Horror Author/Filmmaker's Perspective: COVID-19 Pandemic

Skip this if this kind of thing freaks you out. It freaks me out. IF ya don't wanna know, don't read it! But for the curious, scientific or medical interested among us...What Does the Coronavirus Do to the Body? That's kind of the focus of the topic here, but...not really. By the way, I've been updating the best info I can find, debunking stuff as I come across it, on my Facebook page.

UPDATE 3/20/20: Smashwords just started a sale between 3/20-4/20. So I have made all my writings on there free because of the pandemic, as I know many are now stuck at home climbing the walls. Enjoy! Also, you can listen to the Kelly Hughes podcast I'm on about my new film, "Gumdrop", a short horror (trailer). It's still going around film festivals until late 2020, so it is not yet available to view.

And please, everyone have at least 2 weeks of backstock of food at home through this. It may seem crazy to some, normally. But you may have noticed...this ain't normal. Don't go nuts. But go...

As the title of this blog indicates, it's really about how as a horror writer and filmmaker of the macabre would personally handle this kind of a dire life situation. How does someone with an overactive imagination, who exercises it professionally, deal with being in the midst of a global pandemic? Especially in getting older and being in an older, more susceptible cohort.

Meaning, it could be even more fear evoking. Though I've never been much of one for being frightened at much of anything. That, however, is something that took me a great deal of effort and work when I was younger. More on that, later.

For now, something you should be aware of, soap. A comment from The Guardian about this pandemic and protecting oneself.

They also said this:

America faces an epic choice...
... in the coming year, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times. Over the last three years, much of what the Guardian holds dear has been threatened – democracy, civility, truth. This US administration is establishing new norms of behaviour. Anger and cruelty disfigure public discourse and lying is commonplace. Truth is being chased away. But with your help we can continue to put it center stage.

Rampant disinformation, partisan news sources and social media's tsunami of fake news is no basis on which to inform the American public in 2020. The need for a robust, independent press has never been greater...

And so, this is about how I think, how I got here, and how I handle things. I'm lucky. I put in a lot of effort when I was a kid and as a young adult, to learn discipline, to face my fears (and I had plenty to contend with) and, how to remain functional while experiencing sheer terror. Or worse, how to be a first responder and tuck away my fears to act to help others.

I actually found that easier. To ignore fear. Because when you dedicate your situation to helping others, to protecting others, you are using a kind of mask. You are hiding yourself from yourself behind a mask of action, need and necessity. Your fears don't matter, don't exist, because you are doing a job saving others' lives.

So, yours don't matter. Other than to stay functional long enough to complete your mission. Whatever it is. I realized decades ago that I could be functional in dire situations, and then only afterward, I'd feel the response, physically, mentally, emotionally.

On the market now with Producer Robert Mitas attached

This is the same for acting as a bodyguard. Whenever I performed that function, it was like looking through a lens. "You"... don't exist. Only your mission. Your purpose. Your person to protect. That's your universe. It's why war zone video journalists get killed so easily as they are focused through their lens in order to get their shot. They forget they are a person and need to protect themselves.

It's about their mission, the photo, the video and that's about informing others, elsewhere. Yeah, it's a paycheck to be sure. But that's not the motivation in the moment. It's doing the job and "you" don't exist and therefore, neither do your fears. It's freeing in a way. It's also what's so addictive about it and why some are compelled to go back time and time again. Sometimes, until it's too late.

Like being a soldier in a warzone. It's not so much courage as it is, at least in my mind, from my experiences, about your team, so that you are hiding your fears from yourself and remaining functional and active... because of others.

Courage to me is acting in the face of nothing being in it for me and still risking my life. Which is kind of what heroes get medals for, where normally courage doesn't really come into it. Not in the moment, only in hindsight. I guess courage or those medals, involve far exceeding that kind of "normal", in that situation.

Which is already far above the norm for most people. It's hard to explain in a short amount of space and time, like here and now. I think that is all in part why so many "Heroes" who get medals downplay their actions and involvement, as it's confusing to them. "The other guy is a hero", they'll say. Or, "The dead guy I couldn't save is...not me." Of course, that can also have to do with survivor's guilt. Something I'm glad I've never had to deal with myself.

Moving on...

As I said, I've always had an overactive imagination. As a kid, it drove my mom (and my family, to be sure...and my teachers) a bit nuts. Dreams and nightmares were either awesome or terrifying but I loved them both. I've been a writer, and now filmmaker of the macabre, since the early 1980s.

