Most Tuesday nights this year I’ve been attending the Writing Workshop KC, taught by the poet Jen Harris. We get 3 prompts to write on for 10 minutes each and then we share our drafts with one another. It’s so amazing to see the moving and gorgeous words that are produced in only 10 minutes by my writer friends. I have a tendency to write about tv/films even if that’s not the exact prompt; gotta make it your own, ya know. This is what I managed last night, not perfect, but hey, it was 10 minutes, not too shabby.
Prompt 3
PROMPT: Write about the history of Halloween as if you are a scholar on the subject. Feel free to be the pompous know-it-all of this particular holiday.
The Devils from 1971 adapts Aldous Huxley’s non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudun (1952) in such high gore and horrifying detail that it was mostly banned for over 40 years. The 2021 Shudder Streaming service release allowed several generations to finally see this story of deranged medieval Catholic abuse of power. Oliver Reed plays a devastatingly handsome priest who fights a loosing battle against claims of heresy by an unhinged nun played with psychotic energy by Vanessa Redgrave. Murray Melvin again wears a priest’s robes, as in his classic role from Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, this time meting out the agonies of hell on the pliant flesh of Reed’s falsely accused priest. Take a trip to stark white porcelain medieval hell designed by Derek Jarman and executed, no pun intended, by the wild mind of Ken Russell.