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Robert Guffey, "Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos" (Headpress, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network. And today I am here with Robert Guffey, who is the author of Hollywood Haunts the An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos. Robert, could you start out by kind of giving an overview of the book and why you decided to write this book?
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Yeah, I started writing the book probably back in 2009, and then working on it off and on over the course of many years, while working on other books as well. But I became fascinated by the topic of taboos, cultural taboos. Why certain things are taboo, why certain things are not, how taboos change based on who's in power at the time or the shifting of the winds sometimes. And back in the late 80s, I was reading Stephen R. Bissette, who's a comic book artist who worked on Swamp Thing, most famously with Alan Moore. He edited a series of horror anthologies in comic book form called Taboo. And the series dealt with various taboo topics in fictional and non fictional form. But the types of taboos dealt with as the series progressed were wide ranging. And so Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell began in Taboo, serialized. So did Lost Girls, also Balamore and Melinda Gebbe. And Lost Girls was not a horror story. It examined the nature of sexuality. What's the difference between erotica and pornography? Is there a difference? Alan Moore says no, that it's mainly a class distinction. If rich people consume pornography, it's called erotica. If poor people consume pornography, it's called pornography. And so Taboo explored the nature of these taboos beyond the horror genre, beyond tales of the supernatural or things like that. So it got me thinking about how taboos operate and fluctuate, as I said. But, you know, depending on who's in power, I mean, just like a recent example, Gretchen Felker Martin, who's a talented novelist who wrote the novel Manhunt and several other novels, she got in trouble the day of the Charlie Kirk assassination because she had just that same day she had published her first comic book with DC Comics, which was A title called Red Hood that was like a Batman spinoff. And she had posted on social media something that was less than complimentary about Charlie Kirk. I think the exact comment was something like, I hope the bullet's okay. And Warner Brothers freaked out and immediately pulled the comic book that they had been promoting heavily the previous day. They suddenly pulled it that day. And I thought that was somebody from DC Comics calls up Gretchen Falcon, Martin says, demands an apology. And she refused to apologize, which I think is perfectly appropriate. She doesn't have to apologize for anything.
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And.
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But I thought it was interesting that if, say three years earlier, Gretchen Felker Martin had gone on social media and said something complimentary about Charlie Kirk, an editor at DC Comics would have called her up and said, you need to apologize for that. So these multinational corporations, whether it's Warner Brothers or whatever, they just sway in the wind and they're like seat cushions that bear the impression of the last ass that sat on it. So Gretchen Valkar Martin was ejected from the hallowed halls of DC Comics at that point. So it's just interesting how something can be taboo one year and then the next year something else is taboo. And so that kind of reading, the Stephen Bassett edited horror anthology, kind of went out. Was a teenager, really. It's kind of got me thinking about it. And that planted the seed. And then as I realized round about 2008, 2009, that wanted to write about this in the context of film, because fiction has always been the most effective way to deal with societal taboos in a way that won't get the creators, you know, arrested or killed. Right. And film has been the most popular venue for fiction for almost 100 years or more. And in fact, this book, Hollywood Haunts the world, covers 100 years of cinema from 1921 to 2021, though it does so in reverse chronology. The most recent films are dealt with first, and we go backwards into the past. I think the most recent film dealt with in the book is Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley. And then it goes backwards all the way to 1921 to Victor Sjostrom's the Phantom Carriage, which a still from which is incorporated into the COVID of the book, which is handsomely designed. I was very happy with the COVID And so I deal with a number of different topics that should not be discussed in polite society, but were examined in the context of. Of popular films. So later in the book, as we're getting further to the birth of cinema, there's a chapter in there called the suppressed science of Dr. Miracle, which is all about what I call Darwinian horror films. That's another thing that I found interesting is that the taboo topic, not only is it dealt with in a hidden form, in the form of metaphor, but often in some sort of genre form, whether it's horror films, science fiction. There's a chapter about westerns, and it's usually some genre that at the time the film was made, was considered less than respectable. It was. And therefore able to sort of fly under the radar. People weren't paying close attention to it because it was trash genre. And so with the Darwinian horror films, I trace those back all the way to the 1920s. And of course, the Scopes Monkey Trial happens in 1925. And yet it didn't stop being illegal to teach the theory of evolution in schools until 1968, I believe. So there were still states in the United States, even as late as 68, where you could not teach evolution in schools. So you certainly couldn't discuss this in a naked, open way in a popular film in the 1920s. So instead, you see the theme played out mostly in the context of horror movies. Lon Chaney Senior did films with that theme often for some reason. There's a lot of interbreeding between women and apes in these films. That's a common plot element, I noticed. And some of these films are lost, like Lon Chaney's A blind bargain from 1922 is a lost film, but it deals with that theme. In fact, I recently heard that Crispin Glover had done a remake of A Blind Bargain just last year, which I didn't know about it until just recently. I thought, oh, that's fascinating. I have to see that. This is a total tangent. But Crispin Glover once autographed to me an L. Ron Hubbard