Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Strange Aeons: Celtic Magic and Rational Response

(For the first part of this feature, click here).

It was not just during Samhain that the Celts believed they could communicate with the forces which lay beyond the fringes of the real. Druidic belief asserted that man could commune with the gods; the underworld itself was frequently believed as being physically accessible through pools, caves or hills, and its supernatural denizens often journeyed between the two places. The idea that these parallel domains are still there, sometimes literally below or around our rational, urbane towns and cities, and sometimes within the grasp of individuals properly-versed in the appropriate rituals – or even sometimes accidentally encountered – has long been used in horror, both in literature, from novellas such as Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890), and in cinema.

A lesser-known modern film which references a number of Celtic beliefs and derives its horror directly from the proximity of old religious sites and beliefs to modernity is Broceliande (2002). The film is set in Rennes, capital of Brittany, where a young university student named Chloe is about to join an archaeological dig in the Broceliande forest, legendary location of Merlin’s tomb. The scholarly soon meets the magical here: as Chloe’s seminars cover lessons in Samhain traditions and ritual magic, the student becomes prey to mysterious phenomena, especially after she discovers a druidic tomb during the dig. In order to suppress the age-old forces which are threatening to envelop her, Chloe has to become well-versed in druidic practice or secure the assistance of those academics who possess the right knowledge, in order to prevent the resurgence of druidic magic which will otherwise rather forcefully close the gap between old world and new.

In many ways, this is a flawed piece of cinema – it squanders its initial promise by launching into action sequences, some of which are reminiscent of Tomb Raider – but it is still an interesting film which makes abundant use of Celtic lore. Firstly, it self-consciously forges a link between Brittany and other Celtic nations: one of the professors at Rennes studied history in Dublin, as did one of the students; the druid stone which figures in the film’s plot (here a small magical artefact, rather than the more usual standing stone) has been brought to Brittany from Ireland; during lectures, ancient events in Wales are also mentioned (including the Roman campaigns against the druids, as mentioned by Tacitus in the first part of this feature). This suggests an idea of shared practices and thus heritage: Celtic magic here derives from a broad-based ‘Other’, a history which had a widespread influence in Northern Europe and therefore could mean there is more at stake should there be a resurgence of these old shared beliefs. There is a fear here of the repercussions of any new wave of hitherto lost, arcane or restricted information: through students gaining access to an understanding of druidic practice which they are able to enact, they are able to cause great upheaval to order.

The fear is, then, that there could be a long and widespread legacy of efficacious, arcane knowledge just waiting to rise again: tellingly, the film is set on the eve of Halloween – or of course, Samhain – where, as we have seen, the idea that ritual and magic could influence supernatural forces is ripe to be used as a basis for horror. The fact that the film takes place in Brittany in itself points to the powerful nature of heritage, where these modern students in the region feel such a vested and personal interest in recreating a shared past. This determination to bring back such a pagan past in itself can be a source of anxiety, regardless of how successfully this is done. It so happens that the most macabre elements of ancient Celtic practise are resurrected at the hands of the students in Broceliande: human sacrifice, ritual and spellcraft literally transforms one of the students into a monstrous being; although, even if the magic had not generated a literal monster, the treachery at the heart of the plot and a rejection of modern beliefs by a strident group would have been enough. The consequences of resurrecting the old gods and myths are manifold, but ultimately, those who do so are creating a rift in modern society and rejecting its values, and this can be monstrous indeed.

Wilfully participating in a Celtic otherworld is one thing, but worse still could be to stumble upon this proximal terrain accidentally, and to have no easy means of equipping oneself with the knowledge you need to escape. Another film which takes place in the forests of Arthurian legend – albeit taking a completely different approach stylistically – is Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (Morgane et ses Nymphes) (1971). In this film, two young women names Anna and Françoise are travelling through an isolated region in France when they are forced to stop. They have to spend the night in a disused barn after getting (tellingly) lost in the forest, but when Françoise awakes, Anna is gone. Her friend looks for her in a nearby chateau, where she encounters the Morgane (Morgana Le Fay) of legend: Morgane is surrounded by beautiful women and she offers the bewildered Françoise a choice. Either she undergoes a ritual which will attach her to the chateau forever as one of her slaves, granting her eternal youth like them, or – she will rot into old age in the chateau’s dungeons.

