Regular Episode
#175 – MT/AF CROSS-OVER 3: ATTACK OF THE KILLER TANGENTS
October 29, 2018

#175 – MT/AF CROSS-OVER 3: ATTACK OF THE KILLER TANGENTS

🎙️ It’s the third annual Halloween crossover between MonsterTalk and the Archaeology Fantasies Podcast, and this year the combined crew is talking movies — specifically, films that sit at the intersection of archaeology, hauntings, ancient curses, and things that are better left unexcavated. Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow are joined by Archaeology Fantasies hosts Ken Fader and Sarah Head (co-host Jeb is absent — officially performing an exorcism) for a wide-ranging, pun-laden romp through Hollywood’s long tradition of blaming archaeologists for the end of the world.

The format is simple: each host picked a film (or in Ken’s case, a small cinematic ecosystem) tied to their respective shows’ themes of monsters, haunting, and the archaeology of dubious claims. The tangents, as promised by the episode title, are plentiful.

👻 Karen’s Pick: Winchester (2018) and the Real Mystery House

Karen reviews the 2018 horror film 🎬 Winchester 💵, starring Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester, sole heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The film — which scored around five stars on IMDb — invents a fictional doctor hired to evaluate Winchester’s sanity on behalf of the company, a scenario Karen notes has no basis in reality: the historical Sarah Winchester was worth approximately $20 million at the time and received around $1,000 a day, tax-free, with no threat to her financial position.

The group digs into the popular mythology surrounding the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California — the story that a psychic instructed Winchester to continuously build a house for the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles. Karen points out there is no record of this psychic existing, and the story doesn’t appear in historical sources before the 1960s. The house’s famous “inexplicable” architectural features — stairs to nowhere, doors opening onto eight-foot drops, 13-drain sinks — have more mundane explanations: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed several stories of the original structure, and the Brown family, who purchased the property after Winchester’s death and opened it to tourists within months, added many of the oddities themselves to enhance the attraction. The “door to nowhere” originally had a balcony. The 13th chandelier light is a visibly shoddy addition to an original set of 12. Karen draws a comparison to Mystery Hill, whose later owner also “improved” the site to match a preferred narrative.

Karen also mentions her book 📚 Haunting America 💵, which covers the true history of the Winchester Mystery House.

🏺 Ken’s Pick: The Sands of Oblivion (2007) and the Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille

Ken’s segment is the most archaeologically layered of the night. The actual film under discussion is the 2007 Sci-Fi Channel movie 🎬 The Sands of Oblivion 💵, but to understand it you need to know three other things first.

First: in 1923, Cecil B. DeMille made the original silent version of 🎬 The Ten Commandments 💵 — at the time one of the most expensive films ever produced — on a massive outdoor set built on sand dunes near Guadalupe, California. The set included dozens of sphinxes and a Pharaoh’s Gate modeled on Abu Simbel, constructed from half a million board feet of lumber and tons of plaster. DeMille’s contract required him to remove the set when filming concluded; the popular story is that he simply buried it instead. DeMille himself anticipated the archaeological confusion this might cause, writing in his autobiography that he hoped future excavators wouldn’t conclude that Egyptian civilization had extended to the Pacific coast.

Second: DeMille remade the film in 1956 with Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as Pharaoh Ramses — the version most people know today. Third: in 1982, film student Peter Brosnan read DeMille’s autobiography, visited Guadalupe, found set pieces literally washing out of the dunes, and spent the next two-plus decades trying to fund a proper archaeological excavation of the site. The dig finally happened in 2012 and was documented in Brosnan’s film 🎬 The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille 💵, an hourlong documentary Ken highly recommends for archaeology courses. The Dune Center at Guadalupe-Nipomo now houses an exhibit featuring restored pieces from DeMille’s sphinxes. Among the real finds from the dig: an enormous number of cough syrup bottles, apparently the preferred workaround for DeMille’s strict prohibition-style no-alcohol policy on set.

The fictional Sands of Oblivion explains the burial differently: DeMille brought back a cursed Egyptian amulet containing an Anubis-like shapeshifting demon, workers started dying, and he buried the entire set hoping to trap the demon forever. The cast includes Morena Baccarin (of Firefly and the Deadpool films) and Adam Baldwin (also of Firefly) as archaeologist ex-spouses, and Dan Castellaneta as DeMille. Character actor George Kennedy appears as an old man who remembers where the set is buried — and loses his arm to the demon for his trouble. Ken notes the film exemplifies a common Hollywood trope: archaeologists as the people whose professional enthusiasm for digging up the past is directly responsible for releasing ancient evil upon the living.

