Ten questions for Dr. Stephen Edred Flowers
Stephen Edred Flowers grew up as a “Monster Kid” in the early 1960s in the Dallas/Ft. Worth. From an early age he was obsessed with the images and narratives of classic horror and science fiction. As he matured, his interests turned to the occult and the practice of magic, and later to the serious academic study of myth and comparative religion. He eventually obtained a PhD in Germanic Studies with a concentration on early medieval culture. Gothick Meditations at Midnight represents a new sort of hybrid text that synthesizes all of these interests and passions.
1. How did your academic and personal background lead you to the unique approach toward esoteric insights that you take in Gothick Meditations at Midnight?
My personal background was nothing special, I suppose. I was one of millions belonging the generation of Boomers known as the Monster Kids. I grew up in Dallas and we had the good fortune of having a horror-host named Gorgon (Bill Camfield) who was unusual in that he took the films he introduced rather seriously and did not try to make a joke out of them. But as I grew up, other things certainly began to be more important to me than my boyhood obsession with monsters. But that early interest left a permanent mark on me, to be sure. The world of horror films in many ways seems to have functioned as a gateway mythology into the realm of magic and the occult, which increasingly captured my imagination in young adulthood. All that was very much a part of the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. As my university life developed, I had both interest and extraordinary opportunities in connection with the study of ancient languages, literatures, religions and mythologies at the University of Texas. Learning about the paradigms of mythic structures made indelible patterns in my own ways of thinking about almost everything. Occasionally I might think about my old monster friends in this way, especially with regard to literary interpretations, for example the Romantic approach to works such as Frankenstein. This preparation led me to the experience of having the underlying secrets contained in each of these tales and films of mystery and imagination unfolding themselves easily as the mind’s eye is focused on each object in turn. An essential aspect of my approach lies in the fact that it is not ideological. By this I mean that the mythic approach is always open to magic and mystery, and is not merely a tool for the expression of a pre-determined ideological outcome or message. A Christian always comes up with a Christian interpretation, a Marxist only keeps coming back to the Marxist dialectic, while a Freudian always… well we all get the picture. Sometimes a Gothick meditations reveals a mythic component, sometimes a psychological one, then again there may be a hidden aspect of history, or some biological obsession. The possibilities are vast and emerge from the subjective component of the object rather than a preordained ideological doctrine.
2. You are quite prolific and have written more than 50 books in your career. In your preface you say that writing Gothick Meditations at Midnight was the most fun you’ve ever had writing a book. Most folks can imagine obvious reasons for this but what was perhaps the most surprising and fun aspect of writing this book that you discovered during the process?
What made it so fun was a twofold aspect. First, it was a revisiting of some of my very earliest memories and enthusiasms of my boyhood. Going back to the origins of life, no matter how trivial they might appear on the surface is a great source of recreation, and by that I mean the etymological understanding of that word as an exercise in Re-Creation. That was one thing that made it so much fun. But the other was the fact that in revisiting these old friends, the mysteries of the works revealed themselves in such easy, meaningful, and fascinating ways. There was very little in the process that felt like “work” at all, it was almost entirely done in the spirit of playfulness. This does not mean that what appears in the final form of the study was not a matter of higher Work. The Gothick Meditations are a synthesis of the serious intention and playful experience. I hope this spirit is conveyed to the readers.
3. What was the first horror film or book that made you realize there were esoteric insights to be found within it and how old were you at the time?
This realization first came to me when I was 17 years old in 1971. As a senior in high school we were required to write a major research paper in English class. I had been devoting myself to the reading of many of the classics of horror and science fiction at that time, and I was starting to get some inkling about what possibilities the “occult” might hold out for me. From my readings in Famous Monsters of Filmland I recalled an article that outlined the “powers of the vampire,” an article really focused on the narrative found in Dracula and films based on that novel. These powers were among those most commonly attributed to powerful sorcerers of the occult world. Of course, Stoker was well versed in the lore of such occultists and the literature surrounding them, so he created a veritable catalog of occult powers which he attributed to the noble count. The high school library was devoid of any useful resources, one teacher directed me to The Golden Bough, but that was of little help at the time. I made an expedition to the mall and went to the occult section and found a few books that were quite useful on true vampires of history and even The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey! In my rather substantial senior research paper, entitled “The Fact, Superstition and Imagination in Dracula,” I recorded the idea that the character of Dracula was based on the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler. This was before the publication of professors McNally and Florescu’s famous In Search of Dracula. But, as it turns out, Stoker in fact did not base his character on Vlad at all, as I discuss as an aside in Gothick Meditations. This was, in many ways, the beginning of my writing career, as I learned the joys of delving into the mysteries and reporting my findings to those who are interested. The great lesson was that there is more to things than is at first apparent.