Scientology book. That's a whole nother story. Maybe put a bookmark there, and I'll tell you that later, because that's a weird story. So I go from the 20s all the way into the early 30s with Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue. And that's kind of like the centerpiece film I use in that chapter. That's Murders of the Rue Morgue was the film that Robert Florey was given after Universal Studios took Frankenstein away from him. Originally, Robert Flory was supposed to direct Frankenstein and with. With Bela Lugosi first supposedly playing Victor, and then that got switched around to where Lugosi was playing the monster, and he was unhappy about that and refused to play a character that had dialogue. And, of course, you know, as we know if you read the Mary Shelley's original novel, the monster is very talkative and perhaps, perhaps Lugosi objected on that level, but for whatever reason he did not want to play a non speaking role after having just starred in Dracula. And so Universal removes Lugosi and Robert Florey from Frankenstein and puts them on Murders in the Room Org. And so you see Florey taking some of his ideas that he would have used in Frankenstein and instead interweaving them into this very odd adaptation of Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, which of course bears very little resemblance to the original story because it's about a scientist trying to prove the theory of evolution through these illicit experiments on apes and female prostitutes. And it's a fairly salacious plot that I think is partly unofficially based on H.P. lovecraft story the White Ape, which was first published in 1921 and then later reprinted in Weird Tales in 24, I think. And it's in the original script that Robert Flory wrote The Lugosi character, Dr. Miracle is breeding apes with these prostitutes that he's snatching off the street. Of course, even for pre code Hollywood that was a little too salacious. So it's changed to that he's mixing the blood of the prostitutes and the apes to prove this genetic connection between ape and human. He's trying to prove the theory of evolution. And of course the movie is taking place in the 1800s, so Dr. Miracle is a very forward thinking scientist despite his questionable methods of experimentation. But this theme of Dr. Miracle has to do perform these lectures about evolution at the circus sideshows because he's not allowed to do it in any other context. And so there's all this kind of fascinating kind of subtext going on where Flore is almost rubbing in the face of the audience the theory of evolution, but only in the context of this salacious horror plot because you couldn't do it as a realistic film. And so from there I move on to films like Earl Kenton's island of Lost Souls, another great Lugosi film with Charles Lawton and Lugosi, an adaptation of H.G. wells, the island of Dr. Moreau and. And on from there to a series of peculiar films. Edward Demetrius, Captive Wild Woman with John Carradine, Dr. Renault's secret with George Zucko, which is an adaptation of a book called Bollalu by, by Gaston Leroux. And some of the horror, these horror guerrilla films are sort of, some of them are actually progressive in nature in a weird way. And Others are sort of subliminally, perhaps subconsciously racist or regressive. But I would argue that Dr. Renault's secret is an interesting little film. It's essentially humanist at heart. The villain is not science itself. It's not progress, as it is in so many of these horror films where science is the villain. You know, exploring the links between human and ape is not the crime and Dr. Reynolds secret, it's the inhumane methodologies of the scientist. And the same is true, of course, in Shelley's Frankenstein, the original novel, as opposed to the James Whale film, which of course, the theme is quite different in the James Whale film. But anyway, I explore all these different films, going all the way into the 40s, into the 50s, and then at a certain point in 1960 when Stanley Kramer directs Inherit the Wind, which stars Spencer Tracy and Frederick March, both of whom played Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the Reuben Mamoulian 1932 film. Dr. Jekyll reverts to this ape like hairy creature when he becomes Mr. Hyde. And of course, that's not the case with the original Stevenson novella. In the original novella, it's implied that it's more of a psychological transformation. But because film is visual, Mamoulian chooses to interpret the transformation as the doctor transforming into this half man, half ape kind of creature. And the same is true to a lesser extent with the Spencer Tracy version directed by Victor Fleming in 1941. So I think Kramer on purpose casts Frederic March and Tracy in the role of the two opposing lawyers in the Scopes Monkey trial, which is the subject of Inherent the Wind. And so the pattern that I explore in many different chapters in the book is how you have this process of. First, the taboo topic is dealt with in disguised metaphorical terms, usually in genre films. And that can last. That trend can last maybe decades. And then eventually there's a film that comes out that will deal with the topic just nakedly, no metaphor, almost docudrama style. And at that point it's not taboo anymore because it's being discussed openly. That's why they can discuss it openly, because the barriers have cracked, have shattered a bit. And so now it's being discussed nakedly. And the previous trend of Darwinian horror films just kind of disappears at that point, or certainly recedes into the background. Occasionally you get certain throwbacks, like the Plan of the Apes series and films like that. However, those. Those films really more reflect their times, you know, of being metaphors, extended metaphors for the civil rights movement and all this other stuff. Baked into that series. But so it's. So I explore that pattern of the taboo being dealt with metaphorically and then eventually being dealt with in a kind of just open way. And I discussed that in the context of other taboos as well. Like there's a whole. There's two chapters about UFOs which some people might not conceive of as a taboo. But you know, if you went to like an academic cocktail party and just said, oh yeah, I was abducted by aliens, they look at you a little funny even in 2026. So just, just the fact that there's a bunch of late night documentaries about something on the History Channel doesn't mean it's not a taboo topic. So there's a whole nother chapter about the JFK assassination and it's called the Brains that Killed Kennedy, which is probably the longest a chapter in the