Van Helsing A Day: Peter Cushing

For my money there is no greater Van Helsing than Peter Cushing, hands down, now and forever.  Peter Cushing played Van Helsing no less than 5 times for Hammer starting with 1958's Dracula (U.S. title Horror of Dracula) followed by Brides of Dracula in 1960, truly the defining film for Van Helsing's awesome vampire hunting skills and commitment.  It would be 12 years before Cushing would again take on the role, this time as a descendant of his previous character in Dracula AD 1972  which was followed by The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973).  Peter returned to his original Van Helsing one final time in 1974 for a joint Hammer-Shaw Brothers kung fu horror picture The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires.

While it is not established in the '58 Dracula nor in Brides, Peter Cushing's original Van Helsing is named Lawrence rather than Abraham and his descendant is Lorrimer, although a suggestion in Brides is that his name should be something beginning with "J".  Regardless, Peter Cushing is a Van Helsing's Van Helsing worthy of the name and character.

Three things really stand out about Cushing as Van Helsing.  The first is in Dracula where Van Helsing uses two candlesticks to make a cross to defeat Dracula.  Enterprising, brave, strong in his faith as a man fighting ultimate evil, this Van Helsing does what few others can pull off.  Others might attempt it, but success is by no means guaranteed.  The image of Peter Cushing with the candlesticks is iconic in the genre.

When a collectible bust is made of you featuring a single scene in a movie you are a bloody icon!

The second is how he dealt with the villain Baron Meinster (the ersatz Dracula) in Brides.  In Flesh and Blood the documentary about Hammer Peter Cushing commented that neither the budget nor his sense of the character (of Van Helsing) would allow for the originally scripted ending of Van Helsing summoning a horde of bats to destroy Baron Meinster but, as Peter said, "A splash of holy water and a jolly good fight" certainly did the trick.  Peter is really understating what happens.  Van Helsing and Meinster fight with Van Helsing using his holy water to hurt the vampire only to have Meinster kick over a brazier of coals setting the windmill where they are fighting ablaze.  Van Helsing then escapes the windmill and uses the sails to form a cross shadow and trap the bloodsucker inside the inferno.  Classic.
The third thing is the best of all.  Baron Meinster had bitten Van Helsing and left him to be turned into a vile undead.  Van Helsing awakes, discovers the puncture wounds and thinking quickly sets a piece of iron in a brazier to get it glowing hot then grasping a chain to support himself he PUTS THE GLOWING IRON ONTO HIS PUNCTURE WOUNDS!  Staggering with the pain, but conscious, he splashes holy water on the burns and is thus cleansed of the taint of vampirism.
This guy is beyond bad ass.

Although he would not fight Dracula again until 1972 in Dracula AD 1972 and would do so as Lawrence's descendant Lorrimer Van Helsing, he still cuts a fine figure as a determined warrior against the forces of darkness, despite health troubles and advancing age.  Peter Cushing always brings a slyness and cunning to the role but balances that with a paladin's devotion to good that might be surprising in a jaded culture that cannot fathom a character that is good for good's sake.

STATS 
Brains-10/10
Might-6/10 in his youth
Tools of the Trade-Holy Water and Crosses, Stakes and even a Rosebush, used a Windmill as a weapon
Faith-10/10 (any two objects combined in his hands become a cross)
Courage-10/10
Cushing Score-Alpha Cushing
FttB-12 out of a possible 10 Foots to the Balls

Van Helsing as played by Peter Cushing is what all Van Helsings should aspire to be.  He does his homework, he can be cunning or forthright, he is clever and has the knack for improvising, that he can turn two candlesticks (or a windmill) into a cross shows extreme heart, and his primary solution for dealing with a foe is a foot to the balls and a stake to the heart.  Cushing Van Helsing fights against evil and to promote good not for some dark or tragic past but because it is the right thing to do.  This is a hero among lesser men.

Keep your pumpkins lit.

