Myths Obscure Voodoo, Source of Comfort in Haiti

Dismissive attitudes follow a history of misrepresentation in American journalism and popular culture.

The Uncanny

From an interview by Michel Ciment with Stanley Kubrick, from Ciment's book Kubrick.

"A story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analysed too closely. The ultimate test of its rationale is whether or not it is good enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you submit it to a completely logical and detailed analysis it will eventually appear absurd. In his essay on the uncanny (Das Unheimliche), Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life."

From "The Uncanny" by Freud:

"Among the many liberties that the creative writer can allow himself is that of choosing whether to present a world that conforms with the reader’s familiar reality or one that in some way deviates from it…. The imaginative writer may have invented a world that, while less fantastic than that of the fairy tale, differs from the real world in that it involves supernatural entities such as demons or spirits of the dead. Within the limits set by the presuppositions of this literary reality, such figures forfeit any uncanny quality that might otherwise attach to them. The souls in Dante’s Inferno or the ghostly apparitions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, or Julius Caesar may be dark and terrifying, but at bottom they are no more uncanny than, say, the serene Gods of Homer. …Not so, however, if the writer has to all appearances taken up his stance on the ground of common reality. By doing so he adopts all the conditions that apply to the emergence of a sense of the uncanny in normal experience; whatever has an uncanny effect in real life has the same in literature. But the writer can intensify and multiply this effect far beyond what is feasible in normal experience; in his stories he can make things happen that one would never, or only rarely, experience in real life. In a sense, then, he betrays us to a superstition we thought we had ‘surmounted’; he tricks us by promising us everyday reality and then going beyond it."

William Friedkin on Horror

William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist provided commentary on the dvd release of The Leopard Man directed by Jacques Tourneur:

"The enemy of the horror film is coherence. I think the more that is explained, the more somebody in the film tries to help you to understand what's going on the less helpful they really are because these films lurk in the imagination, they lurk in that part of the unconscious where night terrors occur. These films play out like nightmares. They have the logic or illogic of a nightmare. They're flawed, as nightmares are. They have elements of surrealism--things within them that happen that are inexplicable and yet seem to make a kind of sense when it's all over or at least they stay with you...."