book. It's almost the size of a book itself, that one chapter. And in that book I. In that chapter I talk about how the whole notion of there being a conspiracy and the death of JFK was obviously something that you were not going to get greenlit at a major studio in 1964. And so I cover all these various films before the assassination and after, ones that prefigure the assassination and ones that follow. And I talk about how. I talk about a book called Were We Controlled by Lincoln Lawrence? Which was one of the first books to connect one of the first alternative conspiracy theory books about the JFK assassination and supposedly written by. Well, no one knows who actually wrote it. Lincoln Lawrence was the author, Were We Controlled? But no one knows exactly who Lincoln Lawrence was. And even though the book is written in this a rather naive style, nonetheless, the book contains a lot of information about what we would later know is the MKUltra program, the CIA program on mind control experiments on children, mental patients, prisoners. And those facts were not publicly known until in the mid-70s, until 1975. And Richard Helms, who was the head of the CA at the time, ordered most of the documents to be burned. But well before that, in the early 60s, this book comes out, Were We Controlled by Lincoln Lawrence? Which contains a lot of accurate information about the MK Ultra program. Though the words MK Ultra do not appear in the book. But there are a lot of references to Dr. Jose Delgado, who was an MK Ultra scientist, wrote a book called Physical Control the Mind in the late 60s. And he was very prideful of the experiments he had done cracking the skulls of monkeys and putting implants in them and being able to make one pupil larger than the other, and then another pupil, smaller. Simultaneously, he would brag about being able to induce orgasms in female mental patients from afar. He was doing experiments on patients in psych wards. And, and he just sort of openly discusses this in his book Physical Control of the Mind. And a lot of the experiments were even more horrific in the classified MK ULTRA files. But I have a feeling that this book, Where We Controlled, was read by people in Hollywood. So even though I think there's a lot of misinformation, disinformation woven into this book, there's also a lot of accurate information that would later be revealed in these MK ULTRA files. And I suspect that there's several films that were inspired by Were We Controlled and television shows like Patrick McGoohan's the Prisoner from 67 to 68, which also contains a lot of accurate information about the MK Ultra style mind control experiments. And so the, the thesis of Lincoln Lawrence's book was that Lee Harvey Oswald was a, a mind control victim in, In Russia. And so this whole idea of linking mind control experiments with political assassinations, you see this played out in various films in the 50s, creature with the Atom Brain, written by Kurt Siodmak, who, Kurt Scottmack, who wrote the Wolfman in 1941 and Earth versus the flying saucers and most famously wrote Donovan's Brain, which is all about controlling people from afar in order to turn them into sort of remote control assassins. Kurtzyodmak claimed that he had been approached by the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, in the 1940s to come work for them. And he said that somebody at the OSS had read Donovan's Brain and they thought that it was a satire about William H. Donovan, the head of the oss. So they invited Kurt Saradimak to come work for them. Now, he never says in the memoir what he did for them, but I can only assume that the only reason you'd hire a science fiction writer is if you wanted him to write science fiction for you or propaganda in some way. And so it's interesting that if you see the films that he wrote in the 50s, like creature with the Atom Brain, that movie is all about mind control. And the method of mind control parallels exactly the methods that Jose Delgado was using at the same time. And there's even covert, not so subtle references to Delgado. I mean, they, they just stop short of saying him by name, but they, there are references in the film to a scientist in Madrid doing experiments on animals, and that's obviously a reference to Delgado, who was a scientist in Madrid before he came to work at Yale University under the auspices of the CIA. And so Creature with Adam Brain is about a Nazi scientist who has worked with, hooked up with a mafia gangster guy who wants to get back at all the judges and cops who threw him in prison. So they team up to use this sort of mind control technology on dead humans. And really, in terms of the technology that's discussed in the film, the only unrealistic aspect is the zombie part. If you just take the zombies out, it actually parallels pretty closely what Delgado was actually doing under the auspices of the CIA at the time. And Delgado's experiments when the film came out in 55 would have been very obscure. I mean, you had to have been reading very obscure medical journals to be aware of what Delgado was doing at that time. So it's interesting that Sri Adama clearly knew about it, was aware of it, and decided to build an entire B film at Columbia around this idea. And so I then traced that through other films like the Gamma People. And that's another aspect of these, of these films is that I would be watching them. And it's not like I went and looked up the writer first and said, oh, I wonder, let's find writers who were somehow connected to the intelligence community and see what they wrote. I didn't do it that way. I just watched the films. And then it'd be like signal to noise. Something would leap out at me at the film and I'd think, well, that's very prescient. That really links up with things that we knew was in fact true decades later. And so for this film, the Gamma People, which is extremely obscure science fiction films from the late 50s produced by Albert Broccoli, who later produced the James Bond movies, and my friend Gary Rhodes, who supplied the forward to Hollywood Haunts the World, who's a cinema scholar, he's friends with Tom Weaver. Tom Weaver is one of the foremost experts on the horror films that Universal made in the golden age of Hollywood. And Tom Weaver said that when he tried to interview Albert Broccoli, the one film Broccoli did not want to discuss was the Gamma People. For some reason you mentioned the Gamma People, he just get extremely pissed off and not want to talk to you anymore. So it's interesting that the Gamma People is all about these illicit mind control experiments on children. And it's all about