Pumpkin People: Some Classic Examples

The tradition of Pumpkin People goes back to at least the 19-teens as evidenced from an excellent book entitled Halloween In America by Stuart Schneider.  The book is a collector's guide with prices and contains many color images of Halloween decorations, postcards, greeting cards, invitations and various bric a brac.  I have included some scanned images below which does not violate copyright as it is for the purpose of a review.  TAKE NOTE...it is legal if you are doing a review of a work.

I'd like to start with this image showing a very vegetable Pumpkin Man.  Many of these early images are what I call Harvest Icons as these Pumpkin People are anthropomorphic but made entirely of fruits and vegetables.  Often there is a disturbing quality to them, I think, but they are generally portrayed as jolly symbols of the autumn harvest season.  I consider this an origin of the Pumpkin People of a sort.

Item 1 has a pumpkin body and a pumpkin head with face reminiscent of a jack o' lantern.  The arms and legs are green but don't have vines or other vegetable markers.  The collar and ruff of leaves add a whimsical Elizabethan clown imagery to this happy fellow.  Item 2 has the pumpkin body and head and eyeballs, like number 1, which gives them a living anthropomorphic quality.  Interestingly he also has arms and legs made up of other vegetables such as corn arms and beet feet.  These seem more like goblins than people.
3 and 4 feature a collection of anthropomorphic vegetable with 3 having several autumn harvest choices and another double pumpkin man, this time with proper jack o' lantern head.  With 4 we have two good examples of multi-vegetable people.  The corn body on the left seems to have a beet or radish for a head while the fellow on the right looks to be a melon of some sort with bean pods for limbs.  Again we have a pumpkin man in the "snowman" configuration of pumpkin body and pumpkin head with simple features.  I thin those might be corn legs.  These are not so much people as anthropomorphic representations of vegetables which is an ideal image for a harvest festival.  These are the fruits of the harvest made into human-like forms, but not people per se.

This collection provides a more Halloween mischief theme than a simple harvest theme.  In these images the pumpkin people, or pumpkin goblins if you like, are frolicking with witches, devils, and each other.  Item A suggests that either the devil, the cracker and candle are human-sized or the pumpkin goblin is very small.  I don't know anyone who pulls crackers for Halloween, by the way.  Christmas, yes; Halloween, no.
In item B the jolly pumpkin goblin is witch-sized.  Again we are dealing with the double-pumpkin body-head combo and vegetable limbs, often corny.  They seem happy.  Which makes us ask what happened in C?  Are these two pumpkin goblins running from this witch because they are afraid or as part of a fun and amusing game?  Look at their little faces.  I think it is mischief gone awry.  Finally we have image D.  What an image!  A watermelon rind car with squash wheels, a pumpkin chauffeur and a witch in the back.  How big was that melon?  Doesn't matter.  This is more idea and imagery, not a representation of the idiosyncrasies of reality.  I quite like this picture.

The Second Most Disturbing Pumpkin Image On My Blog

Okay, who else just feels dirty from looking at this picture?  Confused?  No?  So we have a young lady in a party dress, a few happy little devils and a full size pumpkin person, double pumpkin, with teeth and either leaves or cucumbers for limbs.  I think you all know what that means, right?  Cucumbers?  There is more going on in this relationship that appears in the picture.  Again we have pumpkin goblin type pumpkin person with humanoid eyeballs and teeth.  This suggests a bit more humanity than a simple jack o' lantern face, but the complete vegetable composite body suggests not human but otherwordly harvest icon.  Thus do I say goblin.

And that would be the classic examples from the early 20th century.  I suspect, with no actual proof, that this was a time when Halloween was still about adult fun as much as youthful mischief and these pumpkin people are simultaneously harvest images and icons of the new, urban Halloween with its witches and party dresses.  There are elements of the older festivals and the mischief still in these images but what does the future hold for our friendly vegetable folk?
How do they eat?  They have teeth but they are vegetables.  Would they not eat through some simple root system and absorb sunlight with leaves?  At this point we don't know.  This is ancient history as these examples of the species are not to be found today save for the rare retro-genetic throwback, which is sadly unfit for the modern world in which it finds itself.