I read sci-fi as a young kid and then horror. I read Edgar Allen Poe back in the 1960s and watched all those genre movies. I've been a fan of horror all my life (as well as A/A films and sci-fi...big time, etc.). My mother loved vampire films long before I was born. We'd watch old late night horror flicks together on TV. So I learned it young and from a parent. 

Until 1969, when the family saw "Night of the Living Dead" at the drive-in, in our station wagon. After that night mom would not allow that title to be spoken in her house. Not even ten years later.

During this pandemic, I think about Poe's, "The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy". The story, the movie. It's about a pandemic through a romantic or fantastical notion of it and in a rather poetic and obviously, "Poe-like" fashion.

Robert John Burke in "Thinner" (1996)

I think about "Thinner" by Stephen King. And other such tales. I found "Thinner" to be very disturbing as a film when it came out. I was as a kid, a bit short, chunky, not really overweight. Until I hit high school in tenth grade. I had a night job working nights at that drive-in theater. I was going all the time, I had trouble sleeping all through high school, I shot up a few inches and dropped a few pounds in tenth grade. So as a kid, being thinner was a thing for me. It was on my mind.

In eighth grade, I once tried my mother's "diet pills" from the kitchen cabinet where she kept them. I didn't like them very much but they did curb my appetite. Being a kid of ADHD, speed tended to not speed me up but slow me down. I had a strong desire to drop pounds or look thin for a long time. But I only tried one of those pills. They weren't pleasant. 

Decades after that was a concern anymore, I saw that film, "Thinner". The idea that you find you are losing weight, and it's exhilarating, but then you keep losing weight, until , you begin to get concerned. Then worried, Then outright frightened...it really hit home. 

What IF you lose weight, but it never stops? It's like that short story about a piece of skin or a hangnail that is bugging someone. And so they pull on it. It rips on up along their arm. Of course, you're sitting there wondering, why don't they just stop pulling at it? That idea of picking at something, anything, but it goes wrong. Horribly wrong. And you can't stop.

Echoes of parents warning you about things: "Don't cross your eyes, or they will stick that way. You'd need surgery. You know, that happened to Jerry Lewis once! And he needed surgery. He was lucky. They fixed him. They might not be able to fix you!" My mother actually told me that as a kid. I'm sure everyone has one of those things their parents told them as kids. It's basically lazy parenting. Or simply ignorant parenting. Or parents merely passing on ridiculous things they were told and perhaps, still believed. 

I'll give you a really nasty one. As kids, we were watching TV with the family. I got up, stepped over my younger brother, both of us having been stretched out on our deep blue long shag carpet, chins propped up on hands watching TV and too closely (that issue being yet another).

Mom exclaimed to me, "Don't step over your brother like that, or he could die!" I was annoyed. And perplexed. Did she really believe that? No one else said a word.

It was ridiculous. But, I stepped back over him to neutralize it and said, "OK?"

She said, "Well, I don't know if that fixes it or makes it worse."

I just shook my head and went on to the kitchen. Sadly, some years later he did die in 1975. Of liver cancer, weeks before he turned fifteen. And sadly, five years to the week of the first successful liver transplant.

Years after that I happened to bring up my mom's superstitions. I mentioned to her she had said that about stepping over my brother and she outright denied it. I told her she had been superstitious about other things, but again she denied it, too.

Fears. Where do they come from? Ridiculous fears. Especially fear of oneself.

But that's part of the trope. It's like being near a cliff or edge of a tall building and being innately frightened that you might decide to leap off it. The pulling at skin thing, has been done a few times in films. But the concept is usually, something small and innocuous begin to bug you and it ends up morphing into something massive and horrific. Who's responsible? You. 

That concept has been explored in horror and sci-fi for many years.

What if you wish to be younger, so you try something to make it happen. Then... success! But, it doesn't stop! Maybe you are young, wishing to be an adult. But then you don't stop aging?

The basis of horror, really. Getting what you want but it goes seriously awry, horribly wrong. That's also the concept behind the Genie, or Jinn, where you get three wishes. But be careful what you wish for. Genies, after all, are very literal, and like Leprechauns, mischievous, if not outright evil. The innocent as evil being another fun trope. Or terrifying one. 

Years ago, I got into studying the Spanish Flu pandemic and that led me to other pandemics. I then dove into the Middle Ages, the so called, "Dark Ages", and all the horrors therein. That eventually led to the Renaissance, the "Enlightenment".