using radiation and mind control techniques on children to create these savants who will later grow up and be the technocrats who will rule the world. Which sounds weirdly familiar in 2026. And if you read the testimony that was delivered to the Commission on Radiation Experiments on Children that occurred during the Bill Clinton administration, you'll find that the Gamma People, it's not too far off from reality. And there were these scientists who were doing experiments with radiation on children. And a lot of those same scientists were the MK Ultra scientists who were also doing mind control experiments. So it's interesting, when I started looking into the film, I discovered, and his name isn't on the screen. You have to actually look into the archives to discover this, that the initial writer of the Gamma People was Robert Aldrich, who later directed Kiss Me Deadly and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. And Aldrich was Nelson Rockefeller's first cousin. And in the 1950s, at the same time that Aldrich was working on the Gamma People, Nelson Rockefeller held the post of special assistant to the President for psychological warfare. So I thought, well, okay, that's interesting. Robert Aldrich is not an OSS agent like Kurt C. Adamach. However, he had this very definite familial tie to someone who was the special assistant of the President for psychological warfare. And here is this odd little obscure horror film dealing with those exact techniques that would later be discussed or revealed in the Congressional hearings on mkultra in the 1970s. So again, you see this example of something that's taboo. Certainly you couldn't do a film accusing the United States government of performing illicit mind control experiments on children, you know, in 1958 or whatever. And so instead, it's encoded. It's encoded in this cheap Jack science fiction film. And it almost reminds me of Hakeem Bay wrote a book called Temporary Autonomous Zone T A Z, where he claimed that basically you have to. If you're an artist and you're interested in doing iconoclastic work, you kind of have to find your temporary autonomous zone. And the autonomous zone, it's never permanent. It never lasts. So that's why you have people like Val Lewton doing films like the Cat People or I Walked With a zombie and RKO or the BPhil A B film Horror Unit. And the studio heads at RKO didn't care what Val Lewton was making as long as it made money. But Val Lewton pretty much had total creative control over those films. And so, as a result, as Martin Scorsese said, the Cat People changed the language of cinema. But he was only able to do that because nobody was paying attention, because it was a horror film and they didn't care. And it was not an A film. And in fact, Val Lewton when he left RKO, because he had been so successful with those films, he went to produce a films at other studios and found himself in a very unhappy situation where now he was constantly being monitored and unable to do anything particularly interesting at all. So sometimes you can succeed beyond Europe your expectations. And it would have been better. Valud had just stayed, you know, under the radar at rko. But I mean, you see that with, you know, a science fiction in the 1950s where you have people like Phil Dick doing very transgressive work. But these books were cheap Jack paperbacks that you'd find at the drugstore Spinnerac. And Phil Dick felt very overlooked, which of course he was. But in a way it was an enviable position because he could get away with writing books like Eye in the sky or Time out of Joint, which you probably could not have gotten away with if it was from a major publisher at the time. Or if you look at the comic books that Marvel Comics was doing in their early 60s when Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were doing their earliest work there, comic books was completely, it was like a step above pornography. If you told somebody you were a comic book artist, now it's a completely different situation. But at the time nobody was looking at comic books. So somebody like Jack Kirby could get away with doing these insane metaphysical storylines that kind of combined William Blake with the pulp fiction tradition and lobbying these weird metaphysical mind bombs into the, the, the bedrooms of 13 year olds all over the country. And the parents aren't paying attention because it's just a comic book. And so that's how you're able to get away with doing these sort of transgressive stories is by disguising it or finding some sort of venue where you're not going to be looked at too closely. And yet somehow your audience finds you. You know, like, I mean, think about like the people that William Burroughs was reaching when he wrote Junkie. And it was originally published as a cheap Jack paperback twinned with an anti drug book written by a narcotics officer in the same book. That's the only way they were able to publish Junkie was by publishing in the same volume this anti drug book by a narcotics officer. So they could get away with it. But meanwhile the people who really tuned in like actually found this book. I thought, this is amazing. This is a guy who's actually writing a realistic story about drug addiction, you know, from a realistic street level perspective. Something that you could not have gotten away with in a hardcover book, you know, published by Scribners in 1953. So these films, and I go on after the JFK assassination films like the Parallax View starring Warren Beatty, one of my favorite films in the 1970s, which includes this incredible montage sequence in the middle of the film. That's another pattern I noticed in these JFK and the assassination parable films. Every, almost every one of them has a scene in the middle of the film where the film suddenly stops and the character will start a film within the film and then the film within the film. Almost always at the exact halfway point of the film, a character says, let's watch this little movie. And they'll put a movie on and the plot stops. And then the little movie will give you actual, like, facts about the reality that the film is based on. That happens in Creature with the Atom Brain. That's where they show you actual footage of the Delgado experiments in the middle of the film. And then it happens in they Live. There's a parallel scene, it happens in a recent film which I wish I had included in this chapter, but I was already done with the book by the time I saw it, which is Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor, and it came out in 2020. And it also deals with mind control. And there's a scene right in the middle of the film where you actually see actual footage of Delgado's experiments on monkeys that they plant right into the middle of the film. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to fit it into this chapter, but I do mention Possessor at the end of the book where I have a whole list of what I consider to be films that deal with the cult of taboos. But in the Parallax View, there's a scene right in the middle of the film where Warren Beatty, who's a journalist, who has realized that this politician who was assassinated at the top of the space needle on July 4, this progressive politician gets popped. You know, during the. During the election, Warren Beatty realizes that it wasn't a lone nut, that there was this conspiracy behind it. And he discovers that there's this corporation called Parallax that is essentially hiring sociopaths and then training them to be these remote control push button assassins. And so Warren Beatty figures out that the corporation is doing this and infiltrates the corporation by pretending to be one of these sociopaths. He has to figure out how to. How to answer the questionnaire correctly so that they will identify him as a sociopath and hire him. And in the middle of film, they sit him down this chair and they show him a training film. And it's wonderfully done because it really puts you in the perspective of somebody who is undergoing some sort of psychic transformation. And when I saw the film I thought, okay, who wrote this? So I look and it's based on a book, the Parallax View by Lawrence Singer, who's written a number of novels. So you look who's Lauren Singer. Lauren Singer was a member of the OSS like Kurt Siodmak. You know, here he is writing this book in the, in the late 60s about churning out mind controlled assassins who are taking out progressive politicians. And you think, okay, well that's interesting. Is that based on some sort of insider knowledge? Is this all coincidence? Who knows? So then I go on to discuss a wonderfully obscure film called Winter Kills, which stars a young Jeff Bridges and John Huston plays his father. And it's based on a Richard Condon novel, just like the Manchurian Candidate. And Han had been a press agent when before he wrote the Manchurian Candidate, he had been a Hollywood press agent. And he in that context had met a lot of significant figures, in fact dealt with the Kennedys. And he met people like Cecil B. DeMille and Howard Hughes, who he called classical monsters. He said, he said they were men who combined vast minds and dubious morals. And he also met Joseph Kennedy. And these experiences turned him in what he said turned him into an anti authoritarian. And he thought he was satirizing men like this in the Manchurian Candidate and Winner Kills. But it turns out his satire hit a little too close to home because the FBI actually launched an investigation into him based on Manchurian Candidate. And the Manchurian Candidate was actively kept off the market for a long time after the JFK assassination. And according to Condon, there was an actual attempt to suppress the film adaptation of Winter Kills. Because essentially the plot of Winter Kills is that John Huston is the father of, of a character who is supposed to parallel jfk. Jfk, the son, the son of John Houston, had been assassinated in the recent past. And now the other son, Jeff Bridges, is going to run for president as well. But this other son, Jeff Bridges, who's clearly supposed to be like Ted Kennedy, begins to suspect that his brother was not assassinated by a lone nut by some sort of conspiracy. And so he starts to investigate this and eventually discovers that his own father was somehow mixed up in, in the assassination attempt. And what's interesting is that Condon said that the producer of this film, Leonard Goldberg, he was handcuffed to his bed in his Murray Hill district Manhattan apartment and shot through The Head, while the other producer, Robert Sterling, was sentenced to 40 years on a marijuana conviction. And according to William Rickard, who was the director, Sterling believes to this day that one of the reasons for his imprisonment was his role in making Winter Kills. And he told Rickard that his ambition was to follow Winter Kills with other conspiracy themed films. But none of those pictures were ever made, obviously. But Winter Kills the. Would make a wonderful film in an. Almost like Tim Burton's Ed Wood, where you see the making of Winter Kills. Even though hardly anyone knows what the hell Winter Kills is, it would make an amazing film because the, the background story of how they made the film is, is almost more interesting than the, than the, than the completed film. But again, there you have the jfk, JFK assassination being discussed on wholly in metaphorical terms in this case, not science fiction, but more, as you know, 1970s political thriller Intermixed with a heavy dose of dark satire. And so I go on from there. I talk about JFK and then eventually I end with Oliver Stone's JFK, where like with Inherit the Wind in 1960, you finally have the topic just being discussed in an open, naked way, docudrama style. And again, again we have a film where in the middle of it, the main character, Kevin Costner, Jim Garrison, stops the film and says, let's watch a little film. And then you get the Zapruder film. And then you, you get the actual Zubruder film right in the middle of the film. It almost reminds me of, you know, it's like Hamlet, the Murder of Gonzago, where, you know, Hamlet, you know, let's stop the film and watch this little play. And then you watch the play. And what does the play do? The play is telling you what happened, that there was an assassination and the uncle has to sit there in the audience and grit his teeth while watching his own crimes played back in, echoed back at him, you know, in a, in a public forum. And so Hamlet is using fiction because you couldn't. Hamlet can't openly come out and say what he's thinking, so he disguises it as fiction in the form of this little play in the middle of Hamlet. It's like Russian nesting dolls of conspiracy narratives. And so that's essentially what happens. Just like when Inherit the Wind JFK comes out and that kind of the need to disguise the JFK assassination in the form of science fiction or horror kind of dies out. You don't need to do that anymore because it's not really a taboo anymore. I mean, if you interviewed the man on the street and asked them, do you think Lee Harry Oswald worked alone? They'd probably say no. But that wasn't the case in 1964 or in the 70s when the parallax View was made. So instead you had to disguise it.