Keep your pumpkins lit.

Some More Thoughts On Vampire Hunters

Earlier I lamented the necessity of vampire hunters requiring supernatural powers in the modern vampire media.  You probably remember it here.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that knows me that I have more to say on that subject.

Prior to the magical hunter revolution vampire hunters, and monster hunters in general, had a different way to deal with their particular foe.  Or rather ways.  I classify these things when I am stuck in traffic.

SKILLS and KNOWLEDGE:
A classic monster hunter is like any other hunter in that they take the time to learn about their quarry, and I don't mean they dig rocks.  Just as a hunter learns the habits, behaviors, environment and capabilities of deer, bear, turkeys and what not, a monster hunter should know about the particular monster or monsters they are given to hunting.  Without knowledge of weaknesses and strengths all the skills in the world are of little use.  Skills are both general, such as weapon use or building devices, and specific applications of knowledge of the enemy.  Professor Abraham Van Helsing is the paradigm for knowledge and skill in the world of vampire hunters.

Comparison of common tools

TOOLS of the TRADE:
The tools of the trade vary by monster, but are the core set of items that are used to incapacitate and/or destroy the foe.  For vampire hunters the traditional tools of the trade are:
Stakes-The stake has become the de facto vampire killing tool since the stage adaptation of Dracula.  It is most often used these days as a sure-fire solution to vampire problems and more often than not results in a pile of dust or a gooey mess.  The modern stake must be made of wood because, apparently, vampires are highly allergic to it, even in those shitty "scientific" vampire films where the supernatural has been all but removed, which is stupid because vampires are obviously supernatural (I actually read in The Vampire Combat Manual by Roger Ma that we don't know why this is, but we suspect it is something in the resins in the wood that interferes with vampire heart functions...okay...because a stake through the heart is not just lethal or anything).  The original purpose of the stake was far more straightforward and logical: it holds the bloodsucking bastard into the earth so it can't get out.  Simple and effective, non?  Doesn't have to be the heart either, the body will do.  If you follow the older Slavic traditions you know that the corpse must drink blood to stave off the corruption of the flesh and once the flesh is gone and naught but bone remains the soul departs the earth (in about 7 years).  Thus, we see that pinning the monster in the grave prevents the rising of the corpse and leads to the eventual destruction.  For obvious reasons the stake needs to be quite long since it must be driven deep into the corpse and the earth to do any good and only need be wood if the particular cultural tradition requires it.  A piece of rebar should work just fine but if you want to be traditional I recommend hawthorn.
Holy Water-Water that has been consecrated by a priest has the power to upset evil.  In the more dramatic cases holy water acts on vampires as acid does on people leaving horrid burns and causing great pain.  According to the CW television series Supernatural it is a great test for the demon possessed as well.
Garlic-Garlic is a superfood.  Screw the avocado, the French were right about garlic from jump street.  Garlic is good for the blood, good for the body, and apparently the soul.  Whether it should be garlic flowers or the bulb (raw) is a matter of some debate.  Most people choose the bulb.  It is far more recognizable and photogenic and it goes great in a white wine with some shallots.
Silver-I don't much hold with this one but many hunters do it seems, so I put it on the list.  George Hamilton's Dracula, however, had no problem with the moon metal.  Alchemically speaking gold would be better being related to the life giving sun and being a pure element, but ever since Universal's Wolf Man (1941) silver has been the monster killing weapon.  Iron used to work on monsters long, long ago...
Holy Icons-The symbols and icons of religions, save those devoted to evil, can hold the undead at bay and sometimes do them physical harm.  In Chapter 16 of Dracula Professor Van Helsing uses the Holy Eucharist, which he is allowed to take from the church by special Indulgence.  Now some traditions will suggest that the holy icon is a matter of faith and not the item itself, but Van Helsing's use of the Host is a more concrete example due to transubstantiation.  Transubstantiation is also why he had to get special permission to use the Eucharist.  An unblessed wafer is merely bread, but once consecrated the bread becomes the body of Christ thus giving it great power against the forces of vile darkness.  This is, of course, the tac nuke of holy icons and works because Dracula, being a thing of pure evil, can no longer use the earth in his earth boxes to rest and replenish his strength.  Be that as it may, an atheist with a holy icon should probably start looking for a more practical solution.
Fire-The all-purpose sanitizing agent.  Fire destroys everything if you get it hot enough.  Some vampires recoil from fire like they are made of straw.  Also useful against animated scarecrows.
Mirrors-Supposedly vampires do not reflect in mirrors because they do not have souls.  Do a little research on fetches and the like and this all makes sense.  Because they do not reflect they tend to avoid them so you can really upset one when you whip one out.
Balls-See next category

