It’s the pitch meeting for a Newspaper Movie, only it’s an Urban Fantasy

It’s going to be Twilight meets All the Presidents Men!  Exploring themes of freedom of the press, corruption, truth, and the undead.

It’s called All the President’s Vampires where one intrepid reporter will get the tip of a lifetime from the ghost of Calvin Coolidge’s pet raccoon Rebecca, which breaks the story that will take down a president.

We open on a grizzled old reporter moving out of his DC brownstone because his wife is an angel, like literally, but it turns out even angels have a limit — and being married to a  fairy who can always detect the truth who went to journalism school is hers.

That night, as he’s guzzling beer at the local bar for journalists, (different than the pub for cops, the cafeteria for politicians, the steakhouse for lobbyists, the blood bank for vampires, and the morgue for zombies), he gets a tip through his anonymous email to meet a source in a parking garage.

There are a lot of parking garages in DC, so it takes him a while, but when he finally finds the source at the Dulles Airport long-term parking facility, he learns it’s a janitor who can talk to ghosts. And the janitor has brought along a ghost of the long-dead Coolidge White House pet, Rebecca the Raccoon.

This janitor also speaks raccoon, being both an animal whisperer and a ghost talker and she says that the President has been drinking blood in the Oval Office.

Now that he thinks about it, the grizzled reporter realizes it’s a little bit strange that no one covered the fact that the President didn’t show up to the Iowa State Fair until the fireworks started, and no one has seen him since in the light of day, but he knows for sure there is a story here.

The meeting with his editor doesn’t go great because it’s right before lunch, and she’s a zombie and tries to eat his brains. And she’s worried about the reputation of the paper with such a bombshell accusation. She tells him he has to find a corroborating source who isn’t the ghost of a raccoon or a janitor.

And so begins a long montage of seeking a source and not getting eaten or hexed or cursed. There will also be shots of opening refrigerators in empty apartments to reveal a solitary half-eaten pizza and more shots at the bar and even at a different bar.  At one point he even hears about a super secret project in the wilds of New Mexico, but reluctantly lets that go, because it’s the wrong genre.

Finally, after five minutes of tracking shots, set to a score by the same guy who does all those disaster flicks, he tracks down the ghost of Zachary Taylor, who died in the White House after consuming insane amounts of green apples and cherries. 

He takes the corroboration back to his editor, who agrees that the ghost of a dead president is slightly more trustworthy than the ghost of a raccoon, but since the same janitor translated for both ghosts, they still had work to do.

And so begins yet another montage of pavement pounding, but this time various to various psychics and magical creatures around the city until he finds a tarot card reader in Chinatown who does not tell all of the politicians she sees that they will win the next election with her help, and does not tell all of the tourists she sees that museum esoterica that the costs $20 bucks, half of which goes back in her pocket, is better than any Smithsonian. Sometimes she mixes up the two messages, which results in quite a few politicians in photo ops at the esoteric museum, but the reporter deems her trustworthy enough to translate.

A dramatic meeting is arranged, this time on a park bench beneath bare tree limbs, which takes some doing because it’s the middle of July. But finally, the tarot card reader and the ghost of Zachary Taylor confirm that yes, the president is drinking blood.

And now, it’s all over but the writing, and the click click of the printing press, which is weird in a movie about an online blog, but the big bold headlines are the same crying the president is a vampire. After a last-minute call for comment to the White House press secretary who says she can get back to them after sunset. In the final editorial meeting, the editor says to go with that quote and that they are going to change the world, speak truth to blood-sucking power, and a few more inspirational cliches.

And as the reporter sits watching the news of the President’s address, the screen fades to black while small white letters tell you that this one article forced the President to say sorry and for one moment tell a little bit of the truth, before going on to win reelection by 20 million votes and two electoral college votes.

The post 1 Reason Why Movies Should Not Have Vampires and Reporters first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I have a small problem with the state of current Urban Fantasy. It is all shifters all the way down!

Here’s an exploration into why that particular myth is a strange choice to go viral.

Chaste sexy monsters?