Like Broceliande, The Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay uses the idea of Arthurian legend and the repercussions of magic ritual, but plays out much more after the fashion of Arthurian romance. Here, rather than a world of magic erupting into the real, Morgane’s realm is co-existent and seeks to remain at a remove from the real world entirely: Françoise wants to escape, but at first she’s not privy to the ritual knowledge which will permit her to leave this strange place. In this, the film does a pleasing job of developing a heady, fantastical atmosphere. Françoise frequently describes herself as feeling as though she is in a dream or a “fourth dimension”; this is not real-time with real characters, and our heroine rebels against that, desperately trying to leave the chateau. “I follow logic,” she protests to her glamorous captor. “That is the worst sickness,” she responds. “Here you can be cured of it. You’re already on the road to recovery.”
Eventually, Françoise cribs enough information from the other women to understand that she must seize some ritual artefacts if she is to escape. This is all complicated by her real-world concerns; not only does she baulk at the irrational prospect of magic, but she has discovered her friend is also an inmate at the chateau, and has rather more happily accepted her new lot. Anna encourages her friend to remain: “We are in the kingdom of the fairies…a place only children can find.” Françoise persists in trying to leave and escapes, but the first thing she sees – an elderly woman following a coffin – causes her to repent her decision. This horror now overshadows the horror of being a slave in Morgane’s castle: Françoise finally rejects the “cold light of reality” and willingly retreats from it back into the fantasy. Here, magic with all of its ambiguities has dominated the ordered – but ultimately finite – world without.

Fairy Folk and Wicked Tales

In both of the examples of cinema mentioned above, the consequences of revitalising – wittingly or otherwise – Celtic folklore are explored: both films play on the fear that a supernaturally-charged history is adjacent, contiguous and dangerous, whether you wish to re-energise its domains or not. Celtic lore also told that certain entities could move between the two states without the concern for protocols which are experienced by humans. The belief in faerie folk, a “multiplicity of beings” with a liminal existence, inhabiting regions of spiritual significance or moving between these and human domains, is one of the most persistent areas of Celtic folklore: “Fairies in the hills and pixies from subterranean haunts were creatures that had to be taken into account” (8). Every area of the ancient Celtic world seemed to be populated by a robust band of mischievous – sometimes murderous – sprites, beings that persisted and were adopted by later cultures. Cornwall had its piskies and its buccas – malevolent sea-dwellers who could be placated with offerings of fish; the Cornish bucca is echoed, etymologically and otherwise in the Welsh pwca and the Irish púca, and also in shape-shifters and pranksters like brownies, bogles, leprechauns and hobs, though these creatures are not as reputedly wicked as the murderous kelpies or the fearsome bugganes. These beings seem to urge a respect for nature and for important locations, meting out punishments for offenders – or sometimes simply enjoying themselves at human expense. Little wonder that the Celts and their successors were deferential to them, and the reputation of these wee folk as being “at best capricious, and at worst downright malevolent” (9) has survived modern romanticisation and entered them into the fringes of the horror lexicon. Their traits – and ambivalent attitudes to ignorant humans – lends themselves well to cautionary tale-telling, or on occasion, just lend themselves well to the sort of gleefully unpleasant treatment you might expect from beings “more likely to harm than help” (10).

In Cry of the Banshee (1970), an Elizabethan family pays the price for disbelieving in the power of the ‘old religion’ when it is visited by a vengeful sidhe, a supernatural faerie entity of Celtic descent believed to inhabit the otherworld. When magistrate Whitman (Vincent Price) imposes his conventional and rational – though bloody – judgement upon a coven of witches, he makes the mistake of sparing their leader, Oona. Oona swears revenge, conjuring the shape-shifting sidhe to dispatch the Whitman family one by one. Whitman scoffs at the superstitious villagers who recoil from the howls of what they insist is a ‘banshee’, but as his relatives begin to die in mysterious circumstances, he too becomes infected by their terror. Although the title is misleading – the banshee (or bean sidhe) was typically believed to be a female entity – the film demonstrates some pertinent fears; here is an example of effective witchcraft, and order, however brutally it is imposed, cannot repress either the power of the witch or the knowing fear of the villagers. As his world view is demolished, Whitman becomes more and more afraid, and the sidhe here manifests itself as a powerful agent of revenge.