Since vampire types and weaknesses vary by culture the tool list is by no means exhaustive.  As time has changed both the vampire in popular culture and the available technology for hunters, we could include such items as UV lamps, Special Bullets (including the ridiculous UV bullet), Crossbows (for dealing with vampires that explode should the tiniest sliver of wood get into their hearts), and Magic.

Visual Aid 

FAITH, COURAGE and A FOOT TO THE BALLS:
Vampires are (were) things of evil.  Things of evil are best fought with faith and courage and a strategically placed foot-to-the-balls.  One need look no further than Cushing's Van Helsing in Hammer's 1960 The Brides of Dracula (an inappropriately named film as it lacks both Dracula and any weddings) to see the best example of this principle.  I shan't go into details here as so spectacular of a display of vampire fighting prowess is it that it deserves its own discussion...in our Peter Cushing spotlight!
Now faith is a tricky subject in these enlightened (read bullshit) times, but I make no apologies for it.  The vampire is a cursed/soulless/damned thing of evil.  None of your mamby pamby pseudo-psychological feel-good moral equivalency bollocks here at the Pumpkin.  Vampires=Evil.  As soulless undead fiends of the night the original champions faced them with a strong faith in their cause, the concept of good, and working under the aegis of their particular deity.  Van Helsing certainly did.  This should not be misconstrued as supernatural powers, however.  I'm not talking about the DnD Cleric's undead turning, here.  I'm talking about the ability to turn a pair of candlesticks into a cross to smack Dracula down (See Cushing, Peter).
Courage is not so tricky.  Monsters are scary.  If they were not we'd call them something other than monsters.  We'd call them puppies or librarians, for example.  Monsters are not just scary like your 3rd grade Social Studies teacher was scary; monsters are scary and can actually do something about it.  Courage is one of the prime weapons in the fight against vampires and other vile monsters.  Courage should not be confused with foolhardy and reckless behavior, however.  One can be both brave and smart.  It is still a mark of courage to track your foe to his lair around noon and venture inside to kill him there.
A foot-to-the-balls I should not have to explain.  It hurts and it is not a low blow if your foe has only a select set of weaknesses.

Consider this a primer for more discussions of select vampire hunters and stay tuned for more CPPSAs you can use!

Keep your pumpkins lit.

Some Thoughts on Vampire Hunters

Despite the current fad for all things zombie, you still can't swing a dismembered zombie arm without hitting some sort of vampire media.  Once the stuff of mere folklore and superstition vampires have been big media bucks for several decades now.  I can understand why.  Vampire films/shows/books are cheaper than a washed up barfly at last call.  If you want to make a werewolf picture, or zombie picture, or monster movie you are going to need special effects, make-up, probably some CGI.  If you want to make a vampire picture all you need is a complete lack of self-respect and some plastic fangs.  The fangs are optional, actually.  I'm not saying you can't go big budget; I am saying you don't need to go big budget.  Similarly if you want to write a moderately successful vampire novel take the nearest romance novel or porn, put a vampire in it and viola, vampire novel.  Sadly this trend has started to infect the werewolf market as well.