Which eventually led me at university to write a short story about a Judge and Witch Hunter in, "The Mea Culpa Document of London", contained in my collection of my older short stories, "Anthology of Evil". That led to another and longer story as an extension of it in, "Vaughan's Theorem", contained in another book, "Death of heaven". A massively epic horror sci fi book.

It's interesting to note that about twenty (thirty?) years ago in my researching pandemics (this included surveying Scientific American type journals and some even more scientific journals of immunology).

I should mention that I've been reading Scientific American since the 1970s and it used to be much more than it is today. Bigger and in my mind, better. I loved its style of presenting material and research. It opens in a form anyone can understand, then goes deeper until finally it gets deep into the fine detail and even scientific data.

By the way, not sure who wrote this up, but ... my disclaimer

During that research on pandemics, I kept coming across comments in journals and books and interviews, that the world was overdue for a pandemic. At first, they were just comments that we were overdue. But over the years it was stated in ever more intense comments of futility, that we were "long overdue". Some seemed rather concerned in their interviews. The concern was palpable.

So, for it finally now to be hitting, in this year,  as I've been waiting for it for so long, for me at very least, it's a very curious feeling. As with things like climate change, where you start to think maybe it will never happen, until it does...in this case, it has. It is in fact, surreal. 

I've always had a penchant for those wonderful jags of diving into research. When I went to university, I learned how to do it professionally and knowledgeably. Researching. I had really discovered something. I would delve deeply into it for a while until I satiated my interests and then, move on. That goes back with me to I think the fifth grade. And our local public library. 

My family had moved into a new house, a new location, and new schools. I was a mischievous kid myself so mom wouldn't let me go anywhere at first. For a while. But finally I got her to agree to let me go to the local library. It was about a mile away. So when I wasn't grounded, I'd talk my mom into letting me to go the library.

I rode there on my bicycle. It didn't take long to get there and the road there was pretty safe. And it was the 60s. So I started hanging out at the library, once I realized it was about the only place she'd let me go on my own. Just to get away from the house. For some peace and quiet and control over my own devices, away from the parents. Especially, my step-father. We never really got along. 

I discovered at the library how you could look things up. It was...amazing. I didn't know it was research, it was just...cool. My mind sucked up knowledge like a sponge. The librarians were very nice to me and answered any questions. I think they were a little surprised that a kid in fifth grade was showing so much interest in a library.

On his own. Without being forced to be there by his parents. Or, just being brought in by parents, getting books and then...out of there. I would hang out there for hours. I was typically the only kid there most of the time, without a parent along with them. 

Then the greatest thing ever happened. I discovered the adult section! Wow!

I don't know what section it was really, probably just not the kid's section. But to me,it was... The Adult Section. With adult things. Adult concepts. 

Adult stuff. They talked about things in books I never heard about. Sex. Violence. Complex things way over my head. My grandmother, my intellectual mentor, had told me I should do as she did. Read a book for fun. Then for your next book, read a book you know is over your head.

You don't have to understand it, she said. You just have to get through it. And always finish a book you start. One of the best pieces of advice I've even been given. Because it moved into other areas of my life. Always finish what you start.

IF you keep doing that, reading over your level of understanding, always finishing the book...over time you will begin to understand what you are reading. I read a lot of books where I had little idea what I was reading. But she was right.

Eventually, I got it. I got it all. While others, friends and even older family members, and parents, didn't even know what I was talking about half of the time. So people started to think I was weird. Just because I said things that to them were, gibberish. Knowing it was knowledgeable stuff, it was confusing. Alternately, embolding and disappointing, or depressing. 

Understand, this was in the 1960s. My family was a blue-collar family. My stepfather had a high school education. Had been in the Coast Guard in WWII. As a musician and a typist/clerk. My birth father had been in the Navy in WWII. I'm not sure what his job was, but he was later a construction electrician most of his life.

My mother had a 9th-grade education. But she was pretty sharp, just generally unfocused and a bit flighty. I was the first in my nuclear family to get a university, or for that matter a college degree. Though my cousin, my mom's sister's daughter, got her university educated some years before me. She went from high school to college. I went from high school, kicked about a few years, then the USAF, then a year off, and only then I got around to college. 

Back to the library. When I walked into the library as a kid, if I went straight ahead, past the librarian check out area on the right by the front door, walking straight forward, I'd hit that area I called...the Adult Section. 

I'd sit there and go through all the books one after another and was AMAZED, in what I was reading. I'd sneak a glance to the Librarian behind the counter and the one wandering about doing things or helping people, but they never once said, "HEY kid, what are YOU doing in the adult section?!" Never nary a word. So I just kept reading, surveying all those books. 