In a neat short film, The Faeries of Blackheath Woods (2006), a child who makes the mistake of perceiving faerie-folk as being akin to their cutesy modern incarnation is punished for her transgressions in a decidedly nasty way. Little Melissa – out on a picnic with her parents – starts to chase after some ephemeral winged creatures she recognises as fairies, killing one when she puts it into a jar. Undeterred, she gives chase to others, but she’s then lured into a remote corner of the woods and reminded that these flimsy beings can defend themselves in a bloody fashion. These fairies are traditionalists, and there are certain codes of conduct to be observed. Similarly in another short film, Pwca (2009), a young girl undertaking community service in rural Wales is incredulous at her elderly employer’s descriptions of the resident ‘pwca’, who demands a meal a day – not to mention people’s respect. A lack of these gets them both into trouble, and it falls to young Hafwen to take over the burden of care when the pwca shows his nasty side. When handling these entities, it pays to be cautious…

As so many amongst these bands of faerie-folk garnered a reputation for mischief-making, it’s no surprise that there are a number of movies which treat the folklore with a sense of fun – or not, depending on your viewpoint! Out of the eighties came a horde of mystical little people in films, at least some of which delved into the idea of a fairy kingdom, and following on from Troll, the non-sequel Troll 2 (first titled Goblins) gave another mention to Stonehenge as the source of these ugly little beings’ power. The Leprechaun franchise – which starts with a demonic leprechaun who kills and maims in the pursuit of his bag of gold – has spawned five sequels, but order is usually restored when the leprechaun has his own magic turned against him. When these wicked tricksters turn up in films, there are usually magical means of banishing their influence; as with escaping from Celtic-styled otherworlds, the source of the horror lies in not knowing how, and in being terrorised by creatures that delight in this human folly. Ambiguous beings which are by turn punitive, mischievous and charged with supernatural abilities, ready to harm on a whim; it’s little wonder that faerie-folk provide a rich source for storytelling and have the potential to frighten. Little wonder, either, that nascent monotheism had its own methods and reasons for trying to dissipate these persistent old legends.

The Horror of the Old Gods

Much within horror refers to a pre- or extra-Christian world (or the equivalent predominant set of beliefs): the supernatural is a stubborn thing, and an array of vampires, ghosts, demons and monsters have never been entirely shaken by the recognised order. “Myths, like modern fiction or art in general, can be seen as a way of attempting to describe what may otherwise be inexplicable” (11) and some of the oldest myths, as we have seen, retain the strongest hold. Early Christianity was faced with a dilemma: merely supplanting the old festivals may have had an effect, but that was never going to be completely efficient on its own. Folklorist Ralph Whitlock makes an interesting point when he suggests that many old stories which take the form of ‘vs.’ stories – good against bad – show some evidence of being allegorical, telling of the “struggle which really occurred between the new religion – Christianity – and the old” (12). So, when we have tales of noble Christian knights defeating giants, dragons or the Devil himself on British soil, this could be a personification of the old religion – something fearful, monstrous, and in need of suppression. This approach was also taken with regards otherwise inexplicable natural phenomena, and also prehistoric structures which were otherwise mysterious: so for instance, the standing stones at Callanish in the Outer Hebrides are transformed by mythology into a row of giants, turned to stone by St Kieran when they refused to convert to Christianity.

These folk stories are in their own way pervasive and fun, but the thwarted devils of the stories never quite uprooted the old gods: as W. B. Yeats suggests in his Celtic Revivalist collection of writings The Celtic Twilight, “It may be that this, like the others, was not the devil at all, but some poor wood spirit whose cloven feet had got him into trouble.” In another part of the novel, an old Irish woman dismisses Hell as “an invention got up by the priest” but is a firm believer in “faeries and little leprechauns” (13). That the Celtic Revival could take place at all, restoring a folklore which was meant to have been sidelined by orthodoxy, is testament to its resilience. What then if people were to reject this orthodoxy altogether, and return to their old gods?