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C
Yeah. As you're talking. Right. And talking about these, you've answered a number of questions. I have. But one thing too, I was wondering is when you're thinking about these. These taboos, and a lot of this is in the cinema, but, like, I think part of what you're getting at too, is that it also impacts and influences real life. Right. So can you talk about, like, how do you think that. Like, how do you think some of this genre work, some of the work that you did or looked at, and some of the films that you looked at are also impacting how. What happens after that in our daily life, you know, in our everyday kind of lives?
- [41:12]
B
Oh, well, I mean, JFK is actually a pretty good example of that because of the JFK film. A lot of the JFK files were essentially released as a direct result of the film having been released and the impact that it had. So there you have an example of an almost immediate impact of an art object, a work of art, having an immediate. A change, you know, social change, actually resulting in the release of documents that had formerly been unreleased. And so. But however, very off that. That's very rare when you have something that has an immediate impact, a work of art, usually it's slow change. And that's what you see in this. These processes that I'm discussing now, like with the Darwinian horror films were go back to the early 20s and all the way. And it's not until 1960 that inherent. The wind is made. So people. Paradigm shifts, you know, a paradigm shift. The implication is it's. It's something that happens suddenly. But. But most of the time these kinds of changes in thinking are very slow. And so that is one of the functions that art has. I think. I think it was Ezra Pound who said, the poet is the antennae of the race. In other words, the poet understands the change that's coming before everybody else does and then reflects it in the work. And I think with. I mentioned earlier how I read as a teenager, Stephen Bessett's horror anthology is Taboo. And that led me to write this. But this book came out in 2025. I read those Taboo books in the late 80s. That's a very slow, slow burn there. And sometimes artists don't know the effects of the seeds they're planting. Until decades later, or maybe even after the artist has died, you know, and therefore is, I suppose, not aware of it, but those. In fact, I start the book with an epigraph. There's three epigraphs, in fact, and one of them is John Dewey, the Public and Its Problems, 1927. Artists have always been the real purveyor of news. And then William Burroughs. Artists, to my mind, are the real architects of change and not the political legislature, legislators who implement change after the fact. And so the JFK film, that's an example, a rare example of sudden change. But I would say that the function of these films is they're slowly changing perception over time. And as with the Darwinian evolution films, it took many years and all the way until the late 60s for some states to say, oh, yes, you can teach Darwinian evolution. I don't think that would have. It would have been an even longer stretch of times if you didn't have these films being these kind of little covert mind bombs slipping into people's subconscious and changing the way they're thinking and their attitudes toward this subject slowly and over a long period of time.
- [44:46]
C
Yeah, you know, you talked about one that you didn't talk about that I thought was really interesting is like, when we think about these sort of taboo subjects or we think about some of the conspiracy theory discussions you're talking about, it is some of these genre films, but you also talk about the Western and the Western and Breaking Bad. So can you talk a little bit about that chapter and what you were doing there, too? Cause I thought that was a really interesting sort of way to. Because it's one of your earlier chapters. Enter into this conversation and talk about this.