📺 Blake’s Pick: Ghostwatch (BBC, 1992) and the Feedback Loop of Ghost Lore

Blake discusses the 1992 BBC television film Ghostwatch, written by Stephen Volk and presented as a live Halloween call-in investigation of an alleged haunting in a council house in Northolt. The film featured real BBC presenters recognizable to British audiences, a functioning call-in number (so many people rang in that they got busy signals, inadvertently adding to the verisimilitude), and a format closely modeled on the real-life Enfield poltergeist case of the 1970s. The BBC has never rebroadcast it following the public outcry after its original airing.

Blake notes that for modern viewers the fiction is detectable — an allegedly robotic surveillance camera zooms and refocuses on the action in ways that require a human operator — but argues that 1992 audiences weren’t yet trained to notice such things. Originally planned as a six-part series for the BBC anthology strand Screen One, the story was compressed into a single 90-minute film, which gave it an unusual escalating intensity. The ghost, named Pipes, is a serial killer figure — eyeless, Blake notes wryly, because his eyes were eaten by cats.

Blake argues Ghostwatch is a clear precursor to shows like Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures, complete with thermal cameras, temperature monitoring, and on-site investigators — and that it illustrates a memetic feedback loop: a real case (Enfield) inspires fiction (Ghostwatch), which in turn shapes the template for subsequent “real” ghost-hunting television. Volk was also a devoted admirer of writer Nigel Kneale, whose work on The Stone Tape and the Quatermass series clearly influenced Ghostwatch‘s aesthetic. Blake also surfaces a minor Kevin Bacon connection: actor Timothy Spall, who played a paranormal investigator in the ITV dramatization The Enfield Haunting, was also in the Ken Russell film 🎬 Gothic 💵 — for which Volk wrote the novelization.

🎬 Sarah’s Segment: The 10 Best and Worst Horror Movies Featuring Archaeologists

Sarah worked from a list compiled by Dig Ventures of the ten best and worst horror films featuring archaeologists and watched as many as she could track down. A recurring theme: in almost every entry, archaeologists function as vectors for releasing ancient evil. Highlights discussed include:

– 🎬 The Exorcist 💵 (1973) — the film opens with a dig that unearths the demon Pazuzu, setting everything else in motion.
– 🎬 As Above, So Below 💵 (2014) — a found-footage horror film set in the Paris catacombs; described as a horror-movie riff on The Da Vinci Code with more mumbo jumbo than it removes.
– Stonehenge Apocalypse (2010) — archaeologists accidentally tune Stonehenge like an instrument, triggering electromagnetic pulses and explosive shockwaves at famous sites worldwide.
– The Legend of the Bog — archaeologists in Irish bogs encounter a survivalist and must contend with reanimated bog body zombies; stars Vinnie Jones.
– Hausu-adjacent Italian nuns-and-cats film (unnamed) — notable mainly for two and a half minutes of the most confusingly violent trailer any of the hosts have ever watched, involving demonically possessed cats, eye-removal, and a man whose tongue is nailed to a board. It is Italian. No further questions.
– Hiroku the Goblin (1990, Japan) — the sole entry on the list where the archaeologist is the hero. He also invented a feather-duster–egg-beater hybrid excavation tool that the group agrees is genuinely a good idea. The high school in the film is built on the gates of hell, which prompts extensive discussion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 Haunting America 💵 by Karen Stollznow (includes the real history of the Winchester Mystery House)
– 🎬 Winchester 💵 (2018), dir. Michael and Peter Spierig
– 🎬 The Sands of Oblivion 💵 (2007, Sci-Fi Channel)
– 🎬 The Ten Commandments 💵 (1923, silent), dir. Cecil B. DeMille
– 🎬 The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille 💵 (documentary) — available at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center
– 🎬 As Above, So Below 💵 (2014)

🔗 Related Links

– Winchester Mystery House — Wikipedia
– Sarah Winchester — Wikipedia
– Ghostwatch (1992) — Wikipedia
– Enfield Poltergeist — Wikipedia
– Nigel Kneale — Wikipedia
– Cecil B. DeMille — Wikipedia
– Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes — Wikipedia
– Bog Bodies — Wikipedia
– Dig Ventures — 10 Best and Worst Horror Movies Featuring Archaeologists


Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

Our third annual cross-over event with the Archy Fantasies Podcast features our combined efforts to find movies which highlight a theme familiar to listeners — and in keeping with our respective shows’ motifs. You’ll find ghosts, mummies, curses and plagues a plenty. We hope you enjoy it.

Mentioned in the episode

Karen’s Segment
Ken’s Segment
Blake’s Segment
Sara’s Segment

Music

  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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