Eventually, I discovered some guy named Aristotle. Who I gathered, lived a very long time ago. I read his writings and they affected me in both good and bad ways. It might have gone better had someone explained what he was saying, just to put it all into perspective. And how it should relate to me as a kid and a kid in the 20th century. My ethics got a bit rigid and became a high bar for many years for me. For both myself, my friends and my family. 

It didn't help that my grandmother once told me, in trying to help me understand life, that a true friend would give their life for you. As you would, for them. That's a pretty damn high bar for friendship. Especially for a kid. And being ADD (I was more ADHD as a young and probably rather annoying kid, and high energy to say the least, just as my own son eventually was)...and therefore I was also a bit OCD, Nothing extreme, just enough that it was useful. I'd latched onto good ideas and take them to their natural and not always reasonable conclusions. 

Yeah, I could be a bit annoying. But eventually, I mellowed out. With the help of friends. It got to where I didn't have a lot of friends for a while and I was kind of bummed about it. Until a friend explained that my standards of ethics for myself and certainly my friends, was simply too high. Unmanageable. He convinced me to relax a bit.

It took a while but I took in what he was saying and did my best. After a while, things did get better. But it wasn't an easy thing to do. Breaking a habit. Breaking with a long established belief in how the world should work. 

This was in my early 20s. Later in life, I learned some ways to view life that made things event better. To trust, but verify. Some people trust no one. Those poor people. It can so easily lead to paranoia. That was part of my problem.

IF the bar was so high, you'd find people generally untrustworthy. They'd always let you down. But if you simply give people the benefit of the doubt, keep a wary eye on them, just being aware of things, then you can relax and you'll find you have more friends.

Just now I'm getting over a nasty flu experience that has lasted over a month. Today as I write this it is Thursday, March 15, 2020. This flu began on February 9th. My lungs are still a bit sketchy, they've been somewhat inflamed, making them feel somewhat raw, or "weak". But they're now on the mend.  I got an inhaler from the doctor, which has helped a lot.

I'm feeling better each day. But then, the pandemic hits. Great. Just, great. I cannot even fathom going through this all again and in my cohort, having a potential for death. One report from China said that some survivors are seeing permanent diminished lung capacity. Again. Just...great. 

I'm also going to be 65 in August. So again, I'm in that cohort of greater concern (good times, right?). They say this coronavirus, COVID-19 is of concern for the elderly in general, especially people with compromised immune systems. I don't feel elderly yet, but anyone over 60 they say, should be concerned. In getting over one kind of flu, I really don't want another. Not one that could kill me. Not that any flu can't kill you anyway. 

The doctor told me I probably just had one of the three usual types of flu, A, B (the two worse versions) or C. Because I had a flu shot end of last November, he said I probably just had A or B and the flu shot decreased its severity.

I have to say, I'd hate to have had it at full strength. As it was, it was just nasty and very uncomfortable. But I had little fever and not much body ache. Just an overall nasty feeling and those miserable breathing difficulties. Going to sleep was lying awake for hours in several cases in trying to breathe without evoking coughing fits or just great discomfort.

Luckily I've always been pretty healthy, though allergies have always been a problem. Apparently, according to my mother, the day I was born I had some initial respiratory issues. Then as a kid I had annual bronchitis. I hated that. But it got me out of school each year for a week at a time.

So breathing issues have been at the forefront for me since birth. 

Still, I started martial arts in grade school and was always a physically active person. Researchers have said that lots of exercise in your youth and 20s really pays off in leaving you healthier in old age.

I spent the first half of my twenties in the USAF in a very labor-intensive position. where i was essentially doing the same as being in the gum and working out from two to four hours every morning. On some bad days, all day long. And when the hard part ended, I'd just go pack parachutes which also a bit of a physical job. All of which I eventually realized, would one day pay off when I got older. And here we are.

So now we have an actual pandemic. Yes, it could be massively worse. And it may become so. Here's hoping not.

My point in ALL this? I have a background that is perfect  for fantastic thinking. It could be even worse as I've not lived through Ebola or anything like that. It is good for imagining far worse than anything we will probably experience. For causing myself more problems than I need in imagining worse than we'll see. I could write something, or make a film about it. Flu and pandemic movies have certainly already been made, that topic explored.

Not to mention, the zombie apocalypse films. My own new film I'm just now sending out to film festival, "Gumdrop", a short horror...is about a serial killer. I wondered though if it would have been better as a pandemic horror film. Or, if perhaps instead, I ducked a bad idea at this time, in not having made that kind of film. 