This fear is at the nub of British horror classic The Wicker Man (1973), where an agent of mainstream Christianity encounters an isolated Scottish island community which has wholeheartedly abandoned Christianity. “Here the old gods aren’t dead,” explains Lord Summerisle to the appalled investigating police officer, Sergeant Howie. Howie, a devout – and celibate – Christian finds himself repeatedly challenged by the licentiousness of the behaviour he observes, as well as battling against the insular secrecy of the Summerisle islanders in a classic example of the horror of secret societies. But this is not all: the rejection of Christianity has been so complete that the islanders have also resurrected the Celtic tradition of human sacrifice. The film plays nicely on the paranoia of what could happen were paganism – those ostensibly harmless folk beliefs – allowed to flourish again, showing us nonetheless a functional community which certainly boasts no more of a bloody tendency than Christianity has throughout its lifespan; the film’s ultimate message seems to be, though, that religious belief of any antiquity can be misused, or can at least do little to stem the incorrigible nature of human cruelty. In-group mentality is dangerous, and Howie’s attempt to reason with his captors (“Sometimes crops fail: if they fail again then, who next?”) falls on deaf ears. Inflexible, intractable belief is truly horrific here.

Another, similar film which plays on similar anxieties is Darklands (1996) albeit with a more Nationalistic subtext, a tale of the resurrection of druidic practises in Wales by those who feel that mainstream belief and culture has failed them, both spiritually and economically (extending a similar idea found in The Wicker Man – that the dependence on the island’s apple crop encouraged the islanders to turn to gods who might respond to their needs). In the case of Darklands, we actually see the new wave of druidic practitioners attempting to lean on a Christian community which is still around, seeking to reclaim the land on which the local church is built – a process which is already complete on Summerisle. Otherwise, and like their Scottish counterparts, the Welsh order is determined to boost their corner of the world by embracing a particularly nasty heritage…without an overarching moral order such as you might find in Christianity, it seems that the Celtic nations might reserve a tendency to revert to atavistic, Pagan savagery.

Conclusion

Celtic lore has persisted, despite the predominance of an urbane, modern culture; it has even become interwoven with all of the prevalent cultures which overlapped or displaced its tribes. People have long used stories and folklore to feel their way around accepted versions of events, and the easy relationship of fantasy and reality in the Celtic traditions has meant they are always rife for a good yarn, a creepy tale. Our Celtic ancestors used their lore to make sense of their world; they used personification, such as with faerie folk, to explain otherwise inexplicable phenomena and they devised ritual, magic and superstition in order to try and influence things beyond their control. The continued sense of proximity to this lore provides a sense of exoticism at home – we now use Celtic lore to make sense of our world through the medium of horror, privy as we are to a wealth of mysterious, often lurid glimpses of a shared past, not to mention a, co-existent supernatural which lends itself entertainingly to the horror genre.

There is a common thread which runs throughout the films discussed above, and is apparent in any study of Celtic mythology: Celtic lore is resistant to our straightforward interpretations of good and evil. A clear-cut division between the two is largely a Judeo-Christian phenomenon; this is a distinction which would have little troubled the Celtic mindset. Its festivals – like Samhain – were based around the precariousness of the natural world and the seasons, and so accommodated dualities like light and dark, birth and death, because the Celts’ daily existence contained both. In horror, the fun of Halloween is tempered again and again with reminders of the origins of the festivities: Conal Cochran perceives a ‘good joke’ in wholesale Halloween murder; the characters in Trick’r Treat are reminded again and again that the roots of the festival are bloody. Celtic mythology’s resident spirits too were, after all, neither ‘good’ nor ‘evil’: sometimes benign, often a hindrance, and sometimes murderous, in our horror films they are curtailed only by age-old formulae which properly understands what they are – and any illusions about their true natures are properly punished. Likewise, access to the supernatural world by humans could mean opulence and power, or equally it could mean slavery and harm; all of these are possible in the faerie castles of Morgana Le Fay or in the mythical depths of the Broceliande forest.

All good horror has a grain of uncertainty, and where notions of good and evil are rendered problematic through Celtic folklore, the ensuing disorientation has much potential for the horror genre. However, we shouldn’t forget that part of this potential for Celtic lore to influence horror also comes from the inherent anxiety inspired by its potential for resurgence. In The Wicker Man and Darklands, those countries which now claim a Celtic heritage once again elect to follow the old, ambiguous – and bloody – religious path of their ancestors. What greater uncertainty is there than a suspicion of your nearest neighbours? To quote Anglo-Irish author E. M. Forster – who was a contemporary of Yeats, and other important Celtic revivalists – “Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.”