Almost as long as there have been vampire stories there have been vampire hunters.  If the vampire is the villain of the piece, as is appropriate, the hunter is the hero that will put paid to the fiend.  If the vampire is the hero of the piece the hunter gets to be the villain and in some works both are tragically heroic in their own way.  A trend I have observed is that of the supernatural vampire hunter.  It is by no means new.  Indeed folklore from certain regions (roughly Slavic culture) speaks of dhampir, which are the offspring of human women and vampires, that are uniquely suited for finding and destroying the undead.  Original sources describe these beings as anything from normal to boneless and concepts in between.  Much of their power to find and destroy the undead comes from their ability to either see the invisible vampires or a general special quality they have.  As with the vampire itself, the dhampir has changed to suit the modern audiences.

Dhampir aside, most vampires were, traditionally, easily killed by human beings.  The vast amount of vampire folklore attests to solutions for the prevention of, the curing of, and the destruction of vampires and most of it is painfully banal.  This is hardly the stuff of bestselling fiction.  Over time the power of the vampire has grown, mostly through film and fiction, such that the current vampire bears as much resemblance to its original source as a chicken bears to a Tyrannosaurus rex.  As the vampire's power has grown to suit the needs of a scientifically and special-effects jaded audience, so too has the vampire hunter changed to match it.  Where before the hunter needed no inherent supernatural powers to match the prey, now the hunter needs a lunchbox of supernatural abilities to even keep up with the prey.  This is, in my mind, regrettable as some great hunter archetypes existed before the massive vampire upgrade of the late 20th century.  In some sense this change is a result of the modern mindset.  It is nigh impossible for the modern person with their easily accessible information on the internet, their free time for exercise, martial arts training and hobbies, their Starbucks around every corner and access to weaponry to imagine the life of a medieval peasant who worked long hours to grow food or build barrels just to eat, who is afraid of weather, the dark, bandits, and their government, has no access to anything but local information, and does not have time for frivolous exercise.  The idea of a walking corpse is pretty frightening to those guys and the disease and death it brings even more so, lacking adequate medical facilities as they do.  The closest the modern person can come to it is to review their Zombie Apocalypse plan.  That's the closest you can come to conceiving the life of a medieval peasant.  Yet these people had the strength of mind and will to dig up a corpse, stake it into the ground, lop off its head and burn the heart to protect their villages.  No supernatural powers required.

Since the modern half-caff mocha latte sipping schmuck in an internet cafe is just so invulnerable to things (such as cold, heat, hunger, disease, the ravages of age accelerated by those other things and backbreaking labor) in the world around them it follows that vampires just weren't scary enough.  They weren't badass enough to impress the audience.  They had to be made into minor super-villains to keep our attention and in the process they became so badass that we, as a culture, began to worship them, idolize them, and ultimately hunger for them.  The vampire hunter, when it can be found at all, is played as either a heartless killer with more than an allegorical streak of racism, a bumbling idiot convinced of his own self-importance, or is a supernatural entity itself.  Given that modern audiences show an aversion to all things religious (hmmm...like vampires?) the supernatural aspects of the vampire hunter are typically manifested in purely secular or science-fiction ways.

As so much of the current vampire trend media actually features protagonist vampires (vampires in love with humans, sexy vampire bitches, cuddly vampires, desperately "original" paradigm shift vampires, etc.) you are just as likely to have vampires hunting other vampires in a good v. evil storyline.  Since so much of this media casts a vampire or vampires in the heroic roles, the hunters with purely human abilities simply cannot compete at all.  The vampire power creep index is currently so far off the charts that we have to make a new chart and reset our baseline.  Compared to today's vampires Count Dracula is a geriatric with a missing leg and this is an ass-kicking contest.

