Skepticblog

Roman Polanski as "Alfred" About to Drive Home His Point in "Fearless Vampire Killers"

Yes, we have Hollywood’s penchant for the absurd to thank for the concept of a portable kit that stands ready to stake the nearest vampire. In Roman Polanski’s delightful horror/comedy send-up of vampire hunting: “The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me But My Teeth are in Your Neck” (1967) one can see one of the first cinematic appearances of such a silly kit handled admirably by the Van Helsing character: Professor Ambrosius (played to perfection by Jack MacGowran). In this instance, the Professor’s kit is a doctor bag filled with garlic, a rosary or two and a crude stake. As if vampire hunters might be as common as a plumber or electrician, Polanski and MacGowran traipse across snowy castle rooftops and foil the best efforts of several vampires, all the while mixing a tongue-in-cheek black humor into the whole affair. Unfortunately, the people selling these modern day fairground Fiji mermaids aren’t showing their tongues or their cheeks.  

Fake Dagger

As in Asimov”s “Unicorn Wings” theory, (see my post from May 23, 2009 for definition ) one would think that the reality of vampires would need to be first firmly established before the selling of a vampire killing kit would seem plausible. Nonetheless, Sotheby’s and Ebay don’t seem to mind and as far as I can tell aren’t offering any verifiable certification of authenticity. This sort of supply and demand must be largely the private domain of  Goths, jaded rock stars with too much disposable income or extremely eccentric collectors who don’t care about science and just want to impress their friends with a box full of strangeness.

I can’t say I blame them. When you do seances or perform bizarre magick for a living, if constructed in historically correct ways with an eye for realism, such accouterments can be somewhat educational and make the difference between a believable discourse on supernaturalism and being laughed at as a trickster. Small details like screw-top caps on your garlic container or using a Ginsu-Knife from K-Mart won’t add to the antiquity required to suspend belief in today’s special effects wary culture. The props that I use in my seances have to look like the real thing and I spend considerable time searching out antique malls and aging everything to create the right antiquarian effect. My magician friends and fellow bizarre entertainers work very hard to present “genuine artifacts” or whatever they can cobble together that has the look, feel and even smell of the real thing to help sell their show. My friend in bizarreness Christian Chelman is a master of such handiwork. Check out his site at www.surnatuem.org or his latest book “Hanutiques” and you will see how far a consumate performer will go to entice his audience into a world of magick and the occult.

 To the left is Christian Cheleman’s Vampire Killing Kit, described at his splendid site as:

“Vampire Killing Kit, second half of the 19th century
The pistol dates from the 18th century and was brought back from an expedition to Russia and Mongolia in September 2001.”

In Christian’s case, this exquisite collection of props is an important adjunct to his performance technique and as in a Hollywood production, absolutely essential to drawing in the attention of the crowd. No doubt if you saw him do whatever routine or storytelling magick he does using this set-up, you would probably totally fall into the spell of his spiel. You can’t buy stuff like this at the corner magic shop. It takes time and dedication to execute a convincing undertaking of this sort – and don’t excuse the puns.

In an effective demostration only a die-hard skeptic or historian could tell the difference between a real antique or a fake. Sorry, but no disclaimers are given by most of us who have spent so much time “dressing the set.”  To do any kind of disclaimer in this type of performance situation would be like going into a fancy French restaurant and after putting in your order, having the chef come out of the kitchen and tell you it came out of a can. No way. I’m there to sell you the real thing – or as close as I can for your time and money. Most lay people never give such an artifact a second thought. I know because I’ve used the same strategies in my seances for years. At one point after a suggestion from one of my bizarrist co-horts, I had an antique funeral home chest fitted out with an interior that included a special inside coating of Hollywood’s finest fake cobwebs, a scent of antiquity specially blended to create the perfect musty odor, and at one point even a small live spider that was dropped into the box before the show and which scuttled out of the box after I had opened it. Of course the lid of this box was chosen out of many others for the incredible squeak it made when it was slowly opened. These kinds of details are what showmanship is all about in my book (books plural actually:  “Restless Plots”, “Sense and Seance” and “Loose Ends” in particular*) and in a close-up magic situation are strong sensory cues that are rarely if ever forgotten by my sitters. A tarantula jumping out would be a little too over the top. Taste must dictate where one must draw the line.

Does this make me a charlatan or a spook crook? No, I don’t think so. There’s a fine line between what is considered an entertainment and what is sold as real. Forgive me if I sound disrespectful, but I usually assume that when I’m in a theatrical environment or acting as a paid performer, my job is to entertain and not to educate. I also assume (possibly wrongly in some caese) that my audience is fairly well- educated and not likely to really believe I’m going to create a ghost in front of them. This may be a big mistake on my part in the minds of skeptics, but that’s show biz.

So like the schism that often exists between mentalists and so-called professional psychics and mediums, the intention is what is important. I fully intend to entertain you.

I’m sure that any intention to defraud isn’t even an issue at Ebay or Sotheby’s. For them selling Vampire Killing Kits is the same as selling any other curiosity like a stuffed albatross or a alligator wallet. You get what you pay for.

Chritian Chelman's Ghost Hunting kit

Chris Lee as Drac: Now That's More Like It!

 AND THIS JUST IN:

FVZA Kit