References:
Opening quote: Denis Meikle, Vincent Price: the Art of Fear (Reynolds & Hearn: London, 2003), p.213.
1) Jenna Robertson, Christians and Halloween: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art13725.asp (accessed 28th September 2010); Richard Ames, Christians and Halloween: http://www.cogwriter.com/news/doctrine/richard-ames-christians-and-halloween/ (accessed 28th September 2010)
2) Ralph Whitlock, In Search of Lost Gods: a Guide to British Folklore (Phaidon: Oxford, 1979), introduction.
3) See for example: Gaius Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
4) Tacitus, Annals XIV, xxx
5) Bill Price, Celtic Myths (Pocket Essentials: Herts, 2008), p.1.
6) See for example: Strabo, Geography.
7) Whitlock, p.149.
8 ) Whitlock, introduction.
9) Daniel Farson, Vampires, Zombies and Monster Men (Aldus Books: London, 1975), p.88.
10) Ibid.
11) Price, p.13.
12) Whitlock, p.10.
13) W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (1902): http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/yeats/twi/twi04.htm (accessed 28th September 2010)

Select Filmography:
Mischievous Puck (1911)
The Witch of the Welsh Mountains (1912)
The Banshee (1913)
Cry of the Banshee (1970)
The Night the Banshee Cried (1957)
Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (1972)
The Wicker Man (1973)
Alison’s Birthday (1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Troll (1986)
Leprechaun (1993)
Darklands (1996)
Broceliande (2002)
Evil Breed: the Legend of Samhain (2003)
Bloodmyth (2006)
The Fairies of Blackheath Woods (2006)
Trick’r Treat (2008)
Pwca (2009)
Outcast (2010)

By Liam Cannon

It seems to me that we live in an era of senseless hyperbole, when too many people have lost their sense of proportion. Kanye West terms himself a genius after penning some dull chart-topping dross and terms like “epic” and “awesomeballs” are hurled about with gay abandon in praise of the most trivial concerns. I try to be selective about what I call “epic” – usually a Prog Rock mini opera or a series of books spanning decades, rather than my dinner. Not being an excitable teenager, or mentally deficient, I avoid using the term “awesomeballs” entirely. However, with all due consideration for proportion and aptness, there are many glowing epithets I can happily attribute to the Chilean enigma Alejandro Jodorowsky – a true artist, a rebel, a renegade… actually fuck it, I’m even going to call him a mage.

I would never claim to be a connoisseur of film. I intermittently chastise myself for not making the effort to catch up on classics or to keep my ear to the ground for new releases which might be to my taste. However, there’s always been a type of film I’ve particularly loved. Films like the Hungarian headfuck “Taxidermia” from 2006 or Japanese lunatic Takashi Miike’s mind-melting ‘Visitor Q” are examples which come to mind – the type of films where anything can happen and probably will, where the grotesque rubs shoulders with the breathtakingly beautiful and the low-brow co-exists with the profound. When I discovered his work in recent years, I realised that this type of cinema should probably be termed “Jodorowskyan”. In other words, when it comes to mind-bending, uncompromising cinema, this genial Chilean is pretty much the daddy.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is truly unconventional in his film-making. His breakthrough ‘El Topo’ from 1970, although it is generally termed a Western, is very much his trippy individual take on the genre. And even today, the less open-minded among us would hesitate to call ‘The Holy Mountain’, from 1973, a movie in any conventional sense of the term (for the record, I call it an all-time favourite). Likewise, the subject of this piece, “Santa Sangre” from 1989, is anything but a conventional horror film. It has variously been termed psychological horror or Surrealist horror, but to call it either does not do justice to its variety and depth. It displays the kind of irreverent, unpredictable and individualistic approach to the Horror genre that one would expect from the Chilean director, but conversely it’s also something of an homage to some notable heavyweights of the Horror genre.

“Santa Sangre” is generally thought of as the most accessible of Jodorowsky’s films. I would consider this to be true, but only because it is less laden with symbolism, mysticism, tarot references and surrealism, for example, than his other work. In depicting a central character’s downward spiral towards madness and eventually murder, we have classic horror fodder here. A nod to Hitchcock can be detected in the Freudian themes, but with his vibrant imagination, Jodorowsky very much puts his own stamp on it. For example, the central character Fenix (played by two of Jodorowsky’s sons, Axel and Adan) lending his arms to his mother, who has had her own arms chopped off by his brutal father, is an inspired aspect of this film. The scenes of son and mother dancing and playing piano together are both touching and memorable.