In case I am not getting my point across here: I am lamenting the change in vampire hunters.  I am lamenting that it needed to change as well.  Professor Abraham Van Helsing would find his considerable knowledge of no use on the modern market and his tools ineffectual, depending upon the medium, of course.  Vampire lore is so fractured in the modern market that you cannot tell what rules will apply from film to film, show to show, book to book, or even from episode to episode.  Of all of the myriad vampire facts from ages and cultures past only a few are accepted today, and even those have changed much to suit our culture.  Consider the sunlight issue.  Modern vampires are interesting cases of rapid combustion when they are exposed to sunlight, and in some media, thanks to our scientific knowledge, UV light is all that is needed.  Hey, skin cancer is no joke and it affects everybody.  Of course in the olden days vampires didn't burn up in the sun any faster than normal people.  You can thank Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) for that little addition.  As a creature of evil the vampire was, like all spirits, demons and monsters, unable to abide the light of the life-giving sun.  I am not able to abide the taste of beets but I don't explode or burst into flames if I eat one.  Although I am not willing to take any chances on that.  We could do a checklist.  I know you love a checklist.
VAMPIRE VULNERABILITY CHECKLIST:
Sunlight-Crispy Critters (except Stoker's Dracula, traditional vampires from folklore, and those Twilight assholes)
Holy Symbols-Sometimes.  This actually falls into three categories: No Effect; Always; Matter of Faith
Garlic-Occasionally these days, but not often
Fire-Yep
Beheading-99% of the time
Running Water-Nope
Silver-Common now, not common originally
Churches-See Holy Symbols above
Roses/Thorns-Almost never
OCD/Counting: Almost never
Stake-Special (this one has seen the most change, even more than sunlight, and is perhaps the most enduring, originally the stake was to hold the vampire in its grave and needed to be quite long, now it has turned into some sort of Vampire Pause Button that just freezes them until removed, or in extreme cases a severe allergy to wood of any sort, including pencils...sometimes it makes them explode, which is very popular in the modern vampire media)
Must Sleep In Own Grave/Earth from Own Grave: Nope
Bad Breath: Nope

To contrast this we have the lunchbox of vampire powers, most of which did not exist in the historical folkloric antecedents.

VAMPIRE POWERS CHECKLIST
Super Strength
Super Speed
Super Fortitude
Super Math Skills
Super Sexy
Great Skin
Fabulous Hair
Polymath
Eidetic Memory
Outcast Girl Attraction Power
Wardrobe
Flight
Shape Shifting-Not as common anymore
Animal Control-Rare
Mesmerism-All the damn time
Kung Fu-All neonate vampires are the equivalent of Green Belt and it just gets better with age
Wolverine Healing Factor
Enhanced Senses
Brooding

Against such a super-powered foe the hunters had to evolve with them.  The audience would accept no less. Yet the hunters just aren't allowed to evolve enough.

This is not right.

Keep your pumpkins lit.

A Little Something Spooky

When I was a kid (and that was a long, long time ago) I enjoyed reading game books.  The Choose Your Own Adventure series was a starting point, but I tended to prefer books with more game to them, like Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series or J.H. Brennan's Grailquest (still a favorite to this day, actually).  One series I did enjoy around middle school, although I only read a very few of them, was Wizards, Warriors and You.

Wizards, Warriors and You was somewhere between a Choose Your Own Adventure and the more complex dice/random number oriented game books.  While the book series followed the standard "make a decision and turn to X section" of all its ilk, it had more randomized options than the Choose line without having hit points or dice and such like Grailquest.  The basic theme of the series involved the adventures of two lifelong companions, the Wizard and the Warrior of "good King Henry".  The reader took the role of either the Wizard or the Warrior (they were never named in the series) and read the book.  The books' "replay" value came from your being able to reread the book as the other hero when you had finished the quest.  The two heroes had the same story, but different paths.  They worked together regardless of who you were playing.
The "game mechanics" were choosing paths and occasionally flipping a coin, doing a math problem or finding out that you failed because you were reading the book on a Tuesday (no, seriously, that really happened).  When you picked the Warrior you picked 3 weapons from the selection in the back of the book and occasionally that choice meant all the difference.  When you played the Wizard you got a selection of spells and choosing to use (or not use sometimes) the right one meant all the difference.  These were young adult books, you see.  They were hella fun.