Some of the pandemic film titles? There are multiples of these titles and some are remakes.

Contagion, for instance IMDB lists three). Outbreak, obviously. The Crazies. The Stand, by Stephen King. I Am Legend (or The Omega Man, or the original, The Last Man on Earth, originally by Richard Matheson). One even named, Flu from South Korea. The brilliant and classic, The Andromeda Strain (by ), Cabin Fever. about a government weaponized virus gone rogue. The fun, 10 Cloverfield Lane. Resident Evil. Quarantine, of course. Carriers. Pandorum. The Happening. Bird Flu. 

And so many more, some listed in: Vulture's, "The 58 Best Pandemic Movies to Binge in Quarantine." Ranker also has: "The Best Movies About Disease Outbreaks."

So, in having such a great background for creativity and imagination and dreaming up the worst possible things in life, how am I now handling all this. What is now for us, officially a pandemic? 

Doing fine really.

How is that possible? I donno. Maybe having visited all the very worst life can offer when it really comes to be? Reading all those stories, seeing all those movies? Maybe people like that are simply prepared for it?

Or maybe I have such a relaxed attitude since there is not much I can do about it. I'm pretty logical about things. I've been trained to be. I categorize things. Take things one step at a time, especially when they become overwhelming. Maybe also, martial arts discipline has something to do with it. I learned Asian philosophies at a young age and martial arts philosophies. Samurai accepted they were dead before going into battle or to fight a duel. That freed them from fear and they could then fight logically, clearly aware, functionally...bravely.

I've also had a lot of emergency services training beginning in junior high in search and rescue in the Civil Air Patrol. Even before I was in emergency services and flying planes as a twelve year old, I was in martial arts in Isshinryu Karate where we were taught how to kill instantly. But also how to respect life and never use what we knew, unless absolutely necessary. When there was no other option.

Our Sensei once told us he'd rather he found out we ran from a fight than to kill someone. "That is," he said, "if you have to fight, go all in. But if you could avoid killing someone I'd rather be called a coward myself, for saving another's life, than kill them and be seen as some kind of hero, or a killer." That shocked us as kids. We'd grown up watching a lot of war movies and that was our goal, to be a hero, to see battle. Our Sensei was an ex Marine Drill Instructor who learned Karate in Okinawa from the Founder. It was a lesson that stuck with us. 

Life is horrific enough as it is. Yes, I do write horror. I do make horror movies. But oddly enough, that as they say, for fun and profit. It's a fun scare, a roller coaster ride, experienced safely before a screen or from a book. It's not reality. But it's also a way to experience things before hand. A good pandemic or apocalypse film should not only scare for furn, or simply entertain, but also educate. 

What if a killer enters your home at night? Think about the solution before hand. Be prepared. Not just a Boy Scout motto. Here's some suggestions. Entertainment forms like books and films can show us what is wrong to do. A normal trope in horror films to let you yell at the screen, "What are you doing?!!" 

Who do I feel for? Those people who have avoided the horrors of reality. Or in entertainment media in books, films or games. Who are only now facing the considerations of a pandemic. Those who are stunned and unaware of what to do, what can happen, what this all means. That has GOT to be truly horrific for them. And to them? I offer my condolences. But in surviving this current mess, let that be your being made aware. Go forward and learn, get prepared for whatever is next. Because in this new world, there will be more coming. Rising seas, fires, and so on. 

After all this is over, maybe take another, more informed look a the horror genre.

It's not all just what many think it is. It does have a useful benefit in preparing one for possibilities we'd prefer to ignore. I really hope we never have to experience some of those things but we are right now, after all. At least you would be better prepared now. If not simply emotionally prepared, actually prepared in having some sense of how to protect yourself and in consideration of the reactions others can have toward or against you, in situations such as these.

"The Walking Dead" series on AMC network, was massively beneficial in that respect. You'd think up until the point of these horror films over the decades that people in an apocalypse would be helpful, supportive, compassionate. But what we've seen in these things are that people can be fearful, greedy, vengeful against you for no apparent reason. Bullies come out of the woodworks as this si their environment and some have been waiting all their lives for it. The Road Warrior films exemplified this going back into the 1980s. 

I do hope people will be more humane and caring toward one another though, during an apocalyptic event. But let's enter it with eyes wide open.

Trust, but verify. Appreciate your friends and loved ones. Or those who could and might be your friend in a serious if not dire situation. Just always, always... be aware of human nature and how things can change, with some people, with some personalities, on the drop of a dime.

Be safe out there. Ever more Interesting times are coming...