It’s All in the Mind
Astrology may be junk science, but horror readers know that hypnosis is A-1, grade-A science. Whether you wanted to know if your mother was raped by Dracula, whether you were raped by Satan, what sins you committed in your past life, what fantasies compel you to kill in your present one, whether you were possessed by a Vietnamese death demon or abducted by UFOs, in book after book, hypnosis was the answer.
It’s one simple step from hypnosis (totally legit science everyone should use daily) to ESP (slightly iffier). That’s not to say no legitimate ESP research was happening in the 1970s. In fact, both the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program and the U.S. government’s Stargate Project logged intriguing but inconclusive results for years. But horror authors of the ’70s weren’t interested in “intriguing but inconclusive.” They were interested in “totally horrifying.”
The Scourge (1980) made the leap via a pharmaceutical company manufacturing a mind-control drug that “makes hypnosis look like a cheap conjuring trick.” (As if it wasn’t one already.) The results were impressive. At the story’s climax, the CEO turns braindead intensive-care-unit patients into his own tiny zombie army.
In Brain Watch (1985), superpsychic powers are the result of splitting a doctor’s noggin into a quadruple brain, unlocking his ability to project illusions, become superstrong, and control the pigment in his skin to ensure a really great tan. This sounds incredible, but apparently natural processes lie untapped inside our brains. As a doctor explains in Psychic Spawn (1987): “It’s very simple, Mr. Stern. What’s happened to you is that you have become psychic.”
Unfortunately, as shown in Mind War (1980), these abilities can be perverted for evil, as the U.S.S.R. recruits a psychic strike team to telekinetically destroy the Golden Gate Bridge, then the Hoover Dam. Fortunately another holdover from ’70s science comes to the rescue: the Prophecies of Nostradamus.
So now that we’ve covered astrology and ESP, what about UFOs? Fake science, or the best science?
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The Visitors Are Your Friends
In 1977, the launch of Voyager and the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind kicked off a UFO wave. Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos focused our attention on the skies, and every respected scientist came down on one of two sides: either aliens were coming to help us attain enlightenment or they wanted to eat us. Or kill us. Or kill us first and then eat us. There were conflicting theories.
Horror novelist Whitley Streiber (Wolfen, The Hunger, The Night Church) wasn’t sure what the aliens wanted, but he managed to turn his own abduction story into a lucrative empire with books (Communion, 1987; Majestic, 1989), TV appearances, and eventually a subscription-based website. Strieber never proclaimed his extraterrestrials good or bad, but in Wetanson and Hoobler’s The Hunters (1978) it’s clear: the extraterrestrials will proclaim messages of universal peace and brotherhood to lower our guard, and then use the reanimated corpses of our loved ones to lure us into the open, where they’ll shoot us and roast us over a campfire. They’re probably neighbors with the aliens of Earth Has Been Found (1979), whose fart-propelled “xenos” abduct humans and impregnate them with eggs, from which parasites hatch and eat their way out.
Why would aliens travel all that way to eat us? Don’t they have food on their home planets? Well, what if they’re not aliens at all? Leave it to J. N. Williamson to reveal the truth. Brotherkind (1987) starts as your typical abduction story, with Sheila gangbanged on a UFO by a bunch of midget aliens who must use the power of their collective semen to overcome her DNA’s natural resistance. Also, Bigfoot joins in because he was hitching a lift. Returning home, she finds hypnosis, and love, in the arms of parapsychologist Martin Ruben, but the two are menaced by Men in Black. Rubin unravels the conspiracy: alien Greys have teamed up with Bigfoot and the Men in Black and Mothman to seed humanity with alien/human babies. P.S., they’re not aliens at all, but part of a hidden race that we used to call fairies.
Ever since Eisenhower sold us out to the Greys in 1954, our planet has become a one-stop shopping solution for every jerk with a flying saucer. Credit 106
Fortunately, Martin is able to melt the Men in Black and the Greys with the power of the rock band KISS, specifically their hit “Firehouse,” which he finds on an “acid rock” station. Then he simply refuses to believe in Bigfoot until his aggressive disbelief makes the ten-foot-tall manimal fall apart. Tragically, he cannot reach Sheila in time and her hybrid baby is abducted. The book ends with the author assuring us, as any good scientist would, that although the story we have just read is not true, it’s also not not true either. Now that’s science!
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Skeleton Doctors Are the Worst Doctors
Skeletons are the worst. They lurk inside our skin, waiting to jump out and use our computers, dance obscenely in graveyards, and wield enormous scythes. But even worse than a skeleton is a skeleton doctor. To be honest, I’m not even sure their licenses to practice medicine are legal.
I have never discriminated against anyone based on the quantity of their skin, so it was educational to read The Children’s Ward (1985) by Patricia Wallace and Allison’s Baby (1988) by Mike Stone and realize that, yes, in fact all skeleton doctors are fabulously incompetent and should immediately be turned into xylophones. Wallace explores the issue of whether a cursed California hospital ward previously occupied by the criminally insane ought to house an experimental pediatric treatment program. (Conclusion: Probably not.)
On the isolated hospital’s most isolated ward, four children are observed 24/7 by the head of the program, Dr. Quinn, who learns that all of their ailments, from brain tumors to paralysis to leprosy, are psychosomatic; the kids don’t need surgery, they need hugs. But hugs are in short supply as a physical therapist’s arm is yanked out of its socket, a custodian gets bisected by a power tool, a bad daddy shoots himself, and a ghost beats a mean mommy to death. Bad parents are getting punished, but by whom? It turns out that one of the kids is psychic, and the dark forces lurking in Ward D are amplifying her powers. We’re never told what these dark forces are, but the sound of wind chimes is heard whenever they manifest, so I imagine they’re spirits of long-dead Zen surfers.
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Skeletons may have their faults, but you have to admire them for working hard enough to earn advance degrees in pediatrics, obstetrics, and nursing. Credit 109
Meanwhile Allison’s Baby is, oddly enough, about Allison’s doctor, Jason Fielding, M.D. He’s researching memory, meaning that he takes hobos and the elderly, cuts out pieces of their brains, and sees if they remember anything afterward. Most don’t, so he locks them up in a rapidly overflowing mental asylum. Why is Dr. Fielding conducting this stupid experiment? Because when he discovers what makes memory work, he’s going to win the Nobel prize, and if he wins “the highest reward of his profession,” he is certain to “finally prove to his father that he wasn’t a failure.” A noble goal, but Allison and her baby keep screwing it up.
What danger signs should patients watch for when selecting a skeleton doctor? Well, if the doctor refers to patients as “poor unlucky bastards,” be careful. Also, doctors who turn abandoned mental institutions into their own private research facilities are probably up to no good. Especially when the entrance to said clinic is “an underground passageway behind the morgue.” Most important, just remember that whenever a skeleton does science, innocent people wind up getting hurt.