Forever Isn't Over Yet

My new tarot deck arrived yesterday. The Bohemian Gothic Tarot is now brightening up our apartment, and I am spending part of the day flipping through it and becoming familiar with the images and interpretations. They are best viewed in a strong light, because every card depicts something taking place either at night, or in twilight, or on a very overcast day somewhere in Eastern Europe early in the Twentieth Century. Or maybe on a 1930s Universal Studios set. It’s hard to say.

There’s not a single relationship depicted that’s not troubling, a single smile that isn’t sickly, or clueless, or evil, a single child who doesn’t look either imperiled or corrupt. Even the most normally cheerful cards have sinister background music. The family in the Ten of Cups consists of a mad-eyed father, an obviously frightened wife gazing up at him as she clutches a pasty-faced baby, and a dejected little girl in the background. The little blonde boy of The Sun stares and smiles at the viewer from his pony with the nasty precocity of Miles in The Turn of the Screw. He's obviously planning to frighten the governess at midnight by flying his kite in the garden.

It’s all fascinating, but it needs to be viewed under a strong light. Otherwise the details get lost in all the black, midnight blue, and ash-colored ink. The book that came with the deck assures me, for instance, that the female demoness in the Strength card is glaring at me, but I still can’t quite catch her eye, even when I hold the card next to an open window so the sun hits it directly. She keeps lounging against a very bored looking lion, flexing her leathery wings, and looking coolly over to my right.

This is a deck for readings when you’re in a really, really bad mood, have given up trying to elevate it, and are opting instead to cast a morbidly romantic veil over the fact that your apartment is a mess, your bank account is overdrawn, and your cat just died.

Last Friday M and I got in late, but were still a little too restless to go to bed. We hit the sofa and turned on the TV, and I was delighted to see the opening of the 1960 version of Thirteen Ghosts. This, along with The Tingler, is one of the first horror movies I can remember seeing. I watched it on TV with my dad when I was five or six and was profoundly affected by two things in it. One was the possibility that the sinister housekeeper might actually cut out a little boy’s tongue for calling her a witch. (I’m sure I was disappointed when it didn’t happen.) The other was a close shot of a revenant’s ragged, cobweb-covered feet clumping down the halls at night. These two things and a floating Ouija board planchette were absolutely all I could remember about it, so while M dozed off, and eventually stretched out snoring, his head in my lap, I sat up and watched.

Often, when you revisit fondly remembered movies from your childhood, it’s a disappointment. Not in this case. Sure, the special effects are cheesy and the story riddled with logical loopholes, but there’s a strain of subversion running through this film that I completely missed when I was in kindergarten.

The plot is simple. A Los Angeles family learns that they’ve inherited a dilapidated mansion haunted by at least a dozen ghosts. It seems a wealthy, almost forgotten uncle had traveled through Europe collecting phantoms and bringing them home, kind of like William Randolph Hearst’s famous raid on Old World antiquities. Uncle Plato has died under mysterious circumstances and left the house to the family, stipulating in his will that they must live there or the property reverts to the state. In addition to the ghosts, the place comes with a hatchet-faced, broom-wielding housekeeper played by Margaret Hamilton, who I guess was having a little fun before the Maxwell House Coffee people got in touch with her.

All this seems fairly straightforward and generic down to the cardboard sets and that pale early-sixties black and white -- until you sit down and actually watch the movie.

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