LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor, When I was a kid, oh, way back in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, I found myself entranced by a magazine called “Famous Monsters of Filmland.” That’s where I learned about the classic Universal horror movies of the early 1930s. “Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” “The Wolf Man,” “The Mummy,” “King Kong” (and their brides, and sons, and daughters, and curses, and mad scientists, and creepy laboratories, and frightened, enraged villagers).
Those articles were accompanied by black and white still photos from the films themselves. But it was rare when we got to watch the actual movies. In those days, there were no revival houses. There were no film festivals. It was before Blockbuster Home Video. Before Beta and VHS. Before DVDs and before streaming. You either saw the movie in a theater, or you waited for it to show up on a local TV station. Or, like me, you only read about it in some pulp movie magazine.
At my age at the time, the 30 years that had elapsed between when those movies were made and when I first heard about them, I considered them relics from Thomas Edison’s “Black Maria” studio not far from my New Jersey hometown, long before film production moved to sunny Hollywood. And when you’re only 10 years old, 30 years represents three lifetimes – more years than I could actually imagine. (And so many years ago that I can scarcely recall.)
On the movie front, some weeks I lucked out, and something I had missed or only read about, but lamented being born too late to catch when it was new, showed up on “Million Dollar Movie” or “The Late Show.” This was long before there was a guy named Stephen Colbert hosting a late-night show of the same name and devoting his monologue to latter-day monsters with different names and different – but no less destructive – powers, still making us scream and terrifying us, but for completely different reasons.
Of course, back then, we stared at our TVs, rapt, hoping to be scared out of our wits by those grainy, black and white features, with the flat, tinny, slightly-out-ofpitch background music, and the echoey British accents. We’d scrub through “TV Guide” every week, putting a check mark next to every movie described as a “melodrama.” We thought that word was synonymous with Monsters! Destruction! The undead! The incantations, tools, and, as Poe wrote, the “quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,” associated with these creatures of the darkness mesmerized us.
I think of Bela Lugosi, the title character in 1931’s “Dracula,” offering a glass of “very old” wine to his guest, Jonathan Harker, after staring, fascinated, by the blood running from a small cut in Harker’s finger. Harker asks him, “Aren’t you drinking?” Dracula answers, in his thick Transylvanian accent, “I never drink – wine.”
Even if we weren’t exactly afraid, there was still something indescribably haunting and off putting about Dracula’s world. It made me uneasy. The story was, after all, based on myths and folk tales that originated in a shadowy, almost forgotten past. Who could say with any conviction what was real and what was not?
And then there was “Frankenstein.” Or, more correctly, the character called only “The Monster,” and played by Boris Karloff in Universal’s “Frankenstein,” also from 1931. The irony is that the real monster in the movie was its creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein. The creature was a victim of circumstances – shaped by the pride, ambition, and hubris of the man of “rationality” and “science.” But its creator, “divinely proud,” as he has been described, took no responsibility for the actions of his creation and, in fact, turned on it.
Dr. Frankenstein purloined the power of creation, imagining himself a god, by fashioning a creature from scavenged parts of the buried dead, and imbuing them with something resembling life only by lashing them together and raising them on a platform to the heavens where the power of nature, in the form of a violent electrical storm, passed along the spark that animated the creature.
So why all the monsters?
I was talking to my sister last week about the first movie my parents let me go see on my own. It was a 1958 creature feature called “The Thing That Couldn’t Die.” The advertising tag line was, “The grave can’t hold it! Nothing human can stop it!”
That got me thinking about the recent Data Center fight. We villagers, armed with pitchforks and torches, ran them out of town as the bright moon was eclipsed by the dark clouds of night, and celebrated our victory. We stopped them cold. Or so we liked to believe.
But, like the thing that couldn’t die, it seems that the Data Centers can overcome what would vanquish a mere mortal. Inhabiting, as they do, a vast reinforced stone necropolis, as Karloff ’s mummy Kharis did in ancient Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, there is little that can stop them.
While the city put up a barrier, halting their advance, this simply gives the Data Center sponsors six months to regroup to plan and implement a more effective assault. And while the County has attempted to erect its own defenses, Texas law makes it difficult for counties to effectively do so in a situation like this.
We all know the problems. Like Dracula’s constant need for fresh blood, the Data Centers cannot live without a seemingly endless supply of water. The vampire must have its blood, even at the cost of the life of its donor. And the Data Centers must have water – to the tune of an estimated 70,000 gallons a day, at a time of intense drought and in an area dependent on fragile aquifers.
Just as Dr. Frankenstein’s need to have the heavens produce the huge energy jolt necessary for the heart of his creature to begin beating, the Data Centers have an insatiable taste for electricity, becoming power-hungry monsters, consuming what some calculate as two and a half times the City of San Marcos’s peak energy usage.
John Maberry, a landowner seeking to change San Marcos’ land use policy to open the door to Data Centers, says “This is the best path forward for the city of San Marcos and its residents.” It may be the best path forward for John Maberry, but not for the city of San Marcos.
Jonathan Harker does not need a glass of John Maberry’s wine.
Sincerely, Jon Leonard San Marcos
