(Mods, please push this around as you see fit, I’m not sure which forum is best suited.)
I started reading this book last night and it got me wondering: is contemporary society so boring that we feel drawn to magical tales?
It’s all over TV like never before: Merlin, Medium, Ghost Whisperer, Ghost Hunters, Vampire Diaries, True Blood, Supernatural, Reaper, Warehouse 13, Charmed, Buffy, Angel, I could go on and on. In books the forecast has never been better: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Harry Potter, the Bartimaeus Trilogy, His Dark Materials, Artemis Fowl, World War Z, Twilight, the Dark Hunter series, etc. My list of films could go on forever.
I feel like this latest crop of paranormal lore is different from the folklore of our past: before, beliefs in witches and witchcraft were arguably methods of enforcing social control, while stories about vampires and zombies were superstitions or manifestations of poorly understood medical conditions. But current supernatural media strike me as completely different. They’re there for the hell of it. They’re there because we need magic in our lives. We need mystery.
So after all of that, here are my questions to you: Do you think fascination with the paranormal is increasing? Is excess modernity creating new interest in the fantastic?
I think it’s just fun escapism and nothing more. Now if we’re talking about the folks that constantly watch the history channel for the same sort of ‘true’ (Nostradamus) paranormal stuff, then that may be a different breed after all.
[WAG] People have always had a need for the mysterious and superhuman. It used to be that everyone believed in God, witches, and things that go bump in the night. Now less people are religious, and very few really believe in fairies, so there’s a cultural vacuum that’s being filled by fantasy fiction. In the olden days monsters were a an unpleasant reality, a face to your irrational fears. Now, since we have an a nostalgic desire for magic to exist, the witches and vampires and monsters of folklore are continually being reimagined into nicer, cuddlier, more appealing forms. Hence the trajectory from souless people-eating abomination to Twilight.
[/WAG]
Plus, supernatural stuff is way better when combined with lots of special effects.
The level of special effects in television has caught up sufficiently well that most of these supernatural shows can really have a good go at it without looking completely lame.
Remember the ol’ days when all it took was a pair of creepy contact lenses to convince the viewer that a critter was supernatural in origin? Sure, it was okay, but the stuff they do now is way, way superior. That kind of visual drama will keep me turning in week after week.
My favorite movies, books, and TV shows are about supernatural phenomena. Why? To me, entertainment that mimics real life is boring. I want something fantastic, something that I can’t get on the news, down the street, or in my own life. Really, if you want to entertain me, you better bring something that I know is never going to happen to me in real life, like getting the chance to go head to head with a vamp master or kicking some demon ass with some truly fabtastical weapons.
The interest and the market is always there. It’s one of the few cultural constants. Every culture in every time in history has its share of beliefs, myths and superstitions pertaining to whatever might be classified as ‘paranormal’ (or the equivalent term) at the time.
Obviously, the advent of mass media significantly altered how quickly some ideas can spread, and how commercial concerns can seek to exploit whatever interest exists at the time.
It ebbs and flows along with any other trend or fashion in the media. Psychic and paranormal stuff was really big business in the 1970s, the decade of Uri Geller, Erich von Daniken (‘Was God An Astronaut’) and Lyall Watson (‘Supernature’). This is when the genre now given the ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ label in book stores was born. People got a bit tired of it by the time the 90s came around, but now it seems about due for a revival.
I think it comes and goes, but mostly sticks around. For example, spiritualism (the kind that implies a belief in the supernatural) was all the rage in the late 1800’s. Didn’t Queen Victoria hold seances? Ouija boards have been popular for at least a hundred years.
Dear Og of the Great if Somewhat Limited Powers, but what would the History Channel talk about if Nostradamus had just stayed a village pharmacist?
Well, actually stupid question that. They’d talk more about the Knights Templar and the bloodline of Christ, and UFOs. It’s weird that Pawn Stars, which should be HC’s fluff show, is one of the best they have in terms of “real” history. (I’m not talking about the “Grandpa gets his eyes checked/Big Hoss has two dates and two strokes on the same night” type stuff but when they give the history of an item- some of that stuff is genuinely interesting.)
To answer the OP- the supernatural is kind of like Beatlemania and in that there’s always interest but sometimes it will get really popular again. It’s more interesting what related to the supernatural gets popular. Currently it’s vampires (no surprise there- a few big hit series and soon everyone has to have one, which means within a couple of more years everyone will be so sick of them that they’ll be buried again for 20 more years [save to the die hards]), unless you’re talking about the “true” supernatural (the documentary type stuff that’s allegedly based on true stories) in which case prophecy is currently big. The 2012 Mayan thing (I still say that if they had any super mysterious prophetic abilities or magic then the conquistadores would have been a good time to pull 'em out, or maybe it was a “men with beards and metal Klingon-head like hats are going to destroy our civilization and it’s impossible to change it, but act surprised”). I suppose it’s the bad economic times and political unrest (though we’ve gone through both before).
In the 1980s, when the Christian Right was quite present but a bit less vocal, it was the New Age stuff: reincarnation (huge 20-25 years ago due to Shirley MacLaine and others espousing it), crystals, channeling. I’m expecting it to be back shortly; one good novel or movie with a reincarnation theme and suddenly everyone will remember being burned as a witch or sealed alive in a pyramid.
What’s interesting: in the 1980s when times were relatively good financially (my family was certainly the exception but for most people) and politically (no ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ type WW3 scenario scaring everyone) the supernatural fascination was inward: personal spirituality, “the god within” type stuff. Now when things are more uncertain economically and the religious right is louder and more obnoxious than ever the emphasis on the supernatural is more ‘outward’- prophecies and hidden messages and UFOs and the like. I wonder if it’s coincidence.
What surprises me most is the rebirth of Eric von Danichen (sp?). He was huge when I was a kid- Chariot of the Gods, Gold of the Gods, Wings of the Gods, Vacation Chalet and Late Breakfast of the Gods, The Gods Go to Bermuda, etc.). He was the master of “this cave painting shows a bubble with a squiggly line in it- clearly that’s an interstellar cyborg from the Aldeberan system visiting Earth to pick up hot chicks and refuel his moss based starship”. He was being continually debunked even then; some of the best was actually done on The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson (a lifelong amateur astronomer and science buff) would interview Carl Sagan, The Amazing Randi, and others and point out how von Danichen and his followers gave the ancients credit for no imagination whatever. In any case, he lost popularity and by the time he got to Kitchenette of the Gods or whatever it wasn’t selling anymore. Recently however I’ve seen him turning up on History Channel, BBC documentaries, and even on CNN and other networks, and his books are being reissued with “all new never before seen bullshit”.
I mostly read non-fiction now, but I like the ‘supernatural’ and always have. I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula from cover to cover one weekend when I was about 14, and wrote science fiction short stories around the same time. I am bored beyond tears by chick-lit and romance novels, and I am the prime demographic for them!..Same with TV, I mostly watch Discovery Channel and old movies, but I adore the TV shows mentioned by the OP. I despise most reality shows/shopping shows/model shows, and ‘I’ am the one they are aiming at! Go figure.
I agree, we need escape and entertainment different from our dreary world right now. Supernatural stuff seems to fit the bill, and I do agree there is a LOT of it out there.
Well, of course it’s different. Folklore deals with what people believe to be true, while fantastic fiction deals with things that are explicitly understood to be imaginary. It’s little more than coincidence that some of the entities in modern fantasy resemble some of the subjects of folklore of the past – indeed very often they don’t, beyond their names.