4. What movie or piece of literature surprised you the most regarding the insights that arose during your meditations?
By far the most surprising finds were made with regard to the story of Erik of Rouen, the phantom of the opera. Gaston Leroux always claimed that the story of Erik was a true one. The author was previously better known as a journalist in the early part of his career. His claim for the veracity of the story of the opera ghost is normally taken as an exercise in good old Romantic story-telling. But as I delved deeper into the particulars of the details of the sparsely recorded aspects of the Erik’s life a good deal of circumstantial evidence points to there being something more to the claim made by Leroux than most expect. Fortuitously I had done some previous research into the history of Persia/Iran and this served me well as I pried into certain questions. Readers will have to explore this quality of the story for themselves, but the results are startling.
5. What horror filmmakers and/or authors do you admire the most and why?
This is an interesting, but difficult, question to answer. Many creators have one great masterpiece that marks their reputations, Stoker’s Dracula or Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera. The cinematic world is similar in this regard. The creation of these narratives is always a matter of art, not science. Three chapters in the Gothick Meditations are dedicated to authors, one on Edgar A. Poe, one on Hanns Heinz Ewers and the third on H. P. Lovecraft. All of these writers can be designated as artists who crafted a very consistent quality of work, and thus all are admirable in different ways. When it comes to filmmaking the question becomes more complicated, as the creators are so often subject to the alterations and modifications of their visions by studios and producers. Also, the finished product is such a huge work of collaboration that all of the elements, for example, direction, screenplay, acting, cinematography, set design, and many other elements can come together to shape an epic success, such as we find in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Bride of Frankenstein, Psycho or the Exorcist, but more often than not only certain elements stand out and dominate the quality of the work. My favorite filmmakers include Fritz Lang, James Whale, Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur, and more recently David Lynch, Robert Eggers, and Guillermo del Toro. The production career of Roger Corman should also not go unnoted!
6. For some people, deep thoughts about films and literature come easier than for others. What advice would you give to someone who may not find it easy to see the mystery within something they consider pop-culture entertainment?
First one must realize that every work of art, and by that I mean, most basically, all things that have been created or shaped by the human mind and hand, has its roots in the human spirit. The origin and destiny of this spirit remains an eternal mystery, but one to which each individual has the possibility of access. The function of myth and folktales, where magical events are possible outside the ordinary experience of the mundane world, is one of opening the mind to extraordinary realities. Almost automatically the world of horror and science fiction, of fantasy and adventure, is an opening of the mind to this realm. The reader/viewer may experience and enjoy such material on a variety of levels. Even if the creators (writers or filmmakers) did not consciously intend to put certain mythic components in their creations, they are nevertheless present as a result of the opening of the creative process to the imagination and unconscious mythic aspects. Art of all kinds can be experienced on a variety of levels, literal, psychological, symbolic and even mythic. The deeper the investigation, the more profound the experience will be and the level of pleasure derived from this will be exponentially intensified by this process. In my exercises with this book, I discovered that films I had seen in the theater as a kid in the early 1960s went straight over my head. But when I saw them more recently with my acquired awareness, I experienced the joy of rediscovery. I hope this book will be a guide to help others have similar experiences.
7. For reasons that you explain quite well in the book, you have a strong affinity for the horror films and literature that was created between 1919 and 1975. Are there any newer works that you personally think evoke something similar to that earlier period?
As you see, the 1975 cut-off point is not made for reasons of diminished value or artistry, it is merely that filmmakers after that point begin to incorporate the requisite weird concepts in their work more consciously. Things become more obvious and above-board. The work of the meditations is more necessary and effective when applied to unconscious elements present in the older works. Once the Boomer generation kids started making their own movies and the restrictions of the Hays Code were lifted (after 1968) the whole nature of our kind of movies began to change rapidly. The freedom allowed was both good and bad news for the genre. The artistic responsibility for the production of high-quality material became much greater. Actually, as filmmakers increasingly came to understand how the old masters plied their craft, it has become progressively easier to imitate their forms. The book has a list of what I consider high-quality works in the post 1975 era. The list could have been expanded, but after about 1992 I have seen relatively few movies. My list of later works that evoke that special sense include Angel Heart (1987), Jacob’s Ladder (1990), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), The Sixth Sense (1999) and Call to Cthulhu (2005).