The shadow of the Italian Giallo genre is also apparent in “Santa Sangre”, which is not surprising considering that Claudio Argento , brother of legendary Italian Horror director Dario, assisted in writing the screenplay. All of the death scenes in this movie have a whiff of the Giallo about them. In the death scenes involving Fenix, we see the common elements of a first person perspective, shadowy locations, a dramatic repetitive musical score and ultimately a gory and bloodsoaked demise for an unlucky victim. These scenes, in their overall atmosphere, put me to thinking of Argento classics like “Profondo Rosso” and “Suspiria”. I find the music for these death scenes to be particularly reminiscent of the latter.

Although the film contains some very obvious nods to Hitchcock, the Italian Giallo genre and many horror conventions, there are a number of scenes which are quintessential Jodorowsky. I’ve found that when I’ve watched any of his films, I can count on there being at least a couple of scenes to leave me slack-jawed in shock and amazement. “Santa Sangre” is no different. In the earlier part of the film, we are shown how our protagonist Fenix’s troubled upbringing in a circus family has driven him to madness. When an elephant dies in the circus, it is afforded a spectacular send-off, with its giant coffin being sent careering down a steep cliff into a dump, at the behest of Fenix’s brutal father Orgo. We then see hordes of poverty-stricken wretches descend on the coffin, presumably to salvage what they can from the elephant for food. While this scene is not central to the film’s plot, it is classic Jodorowsky – strange, thought-provoking and visually striking.

Another scene I find particularly memorable is in the earlier part of the film when Fenix and a group of other inmates are released for an evening from their mental asylum. The other inmates are played by actors with Down’s Syndrome. A pimp (played by another of the director’s sons, Teo, who died tragically shortly after the completion of the film) takes Fenix and company under his wing, provides them with cocaine and brings them to enjoy the charms of an overweight prostitute. When I first watched “Santa Sangre”, this scene in particular made my jaw drop and will be every bit as shocking to a nowadays audience as it was upon the film’s first release in 1989.

Santa Sangre is an awe-inspiring, multi-faceted masterpiece. It combines Giallo-style Horror theme music with Mexican folk in its soundtrack. It marries time-honoured conventions of the Horror genre to the renegade and unique visions of Alejandro Jodorowsky. It is alternately touching and repulsive, profound and shocking. I honestly can’t say I’ve ever seen another film like it. If you’ve never had the opportunity to see it, make a point of doing so, as 25 years on from its original release, it remains an eminently challenging and rewarding watch.

By Keri O’Shea

There’s been a strange sort of circularity to the career of Roger Corman. Whilst as a young man he made films about anything and everything he could (as did many directors and/or producers of his generation and longevity) he definitely seems to have had a soft spot for no-budget, turn-a-buck creature features: Crab Monsters, Blood Beasts and Wasp Women were the stuff of his early works, reflecting the 1950s ‘B’ movie predilection for nature gone awry, tainted by outsider influences and bad, bad science. Oddly fitting, then, that Mr. Corman has recently come back to the nature-gone-bad motif at this stage in his career as a producer: his work for SyFy will soon be bringing us Sharktopus vs. Mermantula, folks. Bask in that knowledge – but remember that, between these poles, he did his finest directorial work in what has come to be known as the ‘Corman Poe Cycle’.

I think that most would agree that Roger Corman’s proudest legacy as a filmmaker is his work on these Poe adaptations, a series of films undertaken for teen audience specialists American International Pictures – a company that, seeing the success of Hammer in the UK at this time (and, ahem, no doubt bearing in mind the public-domain nature of Poe’s work) decided to try their hand at a bit of High Gothic. The rest is history. In the short space of four years, Corman (usually collaborating with writer Lou Rusoff) directed a series of seven lavish Poe adaptations. All of these films, to a lesser or a greater extent, used the Poe short stories as a starting-point, adding depth and development whilst retaining the sickly, deranged protagonists and their profound isolation. Of all the Corman Poe movies, however, it’s his penultimate one which has left the most lasting impression on fans and critics alike. That film is The Masque of the Red Death: of all the adaptations, this one is probably truest to the original story, albeit with moments of great bleakness which even surpass the original tale. It is a lurid, oddly disturbing film – a film which alludes to sickness almost constantly, but keeps it outside the castle walls for the most part; a film which hints at sex but averts its eyes, or transposes it onto something which still has the power to make us uncomfortable; a film which promises violence but, even in its uncensored state, is more about psychological harm than scenes of torture.