Today I am looking back at the 5th book in the series (which had a total of 18 books), The Haunted Castle of Ravencurse.  It was the first I bought, first I read and remained my favorite all through my youth.
First thing: Great cover.  The Wizard in a magical battle with a zombie king!  Look at the moody art.  It's the exact thing that appealed to my young self.  Okay, it still does.
The Story: Memory is a bit hazy here.  The Wizard and the Warrior have to go to the haunted castle Ravencurse for some reason or the other.
It was a long time ago.  I do recall zombies, ghosts, monsters, and a magical dual with that zombie king.  I probably read this book 50 times.  I wish I still had it.  I'd read it today.

The whole series was good, from what I remember, even if I didn't read them all.  I was always drawn to the ones with the spooky covers or that had titles promising encounters with ghosts, spooks, and the undead.
If you can find a copy I recommend it for the cover alone.  It had some nice interior art as well.

Keep your pumpkins lit.

Pumpkin People: The Obsession Begins

My fascination with pumpkins, jack o' lanterns and Pumpkin People goes way back.  As I noted before I had a favorite Halloween decoration as a youth that was a cardboard cutout scarecrow with a jack o' lantern head, which I identify as a type of Pumpkin Person.  I can establish a line of interest however stretching forward from that.

In high school I sketched up the picture you see above.  It is horrible because I am now and was then a shitty artist.  If you look carefully you will see it is #2 pencil (the type preferred by scantron machines everywhere) and black ballpoint.  As I said, it is not very good.

For those that know this would be the legendary Phantom Jack O' Lantern, avenger of pumpkins everywhere.

Here is a much later work, I can't say for sure when, but you might notice a pattern.  My medium is clearly lined notebook paper.  This particular one was finished off with Crayola markers.

What we are establishing here is that I have had a long term obsession with Pumpkin People and apparently I think they are some sort of special breed of badass.  In keeping with my usual style I will be exploring this deeper during the Halloween season this year and possibly using this as a form of therapy come to an answer for my obsession.  Probably not though.  I have no desire to be cured of this particular affliction.

Light your pumpkins, friends!

Halloween Specialist Wizards

It's October and that means Halloween season and that means that the Pumpkin tries to focus on Halloween related content more often than not.  As opposed to the normally thought provoking and controversial material covered during the off season.  I have covered wizards as they relate to Halloween before , indeed twice before, so today's post should come as no surprise.
Specialist Wizards, a term bandied about in RPG circles, refers to practitioners of magic that choose to focus in a narrow or themed area of expertise rather than the broad generalist wizard.  How specialization comes about depends on the game really (or author as this happens in books and films as well).  I suppose with the freedom to choose spells as you level comes the option to select spells along a similar theme, which could certainly result in a named type of wizard, but when we think of specialists we think of wizard subclasses with a name and theme such as today's subject THE NECROMANCER.

This is the Necromancer from the board game Mage Wars: skulls?  Check.  Bone accents?  Staff and necklace.  Creepy as hell?  Check-o-roonie.

Historical Origins: From the Greek, necromancy is divination by speaking with the dead.
Fantasy Origins: Necromancy and necromancers are wizards who specialize in working with death and the dead.  They are intentionally spooky, often evil (but not always, but then people tend to frown on disturbing the eternal rest of sapient beings) and rely heavily on their use of "pets".  In early literature necromancer was often a synonym for "evil wizard" and even in the modern milieu you aren't likely to see one in pink riding a standard rainbow shitting unicorn.  Oh no, necromancers ride nightmares and wear skulls.  Tolkien used a necromancer as a background character in The Hobbit, although the necromancer of Mirkwood was, of course, Sauron of The Lord of the Rings.  They are popular villain figures, often used as overlords rather than simple straight forward attack villains.  If you are looking to run a creepy adventure or two for Halloween you can't go wrong with a necromancer as the main villain and his castle of undead minions.  And if that necromancer is also a VAMPIRE your name is Tracy Hickman.

See the skull?  That's a neon sign that says "I'm a necromancer".

