliot-author.blogspot.com/
milkweed – http://www.thistlequill.blogspot.com/

[Vampire Month] Against Cancer With Vampires by Anila Hoxha

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Vampire Month

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Anila Hoxha, Cancer, Living with Cancer, The Cursed Necklace series, The Demon Child, Vampires


For her final contribution to Vampire Month, Anila Hoxha talks to us about her very personal experiences of cancer.

I am sitting in front of my laptop, thinking about my life. Where am I now? Who have I become? I have finally made my dream come true, I have published my first book. I feel like I am dreaming, and sooner or later somebody will wake me up, but no, this is the reality.
I remember when I was too afraid to publish my books, worried of what people might think of my horror stories. At first I was embarrassed that I always made up fantasy books, and not others. Like, that was the only thing I was capable of. But what made me change my mind, and finally have the courage to publish my book?An
The cancer.

I was diagnosed with cancer when I was fifteen. You won’t imagine what I felt in the moment the doctor gave me the news. I wanted to be left alone, in my fantasy, in the place where there was no disease. Yes, there were vampires, but they could be defeated. It could have been cool to be a vampire, no? They don’t have to suffer from diseases. I didn’t cry at all, there was no point to. Cancer didn’t knew with who he was messing with. Did he knew that I had invented so many horror stories, and I wasn’t scared from a stupid disease like him? Did he knew that he just couldn’t crush my dreams, because every time he did that, I dreamed other things, I had other plans and ambitions for the future? Well , I guess he didn’t. But it’s okay, because he does now.

Actually I never thought about my disease as something that would kill me, it was rather something annoying that would let me without school for one year. But the truth was that I risked my life, a lot. I understood now, that the fact I am alive is actually a miracle. When you have a disease, the psychology is very important. You should not worry for anything, which is a bit difficult for cancer patients since we’re torn between life and death.

To fill the empty boring days in the hospital, I decided to write a story to keep me entertained. I never thought to write a book, just something I would enjoy. I wanted to write horror. One day I was creating a film ( I like creating films in my mind), and so I decided to start writing this film in a form of story. I start writing it in English, so this way I would practice it, since English is not my Native language. Later when I started chemotherapy, I started getting worse and worse due to the chemo effects like nausea, headache, and sometimes it was difficult to breathe. But as I had to stay all day in the bed, I couldn’t write. But this book remained in my mind for a long time, until I decided “I will publish the book!”

pizap.com13593809746291I didn’t care what people would said, I had been near death and now I was reborn. God gave me a second life, and this time I will make my dreams come true. People would say whatever they wanted.

So, I finished the book, and then I finally published.

Seeing my story in Amazon makes me feel proud of myself. I finally showed people what I am capable of.
So, don’t hesitate to make your dreams come true! Yes, you may make mistakes, that’s normal. But after hard work, you will be rewarded. It’s never too late to change your life, to give yourself what you deserved. You can wait for the fate to knock on your door, or you can go and knock to his door.

It’s all up to you. It’s us who choose our own destiny.

God bless you all.

And thank you to lurkingmusings.wordpress.com for this amazing opportunity.

[Vampire Month] Anila Hoxha Interview

13 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Vampire Month

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Albania, Anila Hoxha, Dhampire, Dracula, Living with Cancer, Lugat, The Cursed Necklace series, The Demon Child, Twilight, Vampire


 Today’s Vampire Month Victim is Anila Hoxha who hails from Albania, the home of the Dhampir and the lugat (don’t know what they are, find out below). Today she tells us all about herself and on Friday she is going to tell us a very personal tale of how she came to be a writer…An

You would probably find her disguised in a dark corner of her library, reading a book, trying not to make any noise, afraid that she might disturb Dracula, who is hiding at the third floor of her house in Albania. Now, don’t even ask about how he came from his castle in Romania, to Anila’s house.

Anila is a horror writer, a bookworm and Dracula’s number 1 fan. When she was little, she wanted to be a vampire hunter, but now that she found out the world was so boring and without vampires, she decided to be a vampire writer. Her book “The  Demon Child” it’s something between gothic horror, dark fantasy, urban legends, paranormal romance and mythology. Find her on twitter.

 

Questions

 

1)      What is the earliest memory you have of writing? What did you write about?