- [45:17]
B
Yeah, that's fascinating because often we think of the western, perhaps more. Even more debased genre than. Than horror and science fiction in a way, because horror and science fiction has become elevated to the point where science fiction is really more of the mainstream in terms of the. The amount of science fiction films that are produced in a year. Whereas, you know, when the man from Planet X came out in 1953, you can find articles. Man from Plan X came out, the Thing, the Day There Is the Still. You can find articles in Life magazine and magazines like that saying, when will this trend end? And it's almost parallels the articles that came out right after, you know, the Dark Knight or Iron Man. You know, when will these superhero films end? And then eventually you. You realize, oh, they're not going to end. They just. They're just going to keep going. You know, and so there was a time when there was almost nothing but Westerns. You would, you know, you'd go turn on the TV or go to a theater and, you know, like 80% of the films that you could see would be. Would have been Westerns. And we don't think of Westerns as being particularly transgressive. Most of them are not, of course. Most of them are the exact opposite. Right. And yet you will find these interesting little oases amidst these genre Western films. And even though the genre itself is debased, there are examples of Westerns. One of my favorite novels of the past 50 years, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, is a Western. And yet it's also an extremely complex book that in fact combines a lot of the gnostic themes that I explore. In the first chapter of the book, I talk about gnostic theme cinema. But in. In the chapter about Westerns, which is called the Box in the Desert, Bud, Medicare, Breaking bad. In the 21st century Western, I'm talking about basically the theme of. Of indeterminacy, of uncertainty, which. Which is certainly not a. An emotion that filmmakers wanted to instill in audiences in the 1950s and early 60s. You know, particularly in Westerns. And at Westerns, things were literally black and white. He had a black hat. He had a white hat. But Bud Boetticher comes along in the late 50s and does a series of very strange transgressive films starring Randolph Scott, who had already made a billion Westerns up to that point. And I think it's one of the rare cases where the end of an actor's career, he does his best films at the very end. He does these series of films with Bud Boetticher, and then he also does Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High country, which is. Which is also an excellent film as well. But in these bud better films, films like Comanche Station and Decision at Sundown, which I focus on particularly, Buchanan Rides Alone, Seven Men from now, the Tall Table Ride, Lonesome Westbound. In all these films, when the film starts, you might think, oh, this is the good guy. This is the bad guy. Particularly in Decision at Sundown, as the film progresses, you're not quite sure if the main character is actually the person who's in the right or is he crazy? And then the film ends with the. With the villain, with the. The film ends with the. The main character, the Randolph Scott character, basically just throwing his hands up in the air and allowing the antagonist to just stride away into the. Into the sunset, which is not the way that most Westerns end it. And so the film, as it progresses, it keeps you, as you get more and more information about the scenario, you begin to question whose view of reality is actually correct here. So it's almost like kind of a Rashomon kind of effect in the context of the western film. And Baedeker did this time and time again with these films. And so as I was watching Breaking Bad as it was originally airing, at a certain point I realized it was originally supposed to be shot in Riverside, California, but it was too expensive to shoot Riverside, so they moved it to Arizona. Which makes total sense because I used to have a girlfriend in Riverside. And I was amazed at just. Everybody's a meth addict. So it doesn't surprise me that Vince Gilligan was going to set Breaking Bad in Riverside. It makes total sense if you've ever been to Riverside. And so then, so because it's so expensive, he, he moves it to, to Arizona, or is it New Mexico?
- [50:34]
C
New Mexico, I think it's New Mexico.
- [50:36]
B
You're right, it's New Mexico. And when he did that, he realized that the change of venue, he, he realized, wait a minute, this could be a 21st century Western. Because the landscape itself evokes those images from, from those Baedeker Western films. And I began to wonder because of course the theme of Breaking Bad also has that sense of indeterminacy. At the beginning, you think you're on Walter White's side. And then as it progresses, you begin to realize, wait a minute, is there are things that he's saying that don't seem to be true. But the filmmakers, they don't give you every piece of information. You kind of have to figure it out on your own. It. Which, when is he lying? When he's, when is he not lying? And the. By, the, by the. And Vince Gilligan said that one of his imperatives was to see how many audience members he could shake off as Walter becomes less and less sympathetic, which is not the strategy of most filmmakers. They're not sitting there thinking, how can we lose the audience? And normally they're desperately doing anything they can. Sacrificing small animals to baphomet to try to desperately figure out how they can grow the audience. They're not sitting there thinking, let's see if we can shake these motherfuckers off, you know, and so. And of course, at the time when he did Breaking Bad, now we have a plethora of anti heroes and unsympathetic characters, but at the time it was not the Norm. And I think it's interesting that I saw an interview with Vince Gilligan when he said that AMC up to that point had been known for just showing old movies. And so they decided we want to create original content. So they do Mad Men and they do Breaking Bad. And Vince Gilligan had only directed one episode of the X Files. And when they proposed Breaking Bad, they greenlit it. And then he said, I want to direct the first episode. He said there was no other studio network on the planet that would have said, oh yeah, let's let the guy who directed one episode of the X Files direct this first episode, this major series. But he said they were so inexperienced with producing original content that they didn't know that that was something you didn't do. So again, that's another, like, temporary autonomous zone there. You know, you either have to find people who either they don't care what you're doing or they don't know enough. The money people just, they don't know enough that you're not supposed to do that. So with Breaking Bad, you have that sense of indeterminacy throughout. And I thought, I wonder if he's actually inspired by the Bud Boetticher films. And it was just something that I was thinking about. I thought it was probably like a low probability that there was any direct connection. Then you get to season three, and suddenly they introduce a character whose name is Gale Boetticher, spelt the same way, and Boetticher becomes an important character in the storyline. And I suddenly realized, oh, no, I'm not imagining this. There's actually. He's planting, by naming the character Boetticher, he's telling you, yes, this was directly inspired by Boetticher's Westerns. And so there's another example of, you know, Boetticher did these Westerns, which were released amidst the flood of many other Westerns. And if you see them all side by side, they all look the same. But then when you look deeply into Baedeker's films, you realize, no, they're not the same as these other kind of factory made Westerns. And so that's, you know, 19, late 50s, 1960, all the way to Breaking Bad, which I think started in 2008. Maybe that's a very long time for, for the seed to be planted in the late 50s and then to result in this, in this series in 2008. But both of them deal with that theme of indeterminacy, uncertainty. And also kind of the rot at the heart of the American landscape is also a very definite theme in Baedeker's films and in Breaking Bad. And so I would say that that's essentially the taboo topic I'm addressing. There is, particularly in the 1950s, the taboo of that theme of uncertainty, of the audience being placed into a position where they're not quite sure who to believe. And that was something that was rare, particularly among genre films and particularly among Westerns in the 50s and 60s.