Skulls are pretty much de rigueur for necromancers as our examples above and below show.  Occasionally they go all out with bone accents on the robes, maybe some bone armor pieces, a flayed (human?) skin robe, pale skin, the whole lot.  A tattered robe is a nice accent, but by no means required.  They usually grow their beards late in life, if they grow them at all, and tend toward the goatee and van dyke.  

Yes, even the French have necromancers.

In wizard school the necromancers are pretty much the Goth kids.  They dress in black, act intentionally creepy to get attention, stare at you a long time for no good reason and listen to minstrel acts that nobody has ever heard of.  Necromancers get voted most likely to become a lich by their fellow wizard school classmates.  Their association with the dead, however, makes them popular around Halloween but they still don't get invited to many parties.

Is this image cool to you?  You might be a necromancer.

Why choose necromancy as your magical specialty?  Because it looks cool!  Necromancers are about being cool, at least to a certain segment of the population.  Skeletons, zombies, spells with names like chill touch, life drain, withering blast, screaming headbanging metal skull, and flense douchebag jock football player all add up to badass, cool, and wicked awesome.  To use an older term, this is more than black magic, this is blackest magic.  So what if you don't have any friends?  Friends are for the weak.  You can just kill people and MAKE them into your friends!

Say "hello" to your new friends.

Which is what you are going to have to do because hanging around with the undead and having no helpful or healing spells is not going to get you invited to parties of the adventuring kind, let me tell you.

It's not all skeletons and zombies, you know.  Spirits are part of the necromancer's bailiwick as well.  In fact, expect to be having conversations with a lot of these things, although I warn you, they are not very interesting, they are practically transparent.

Necromancers speak to and command the undead.  That is their baseline occupational focus.  When another wizard is flipping some feeble magic missile a necromancer is raising a skeleton to rend the flesh of his foes.  There are many frightening and powerful characters out there, but one that can kill you, THEN raise you back up as his servant and/or rip your soul from your body and bind it forever to the earthly plane for his amusement is pretty scary.  Scary awesome, that is.  Practically all of their spells are in some way tied to death and negative energy.  If a necromancer has a heal spell you best believe the hit points he is giving you came from someone or something else just seconds before.  Here's a tip, if you have just been given a heal and you see dead squirrels and grass around you...that was a necromancer that healed you.

What, if anything, this has to do with necromancy I cannot say.

It's not all bad, right?
Well, no, it doesn't have to be.  Necromancy naturally tends toward badness if not outright evil.  You can't be expected to be called a "good guy" if you force the bones of the dead to rise up and get your latte.  And that's okay.  The "good guys" don't have to be "good".  We love an antihero.  You could use necromancy in a positive way, however.  You could learn the magic of death and undeath and then use it solely to protect villages from the rampaging undead, or use your speak with dead spells to become an exorcist, solving the problems of sad ghosts trapped by their undeath and needing to have their desires fulfilled to pass on out of the material plane.  You can be a HAPPY NECROMANCER.  It's up to you.

Or you can be a glowing skeleton of DOOM and BADASSNESS!  It's Halloween (soon) and that's what its all about!  We love the monsters!  We love the spooky!  We love to abuse the exclamation point!  We all know my love for Skeletor, but there is my second favorite, Scareglow!  That's where your necromancy is leading, friends.  Summoning a glowing skeleton with a cape and a poleaxe.  You can get a job working at a haunted attraction and not only will you be THE most valued employee, the attraction will become THE legendary MUST SEE event of the Halloween season!
When the wizards get together for their wizard school reunions though, the necromancer is still going to be the unpopular guy.  Sorry, it's truth.  Of course he's also the one that poisons the punch and raises the whole lot of them as part of his 20 year revenge scheme and then holds the former wizard prom queen hostage to "make (her) love me HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA".  It won't work, of course.  She's still going to say you are creepy.

Stay tuned, kiddies, there are more Halloween wizards to come!

Keep your zombie pumpkin minions lit.