Circus Sex Witch

I've been reading some very strange pulp novles about witchcraft, for research on my new script. The strangest one was "For the Witch, a Stone," by Salambo Forest, 1971. It's sort of a porn novel with sex scenes described in disturbingly vivid detail, where a woman tries LSD and it unlocks her innate supernatural powers. She can now materialize and dematerialize at will, and see into the thoughts of humans and animals (such as segulls on the beach). It's really a flaky, terrible sort of book, but it was so odd that it affected me quite a bit. A lot of new-agey stuff about ESP, psychic powers, etc. And the sex scenes are really awful. There's so much description of balls: "hard cool balls slapping softly," or "the loose plushness of his balls." Graphic and real in a 70's sort of way. Tells it like it is.

Another one, written ten years earlier so much more demure, is called "Love Cult," Jan Hudson, 1961. It's about a so-called witch's coven in Los Angeles, and a hard-boiled guy with an occult bookstore who gets it on with the beautiful dames involved. This guy ends up exposing witchcraft as a hoax, only effective because it preys on the victim's mind. It's got great expositional dialogue that sounds very noir, and you can really imagine some of those noir actors in the roles, or even Ava Gardner, Alexis Smith, etc. This period is more interesting to me right now, the early 60's, for its restraint and the seething sexuality underneath things.

Yesterday I looked all over for notes I'd written for a circus horror witch film. All I could remember is there were some trapeze artists in it, some murders, a castle, and a black cat named Patch. I didn't find the notes, so I'm going to start again from scratch. If there are murders in the circus, they should be committed by a woman. It would be sort of a remake of "Berserk," (Italian title "Blood Circus," see images in this post), but I would have to put thematic elements in to make it more than just an exploitation shocker. She could be some kind of a witch. She could kill with her eyes, with potions, she could make animals crazy. The same scenario would work with in a carnival, set in cheap carnival trailers, tents, diners, and motel rooms.


When I look over these plots I know they're going to sound so stupid to people, that they won't take them seriously. But I have such a penchant for the absurd, the tacky, and for certain kinds of shocking bad taste. Maybe it's because my parents had such good taste, and bad taste seems sort of taboo to me. My mom made all of these beautiful clothes for her store, and even great shirts for my dad. There was never any polyester, no food from a can, no carpets, no pop culture, no elevator music. It's as if I grew up in a terrarium where only beautiful things were allowed, and it's made me isolated from the middle American landscape. I'm trying to get all of that back--the roots of tacky that were withheld from me in childhood.

What's frustrating is that when I try to do bad taste, it comes out as good taste. I try to design hideous sets, and they come out like Technicolor dream worlds and fairybook rooms. It's the good taste underneath, transforming Roger Corman into Ptushko. Much of it comes from the dark and irrational side of myself, but I'm always striving to make my films less arty and more popular. I'm coming to the popular by degrees, and I'll be interested in seeing at what point the artiness vanishes so that only the popular remains. Not that I want to sweep the insanity away completely, just to contain it more, put it more into external things like plot.

I'm a bit afraid to do horror, as I think whatever I would do would come out too scary even for me. But I'm fascinated to try.