Last February, I won the "Isabella" award from the Ghoulish Gallery for "notable contributions to the dark industry," said contribution being my Haunted Mansion website. I was dusting off my award today, which left me thinking about how often I am asked about my role as a de-facto spokesperson for Disney's Haunted Mansion in relation to my faith as a reformed Christian.
How can a Christian be so excited about "dark" things? I'm not really posting these thoughts to get into that right now; suffice to say that I see worth and value in artistic expression that trumps genre, as genre is often not even the most important facet of a particular work. Anyway, I just think spooky things are cooool.
I was emailed by a gay filmmaker asking me about these things a month ago, and we had an interesting and frank exchange; he about his feelings of rejection from a ultra-religious father, and me regarding my travails between interests light and dark. Truth be told, I'm even surprised myself at how many Christians I've met via my haunting hobbies. There are quite a few of us out there that delight in the gloomy sidebars to popular culture.
So let's take a little walk on that line between the light and the dark.
So, in this lifetime, I've both been blessed by the Holy See (yep, that's me and my mom with La Papa in 1984 - another story for another time...)
...and I've communed (back in '93) with the bile-spitting, levitating, demon-possessed Linda Blair, who was kind enough to sign a can of pea soup (pea soup being a key element of one of her most shocking scenes from "The Exorcist") for my pop-culture-icons collection.
How symbolic.
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