8. While the innocence of that time can’t be recaptured, what is something you would like to see newer writers or filmmakers do or understand that you feel would increase a sense of wonder and mystery in modern works?
The process of creating and perceiving such works of art, written or cinematic, is at least a two-way street. The filmmakers of old were not naïve innocents, but the restrictions placed upon their works, at first culturally and then with institutions such as the so-called Hays Code, necessarily forced them to practice their art under the discipline of certain rules. These rules only added to the artistry they produced, and placed so much of the effects of their narratives back into the subjective universes of the individual members of their audiences. What I would call the “classic” age of horror is not necessarily anything that can or should be reproduced or imitated. The best of the newer generation of filmmakers are ones who have studied and who understand the classics, but who have new things to say and new ways to tell their stories. Because the newer generation is so often consciously aware of their own creative process with regard to the mythic and folkloric content of the narrative, the exercise of discovering hidden elements is very different from that applied to the older generation. One of the greatest cultural treasures which seems to have been lost in the world of newer media is the degree to which the classic material acted as a great bridge between and among generations of aficionados. Interest in acting as such a bridge between the generations on my part is one of the great unspoken motives for the writing of the Gothick Meditations.
9. What are your next projects? Can you tell us a little bit about what to expect with your follow up to Gothick Meditations at Midnight?
I hope to continue with the meditations in a second volume that I am tentatively calling “Recurrent Gothick Meditations in the Devil’s Hour.” There are several categories that the first volume left under developed or omitted and I also want to devote some substantial space to the realm of television in the late 1950s and the 1960s—it is truly amazing just how much television programming was focused on the weird and fantastic during the golden age of the Monster Kids—from the sublime Twilight Zone to the ridiculous presentation of a sitcom involving a man’s mother being “reincarnated” in her automobile. The other projected volume is one devoted to specifically science fiction efforts belonging to the pre-Star Wars age. I will never forget seeing a clip from the news conference held by Lucas and Spielberg at the time of the premier of Star Wars with one of them holding a copy of Joseph Campbell’s landmark work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I sat up and took notice since at the time I had that very book on my desk while researching my master’s thesis on the Germanic hero Siegfried. It was at that moment that I understood a new generation of filmmakers was emerging. The Monster Kids had grown up, and some of them became the makers of movies. So, this is my planned trilogy of works, two mainly on the horror genre and one on the sci-fi craze of the mid-20th century. Back then, science fiction was more freely mixed with elements of gothic horror (despite hardware from space and giant bugs abounding). Those who have seen and read Gothick Meditations at Midnight most often see that this book is not like others in the field of horror film history and criticism, but the competition for readers in this field is astounding. I am afraid it may be that the book will only be discovered by a wider readership in some far off “is-to-be.” Here, as elsewhere in my written material, it is usually the case that only the few, adventurous and daring ever quite “get” it.
10. Other than those specific, upcoming, volumes, are there other areas of literature, film, music, etc. that you would consider exploring in this way?
Since I am over 70 years old at this point, I will be lucky to get out the planned two additional efforts in the vein of the Gothick Meditations. Other genres of material or cultural features that suggest themselves to me also include the esoteric interpretation of German Märchen, such as those collected and edited by the Brothers Grimm. In an entirely different direction, and one that appears to belong to the realm of American folklore, is the cultural understanding of the “characters” embodied by professional wrestlers! Again, with regard to that phenomenon, the current manifestation of the “art” has degenerated significantly. There, as elsewhere, a certain grain of authenticity made manifest in the art-form has diminished. The key to the often-unspoken dimension of a practical realization of that mysterious quest for making the unknown known, that quest of which the Gothick Meditations are but one fun-filled adventure, is a matter of what I have come to understand as deep-context. The revelations of real secrets take place on a level at which the individual comes to realize hidden truths embedded in that level where one’s body and one’s mind are discovered to reflect interweaving of experiences played out over eons of time. Such things can only be learned and understood when approached not from a level of straightforwardly telling a person something, but rather from one’s becoming aware of a deep-level context out of which the formerly hidden truths are realized and unfolded in an inner and personal way. The complete answer to your very first question is dependent upon the fact that such a deep-context was built up in my mind over a period of twelve years of intensive linguistic, mythical, and magical development. The realization of the necessity of this process has led me to undertake the development of a system for the transmission of this kind of deep-context to a new generation. The name of this system is the Woodharrow School.