Sexy monsters have been around forever from Beauty and the Beast to Frankenstein. (Though if you want to dig deeper, just be prepared when googling sexy monster!) It seems to have really taken off with the film era and Bride of Frankenstein. But even so, until Teen Wolf, Vampire Diaries, and Twilight, werewolves were not a part of global pop culture, and if they did get in, they were firmly bad guys and mostly there for the ick factor. Now we get swoony werewolves aimed at teenagers. What?

Before the aughts, werewolves were bad guys; subprime mortgages were a great investment, and social media was young. The worst thing that happened on a platform was living vicariously through the juice cleanse of your junior year prom date.

Just me?

I’m saying that it was a more innocent time without these deeply weird myths about former monsters now insisting on marriage.

Alpha wolves are not a thing.

In the modern stories about werewolves, it’s almost impossible to find a story that doesn’t include an alpha werewolf with dominance over other poor wolves and fights to the death to maintain the hierarchy and take mates, whether they want to be taken or not. Which is a whole different newsletter.

Real wolves don’t have alphas. It was all a mistake.

Researchers studied wolves in captivity, and what they were taking for dominance was actually territorial instinct. Wolves have hunting grounds, and if you put a bunch of them together, they can’t establish their grounds and compete for the tiny real estate they have. It’s a behavior totally unseen in the wild.

The idea was popularized by researcher David Mech, who has repudiated his own book and research and asserts that the term alpha is incorrect. When he studied wolves in the wild, he realized what he took for “alpha” was just the parent. Left to their own devices, wolves live in family groups and tend to avoid other families so that there’s enough food for everybody. The parents control their children so the kids, you know, grow up competent, not so they can dominate them.

Deer fight, not wolves.

There are dominance fights in nature and strict hierarchal groups, but we now know this behavior is common in prey animals, specifically herd animals like deer, not carnivores. Which is an image I just can’t get out of my head: the majestic alpha werewolf acting like a deer. It’s also common in our primate cousins, which may explain the appeal to us.

Since we are unlikely apex predators whose original place in the food chain was probably scavenger, it makes sense why we would glorify a true apex predator acting as a herd animal. That’s a lot closer to our experience than I think we want to think about.

It’s a weirdly popular European myth. There are other people. And other carnivores.

Many different European cultures’ fidelity to werewolves as their main monsters is kind of unusual. Japanese myths include a pretty much endless list of scary creatures and there are shape-shifting legends all over the world, but Europe loved their wolves.

It may be because it’s the main predator most villages would interact with. Europe has bears, but they are much shyer of humans than wolves, and there’s really nothing else to compete with them. Unlike other continents with much scarier carnivores.

Or it’s all one story that we only saw as different European myths because of when it got written down?

The idea of a wolfman seemed to spring up all over Europe in the Gilgamesh epic, Nordic folklore, Greek mythology, and Old German and French stories all at once. But maybe it’s all one older story, and the Proto-Indo-European civilization that birthed all of those languages also birthed these myths.

That’s kind of cool to think that somebody somewhere in southern Europe or the Northern Middle East in 1000 BCE told a story about a guy turning into a wolf and that has metastasized into a dozen epics, and, eventually, Taylor Lautner running around without a shirt.

The glorified blood and the bite.

There are lots of arguments that myths are our instincts, and werewolves speak to some super squicky ones. One of the key parts of the werewolf myth is the bite, the infection, and the horror of the change. Even in shifter novels divorced from the monsters as much as possible, usually still keep this one. It’s an instinctive fear, one that we’ve gotten really familiar with in the last couple of years. They are a really bloody part of our history.

Wolves I like:

All this being said, it doesn’t stop me from reading a lot of werewolf fiction, since there’s just a lot being published. Here are my favorites:

1. Audrey Faye’s Ghost Mountain Series – which is also the best book I’ve ever read about trauma, fiction or non. The author describes it as warm, furry belonging. The Body Keeps Score is in second place. Third place is Widen the Window, but that’s another postcard.
2. Gail Carrigar’s Parasol Protectorate, author of The Heroine’s Journey and steampunk, victorian werewolves. Just hilarious.
3. Patricia Briggs and her Mercy Thompson series, which is one of the originals and still holds up.

The post There Are No Alpha Werewolves?! first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.