The earliest memory I have of writing was when a seven years old me decided to write a book with short novels. The first novel I started writing was about a depressed girl who hallucinates about some creatures of horror movies  and at the end she is eaten by them. Unfortunately I couldn’t publish the book, because my parents thought it was too scary. Well, I was only seven, of course they were terrified from my fantasy.

2)      When did you decide to become a professional writer? Why did you take this step?

I decided to be a professional writer one year ago, after I was diagnosed with cancer. I have always been afraid of what people would think of my books. I am only a sixteen years old girl with a strange passion about horror literature and a wild fantasy. People used to laugh when I told them that I wanted to be a horror writer. But when I was diagnosed with cancer, I decided to make my dreams come true without worrying what people say. At the end it’s my life, and not theirs. If I do mistakes, those are my mistakes, and I will pay for them. God give me a second opportunity, a second life to live. I wanted to show people what I was capable of.

3)      What would you consider to be your greatest strength as a writer? What about your greatest weakness? How do you overcome this weakness?

My greatest strength as a writer is my creativity. I can make up a whole story in a matter of hours. But my greatest weakness is finishing the book. It’s very hard to overcome this weakness, and I have to use all my will power, but I do my best. That doesn’t mean I have overcome this weakness. If somebody discovers how, please contact me.

4)      Tell us about the place where you live. Have you ever derived any inspiration from your home or from anywhere you have visited?

I am born in Albania, Balkan, and my homeland has always been an inspiration to me. In our folklore, it’s very in common to find tales about dead people who rise, or dead people who talk to animals. We also have the fairies, the giants, the vampires.  Also the famous word “Dhampir”, who is a half vampire- half human, is an Albanian word. So as you can see, I am grown up with these legends. I live in a huge house with three floors. The third floor looks very ancient and scary. That’s my favourite place.

Which book, if any, would you consider to be your greatest influence and inspiration?

I read a lot, and I have a lot of favourite books. But the book I adore the most is “Dracula”. This book scares me and in the same time amazes me.  Every time I read this book, I feel inspired.  I don’t know why, though.

5)      What drove you to write about Vampires?

As I said before, vampires (or in Albanian “lugat”) are part of Albanian folklore. I remembered my parents used to scare me with this word, so this way I would behave well. But I start to like them when I saw the horror movie “Blade”.  Later I became addicted to vampires after I read “Dracula”. These mysterious creatures have always been my favourites, so I couldn’t do otherwise but write about them.

pizap.com135938097462916)      What do you think is the attraction for Vampire fiction? Why is it such a popular topic?

Whether we are talking about “Dracula”, or “Twilight”, or “Interview with a Vampire”,  there are the same creatures, beautiful, mysterious, cursed, immortal. These words are stuck in our head. Well, everyone want to be beautiful and young forever, but immortality has a price. It’s tempting, you know. That’s why we like these creatures. They are tempting.

7)      In a fight between all the greatest Vampires of fiction, who do you think would come out on top?

I love all kind of vampires, but I think that Dracula owns the top. He’s elegant, mysterious, dangerous. He doesn’t have feelings. I mean, he doesn’t have to do anything, just to say “I am Dracula”, and we faint from fear.

8)      What about in some other contest such as sexiness or dress sense? Who would win that one?

Why would sexiness or dress sense mattered  to vampires when they can use their supernatural power and speed to track their next victim. But Dracula had some dress sense anyway.

9)      How well do you think one of your characters would fare against the winner(s) of the above?

Well, my character Billy Smith, who is the successor of a vampire hunter priest, does have an amazing dress sense . There might just be tiny problem. We can’t compare him with Dracula, because they come from different ages.

Tell us the basic premise behind your latest novel.

The Demon Child (The Cursed Necklace #1)

After her mysterious disappearance, everyone thought that the six years old Anne Marie Bordeleau was a victim of the “animal” attacks that was terrorizing New Orleans lately. Only her big sister thought otherwise, because of the terrible visions she had at night where Anne called her for help. But looking for Anne isn’t easy. There are secrets revealed, ancient prophecies, and legends. It’s a dark world, where even angels can fall.

How can she save her sister from the evil, if her sister is the evil itself?

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