- [55:21]
C
So, you know, you have a number of different kind of themes going through here, and you cover many films. But were there. Was there anything that you. When you're thinking about it, you're like, I wish I could have gotten to this genre or this film that you just didn't have time to get to. I mean, you mentioned, you know, some that you watched afterwards. But were there any, like, sort of larger themes that you wanted to also give some space to that you didn't have the chance to?
- [55:50]
B
Yes, in fact, there's one chapter that I didn't finish until after I was pretty much. There's a certain point, particularly you've been working on something since 2009, where you just have to say, okay, it's done right, otherwise it would just keep going on. That's kind of why I placed the 100 year cap. It's 1921 to 2021, because there's all these films that have come out since 2021 that I would have loved to have included. So there's a chapter that. It's not in here, but it will be appearing in an anthology that's coming out on July 4th of this year. The anthology is called Horror and Indigenity.
- [56:26]
C
And.
- [56:27]
B
And my chapter is all about the view of the image of Native Americans in American horror films in the 1970s. So I'm paralleling the rise of AIM, the American Indian Movement, particularly in the early 70s, with how Native Americans are depicted in certain horror films, like John Frankenheimer's Prophecy. There's a peculiar little film that I love that Universal produced called the Car, which begins with an Anton lavey quote. And then you go into this whole storyline about this supernatural car that's wandering around the desert landscape killing people. And there's other films and TV shows. Kolchak, the Night Stalker. I talk about Native American themed episodes of that TV show. And that was a really fascinating. It was really fun going back, looking at those films, particularly Frankenheimer's Prophecy, because, you see, Frankenheimer did two of the best films of the 60s, been training candidate and Seconds with Rock Hudson, with the wonderful cinematography of James Wong. How, and both of those films are incredible. And so when you see a film like Prophecy, which is somewhat less than incredible, it's. I, I tried when analyzing these films to remove any sort of judgment about that this film is somehow more important than the other film because of the budget or the style or, you know. However, when I was analyzing prophecy, sort of had to address that because on one hand the film seems to be trying to say something profound about the plight of Native Americans while while also reinforcing a lot of negative stereotypes. So, so you kind of had to address that either conscious or unconscious hypocrisy that's baked into the film itself. And that was a fascinating, it was fascinating looking at that deeply. And so it's interesting looking at a film that's flawed like prophecy. Sometimes it's more interesting looking at flawed films than in looking at the films that are, that are perfect or near perfect. You know, the film that has something going for it and yet it has this some sort of crippled broken back quality to it. It's just sort of dragging itself along to the finish line and yet there are these kind of flashes of brilliance throughout, you know, is somehow more interesting than a film that is just served you on a platter. And you're like, that's amazing. So that, that's one of the taboo topics that I address. And I go into like Leonard Peltier, what was happening with that at the same time that these films were being made. And of course Peltier was recently pardoned by Joe Biden right after, by right before Biden left office. So it was interesting that happened. Right, right after I finished writing that article where I, I address Lender Peltier in great depth. So it was a strange coincidence having finished it. And then it was like the next day they announced that Biden was, was pardoning Peltier. So yeah, so that was one topic that didn't get into the book but will be in this anthology that's coming out July 4th.
- [60:18]
C
So I mean that sort of breaches into like, like heads us right into like we've been talking for a while. So like my final question is always like kind of promotion or what you're working on now or anything with the book you want to talk about. So you mentioned you have an article coming out in July. Is there anything else like with this book or, or that you're working on that you want people to know about?
- [60:41]
B
Oh, sure. I, I was very happy that my book, a book that came out back in 2015 called Camellio was just released in a Spanish translation. So it's the first time that I've had a book translated into a foreign language. So that was exciting. And also I have my first. I mentioned comic books earlier with Jack Kirby and all that. I have my first comic book coming out soon. It's called the Upside Down Magician. And I collaborated with a supernaturally talented artist named Nade, who lives in Canada. And it's a comic book about paintings, sentient houses, Horamones, Bosch, government agents, secret societies, and things we can't yet understand.
- [61:28]
C
Oh, that's awesome.
- [61:30]
B
Yeah. Yeah, I'm very excited about it. My first comic book.
- [61:33]
C
Fabulous. Well, Robert, thank you so much for talking with me on New Books Network again. Robert Guffey, who is the author of Hollywood Haunts the An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos.
- [61:46]
B
Thank you.
- [61:59]
D
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- [62:27]
B
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