Blog Posts

Two Faces of Evil: Reviews of "Reality Z" and "Curon"

6/17/2020

When I wrote my 2008 study of the horror genre, Knowing Fear, I remarked that horror is essentially conservative since it revolves around disruptions to the status quo and efforts, successful or not, to restore that status quo. At a macro level, the inherent conservatism of horror also tends to limit the originality of its stories, with new innovations being few and far between. Two new international Netflix horror series released last week illustrate these two points but do so in ways that vary greatly in their success as they work to add something new to two very familiar stories.

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Review of Forbidden History S06E11: "Secrets of the Salem Witches"

6/16/2020

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For the majority of its run, Forbidden History has had six-episode seasons. Naturally, when I decide on a whim to review the series because nothing else in its genre is currently airing, I get saddled with the longest season in the show’s history, eleven episodes—almost double the length of the first five seasons. Finally, after a very long slog through conspiracy theories, Nazis, Atlantean power crystals, and space aliens, we have reached the end of the road. So what is the final topic to close out a miserable season? Today’s topic is the Salem witch trials, a particularly unfortunate choice given that this is a British production with a heavily British cast of so-called “experts,” who don’t really seem too in tune with the underlying use and misuse of the Salem theme in American culture. That doesn’t stop them from trying.

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The Two Faces of Columbus: How a Genocidal Tyrant Became an Anti-Discrimination Icon for Italian-Americans

6/13/2020

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On Thursday, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that he was not ready to remove a statue of Christopher Columbus from New York City because of what it means to Italian-Americans, specifically the role the figure played in helping to usher Italian-Americans into the America’s social mainstream. His comments, along with the destruction and removal of several Columbus statues across the United States, sparked a discussion about the role of Columbus in American life, but missing from the discussion was an acknowledgement of the role that the flawed symbol of Columbus played in standing against exactly the kind of racism and oppression that the vile real-life figure of Columbus perpetuated. The dual nature of Columbus as evil man and hopeful symbol needs unpacking to fully understand how the same statues can represent completely opposite ideas to different groups with shared antipathy to white supremacy.

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A+E Networks Cancels "Live PD" on A&E after Protests but Leaves Racist History Channel Shows on the Air

6/12/2020

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A&E canceled one of cable’s most-watched programs, Live PD, in the wake of protestor demands for law enforcement reform. The network said that it was doing so in the name of social responsibility. However, A&E is a division of A+E Networks, the parent company of the History Channel, and its sister station has made no move to purge its airwaves of programs that support racist, colonialist, and imperialist narratives. In a time when protestors are beheading and toppling statues of historical figures associated with racism, it remains dumbfounding that the History Channel refuses to compromise on its unwavering support for Ancient Aliens, which routinely strips nonwhite people of their cultural achievements, and its many shows which glorify Nazis as possessors of occult secrets.

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Was Osiris from Mesopotamia? Plus: Unveiling the Cover of My New Pyramid Book

6/11/2020

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Later this month, independent scholar Willem McLoud plans to hold a webinar to teach members of Ancient Origins that the Egyptian god Osiris was actually a Mesopotamian king. McLoud is going to base the claim on two papers he published over the past year, in which he argues for a new understanding of ancient history based on the self-aggrandizing “McLoud Chronological Model” of Egyptian history. Basically, he wants to rejigger the Middle Kingdom of Egypt to better fit with his preferred period of Mesopotamian history—questions of more import for Biblical history than anything else, really.

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Fixing "13 Reasons Why" Season 4: What You Saw Never Happened

6/10/2020

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For each of the past two years, I have reviewed the new season of the controversial Netflix drama 13 Reasons Why. Now that the series debuted its fourth and final season on Friday, it seems like I should complete the circle. Given the quality of what they produced this year, I retroactively regret having tried to make the case against critical consensus that the prior seasons had something worthy to say, even if they didn’t always seem to be thematically appropriate successors to the complex and uncomfortably bleak first season. I don’t think I have ever seen a show switch genres and go so wildly off the rails by betraying its own purpose as it did in this final season. I would even argue that this garbage fire of a final batch of episodes only reinforced the original critics’ view that 13 Reasons Why was never anything more than exploitation masquerading as seriousness.

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Review of Forbidden History S06E10 "The Secret Life of Moses"

6/9/2020

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Over the years, legends have arisen to describe and discuss the history of Moses in order to fill in gaps in the Biblical narrative. Modern cable TV parasites routinely link him to the pharaoh Akhenaten or to space aliens. But the stories go back much farther, and are much weirder. Jewish legends claimed he was a giant who battled other giants in superhuman feats of strength. Contrary to what Forbidden History claims in this episode, there is a long historiographic tradition in Greco-Roman literature of discussing Moses as a historical figure (though they were undoubtedly reporting Jewish claims), and there is even bizarre figure, Osarseph, in Manetho’s famous Egyptian history who was a renegade Egyptian priest who led all the lepers out of Egypt and changed his name to Moses—and that story, more than Moses’s, was likely inspired in part by Akhenaten, according to Jan Assmann. Naturally, Forbidden History knows nothing of this and devotes its time to the same tired old arguments we’ve heard a hundred times before on countless bottom-scraping cable shows.

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No Blog Today

6/5/2020

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Due to prior commitments, I will not be posting today or tomorrow. I will return next week.

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New Analysis of History Channel Viewer Data Finds Pseudohistory Viewers Follow Fake History Across the Dial

6/4/2020

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On Monday, a website called TV(R)EV published an analysis of History Channel viewership and viewing trends based on data collected by Inscape and iSpot. While none of the information contained in the analysis will surprise longtime readers of this blog, it is nevertheless interesting to find that my anecdotal impressions have been confirmed by an analysis of smart TV data from 14 million smart TVs in use over the past month. I should probably be disturbed that smart TVs are spying on their viewers, but we all already knew they were doing that, right?

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History Channel Claims to Stand Against Racism, Hasn't Watched Own Shows

6/3/2020

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In the wake of the massive protests that have rocked the nation this past week, corporations have issued strong statements in favor of justice and equality. The History Channel was no exception, posting the message below to its social media accounts late Monday.