The Naked Witch

I’ve seen some excellent horror movies as part of my 2009 Halloween prep. However, The Naked Witch (1961), the movie I watched a few hours ago, is not one I’d call excellent.

Up with insomnia but too tired to continue reading, I made the decision to watch a short movie, thinking that might numb my brain enough to let sleep finally come. So I popped The Naked Witch into the DVD player. This is a recent acquisition I’d not yet seen. But it was short, only 59 minutes long, and according to its description appeared to be bland enough to do the job.

On the back of its DVD case we find the following description:

Ding, dong, the witch ain’t dead! After a college student digs up the mummified remains of “The Luchenbach Witch” and removes the stake from her ribs – shazam! – via some godawful special effects, THE NAKED WITCH is alive and well and strolling through the Texas countryside in her birthday suit! Killing off the descendants of those who condemned her to death, she also seduces the student who eventually realizes he must send his sexy new girlfriend back to the grave… A charmingly goofy, naughty-for-its-time regional rarity, THE NAKED WITCH is also the first horror film directed by cult fave Larry Buchanan, the man who gave the world Zontar: The Thing From Venus!

Actually, The Naked Witch isn’t nearly as exciting as the above paragraph suggests. It truly does contain some “godawful special effects,” I’ll vouch for that. And the phrase “charmingly goofy” is pretty apt, too.

The first few minutes seemed much more like a documentary than any kind of movie, and I checked the disc menu to verify that the right track was playing. Sure enough, it was. So I restarted it and let it run. Surprisingly, I found myself enjoying the show, and I’ll probably watch it again (though not very soon). But as a cure for insomnia it didn’t work. Darn it.

Fighting a Witch

It’s not very often that I have nightmares anymore, but I had one that woke me a couple nights ago. And it was so disquieting that I wasn’t in any hurry to get back to sleep. It seemed a better idea to busy myself with something, anything that would clear my mind and fill it with other thoughts before crawling back between the sheets.

In my dream…

…I was driving a car, transporting a witch back to her family home. This wasn’t a pointed hat wearing, broom riding witch, but she was a wicked woman who used powerful magic to control those around her.

There were three people with me in the car: one adult sitting next to me, and two children sitting in the small car’s back seat. No, I’ve no idea who any of them were. But I had the sense that they were all very scared and were depending on me to protect them. The witch was bound to a heavy wooden pole that was strapped securely to the car’s roof.

We were driving at night, in the rain, out in the country. The witch’s family home was an old farm house located by the side of a narrow, gravel road miles from any neighbors.

I pulled the small car into a sriveway next to the house and got out to release the witch. When I cut her loose from pole she cursed and ran toward the house. Next I pulled the pole off the car and threw it down into a water-filled ditch between the house and the car.

“Don’t you leave that damned thing here!” the witch screamed at me from the porch. “My brother’s going to be so pissed at you…”

“Yeah?” I shouted back at her through the rain. “He’s going to be a lot madder to see that your sorry ass is back!” And with that she shreaked, her eyes started glowing red, the rain suddenly increased in intensity, the wind picked up something feirce, lightning flashed, thunder began crashing, and she charged straight at me, her fingers outstreched like the claws of a wild beast.

As fast as I could, I climbed back into the car, but before I could shut the door she was on us. She reached an arm into the car and smeared it across the inside of the windshield and across the window of my door before I could force it closed. I backed the out of the driveway as fast as I could and when I shifted gears to drive away she yanked open the car’s hatchback and grabbed for the two kids in the back seat. They’d been sitting still, frozen in terror, but at this they started screaming and fighting back at her frantically.

The storm was absolutely violent when I drove away and I had no visibility through the windshield whatsoever. But I could feel the car dip as it slid off the road and I could hear the witch still screaming as the car crashed, and…

…that’s when I woke up.

I was an “Occult Investigator”?

Yep, that’s what I was in last night’s dream(s).

My sleeps last night were segmented, and so might have been my dreams. I slept a dream-filled four hours from 04:00 to 08:00, then was awake for two hours, then slept for another three, from 10:00 to 13:00 hours. All my dreaming was done in the first sleep segment. When I woke from that I couldn’t tell if I’d had three dreams with common elements or one dream that was divided into three distinct parts.

In this dreaming I was an independent investigator of occult events. And so was Mr. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. He and I weren’t partners, but we weren’t adverseries either. And we were both working the same bizarre case. We were investigating a strange cult in Bloomington, IN, that centered around a naked witch who lived in a small cave directly beneath a huge tree that was growing in Dunn Meadow on the IU Campus.

The three parts of the cave involved 1.) my investigation, 2.) Bill’s investigation, and 3.) our interviews. It wasn’t clear in the third part whether I was interviewing him, or he was interviewing me, or if we were both being interviewed by a third party. But the first two parts were vividly clear, and involved visual, auditory, and tactile senses.

No, I wouldn’t call this a nightmare: at no time did I consider myself in danger. But it was one of the strangest dream experiences I’ve had recently.