Sardonic Tales: “When a Beast Looks Up at the Stars”

A few years ago, I did a thing where I picked a movie that would make a good double-feature with one of the stories in my then-newest collection, Painted Monsters. This year, for the Countdown to Halloween, I thought it might be fun to do the same thing, but with my now-newest collection, Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales.

The final story in Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales acts as a bookend with the first story. Here, another narrator who is a thinly fictionalized version of me goes on a trip that has to do with film. In this case, it’s a trip back to his home town, which is, of course, a thinly fictionalized version of my own home town. The Gorka Theatre was really called the Gregg Theater, and as far as I know it’s still there, though it’s probably less accursed than the one in this story.

Because the narrator of “When a Beast Looks Up at the Stars” is a film writer, he talks a lot about film in the course of the story, and even the title is lifted from a really good 2014 flick called Black Mountain Side, which I highly recommend, even if you don’t pair it with this story.

For all that there are several cinematic references in “When a Beast,” there is one that seems more obvious to pair with it than the others. I make a very specific reference to one particular scene in Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out, which is one of my favorite Hammer flicks.

But even that’s not the film I’m actually going to suggest for tonight, Halloween night, to go along with the last story in Guignol. Instead, I’m going to suggest a movie that I hadn’t even seen when I wrote this story. Norman J. Warren’s 1976 film Satan’s Slave not only involves the kind of low-rent goat-headed black mass that these kinds of stories demand, but it has the added family Satanism angle to make it all the more apt a companion piece.

If you haven’t seen it or The Devil Rides Out, watch both and make it a double-feature!