The inmates of Prospero’s castle, in its setting in Medieval Italy, are in the throes of something which has become a cliché of the behaviour of the rich in times of trouble: from the rumour of Nero playing his fiddle as Rome burns, to the reports of Queen Marie Antoinette innocently asking why those starving in the suburbs of Paris don’t just eat cake (both stories almost certainly complete bollocks, of course), here we have a group of wealthy and indolent people partying as the poor die – here, die of a virulent plague known only as the ‘red death’. Like the Italian noblemen and noblewomen of The Decameron who flee the Black Death by removing to their country estates (telling the stories which make up the book in order to pass the time, as they go on surviving a disease which wiped out up to half of the population of Europe), Prospero’s rich, pampered allies are doing just the same. However, their behaviour is debauched, their morals lax: Corman has done a superb job of capturing an image of utter abandon on screen which has rarely, if ever, been equalled. And, despite the time period in which the story takes place, The Masque of the Red Death is a truly Decadent horror movie, in the sense that its main events focus on the utter abandonment of old moral laws and the fatalistic grab for more and more sensual satiety – a sort of deliberate rejection of the soul, with Prospero (Vincent Price in a stand-out performance) and his consort, the stunningly-beautiful Juliana (Hazel Court) moving beyond dissatisfaction with what they perceive as an anaemic, aimless Christianity, to the practice of outright Satanism. Move the film into the 1890s, and several scenes in Masque could be a rendition of the Black Mass scenes in Là-Bas, a Decadent novel about Devil-worship in Paris. The film is a 60s take on a 19th Century story, with interesting precedents elsewhere; it’s this eclectic and aesthetically-heady mix which has helped the film to maintain its impact across half a century.

In terms of linear plot, then, there is a surprisingly little amount in Masque of the Red Death. The bulk of the movie is there to establish the insular, unreal world of the castle – in which the vast majority of scenes take place. Chief amongst Prospero’s amusements throughout the film is the study of a village girl, Francesca (Jane Asher). Francesca finds herself in the castle through a series of unhappy events, but her innocence and faith in God mark her out for especial attention, with Prospero working to show to her that her beliefs are wrong and wasted. In his words, what he does is “not corrupting” but “instructing”; his interest in the girl, however, rouses the jealousy of his chief consort, and propels her to take the final rites she needs in order to ‘betroth’ herself to the Devil and, as Prospero guesses, consolidate her position in the castle.

Yet all of this might have passed as just another cycle of endless amusements, for Prospero at least: the key factor here is not God, or Satan, but Death. Death – just as seen in the Danse Macabre artistic tradition of the time period in which the story is set – doesn’t respect wealth or status. Death – “his own death” – is the only thing which Prospero fears. The deaths of others merely entertain him; when the performer Hop-Toad conspires to burn an old associate of his to death (thus referencing another Poe story, itself called Hop-Toad), Prospero wants to reward him for his efforts, not punish him. When Juliana is killed, Prospero can only smile that at last she is truly ‘married’ to Satan. But when faced with the striking, menacing red-clad figure, Prospero collapses in terror when he realises that he is not face to face with the Devil at all, but with the Great Leveller. The bleakness of this revelation is stronger than any spiritual comeuppance. It’s Prospero’s only moment of weakness, the end to his cold certainty. Death is more terrifying than Hell. Hell had a hierarchy; Prospero was sure he’d enjoy high status there. But in the end, he is struck down.

The similarities between the figure of Death in Masque of the Red Death – he who is later joined by other, similarly-cowled figures, all of whom have claimed ‘many lives’ – was originally the reason which production on the film was briefly delayed. Corman had wanted to make the film second in his Poe cycle, uncertainties over a workable screenplay notwithstanding, but it had been decided that the similarities to the recently-released Bergman movie The Seventh Seal (with its own allegorical figure of Death of course) would weaken its impact. However, in waiting before releasing Masque, it has allowed the later film to really blossom. It’s an allegorical horror story with a vivid, even garish colour palate. Much has been said about the significances of the colours used for the various rooms in the castle (which correspond to the coloured robes worn by the other plague-bearers in the closing scenes); there is a theory that as Francesca moves through the inner rooms to the ‘forbidden’ black room, that the colours represent the passing of a day, adding to the sense of time being enclosed within the castle’s walls. You could also assess the significance of the colours themselves, with certain colours being associated with various mental states – purity, love, cowardice, death. The symbolism of the ‘red’ colour of the plague and Prospero’s superstitious terror of it, and of course the black room, is more straightforward. The Masque of the Red Death is certainly unusual in the level of allegory it offers, and the aesthetics it uses to do so. The overall effect of the film can be sensually quite overwhelming accordingly. And, whilst the Poe story itself is evocative enough, Corman’s film is a piece of unsettling art.

It takes a great deal to make a film that can sustain a name for itself over a fifty-year timespan, much less one which seems to still be attracting new fans. I found myself wondering as I wrote this piece – which of the films of the last ten years will still be written about in fifty? And what, given developments in filmmaking, will be the elements which really stand the test of time? It’s hard to predict that in some ways, but by the same token, the sorts of films which we still know and love from generations back have a certain abundance of wit, vision and originality. Combine those elements with the worst excesses of human nature and behaviour, and you’ll have a successful, lasting horror story. The Masque of the Red Death is a superb example of this; it’s a beautiful tale of “pain and terror and madness” which deserves its enduring reputation.

By Keri O’Shea

“I’m Welsh, and the Celtic twilight sometimes descends at odd moments.” Vincent Price

Horror draws its influences from a diverse range of sources, in particular borrowing from the legends and lore of the past to conjure its contemporary demons. One of the richest seams for such forgotten horrors, ripe to terrify new generations, is Celtic mythology. For all that, it hasn’t been exploited with the same enthusiasm as some traditions, but perhaps this makes the instances when modern shamans conjure ancient Celtic evil via the magic of the screen even more intriguing and strange. For this Celtic twilight is a persistent thing; rudiments of Celtic folklore continue to exert an influence on modern culture, and it isn’t simply a very human fascination with origins which has helped this folklore to survive. There is indisputably something unique about the Celtic mythos – with its mischievous pucks, kelpies, leprechauns, fairies and hobs – and in its rich seams of mysticism, which has borne it along to the present day. We recognise the names of many of its supernatural denizens. However, many of us are more familiar with Celtic entities and deities via a version of Celtic mythology found in more benign fantasy literature – most notably perhaps in the fictions of Tolkien – or on New Age bookshelves, where headhunting and human sacrifices to the gods have been displaced by Mother Goddess ideals and a sanitised version of the Celtic calendar.

Some of its darker traditions continue to haunt us, despite having been inevitably altered by the course of thousands of years – as with Halloween, a festival with decidedly pagan roots which continues to trouble some practitioners of the Christian religion. “Halloween is filled with different kinds of pagan characters and customs that Christians should avoid,” opines religious author Jenna Robertson, whilst evangelist Richard Ames adds, “Should we follow our neighbours, like proverbial lemmings, off the dangerous cliff of pagan practices?” (1) Whilst the majority of practicing Christians would happily turn a blind eye to Halloween festivities, it seems that Celtic folklore, with its spirits, its stories and its ambiguities still retains the ability to engender anxiety in some quarters. It’s no surprise that its influence can be felt in modern horror, for here we have another domain of dark storytelling where ambiguous characters, supernatural entities and the interplay of sex and death hold sway, and another area which continues to be of concern to some within mainstream cultures.

As much about the Celts has come down to us through the legacy of their folk tales and the ‘little people’ in whom they believed – particularly after the widespread Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century – as it has through conventional channels of archaeology and documentation. Much of the origins of the Celtic peoples themselves are swathed in mystery: we do know that they were a group of tribes who gradually colonised what we now know as Brittany, Britain and Ireland between roughly 500 and 100 BC, though whether they arrived from Southern Europe, or rather originated in Central Europe and were then driven north and west is controversial. Despite differences between groups – the idea of Celtic identity is a very new one, and would have made little sense to these fractious tribes – there were some overarching similarities in language, religion and culture, particularly in the importance of oral culture and storytelling.

This emphasis on story and the development of religious beliefs centred on locales and natural features, “standing stones, wells, springs, tumuli, groves, even individual trees [which] were regarded as sacred and possessing a resident spirit” may help to explain the tenacity of Celtic beliefs and perhaps how “of the Roman gods there is hardly a trace” (2) – their gods and their temples all but lost, despite the Romans arriving an organised, efficient colonising force. Indeed, much of our information about the Celts in Britain comes from the Romans themselves who were already a literate culture, although of course a culture which ultimately sought to conquer the Celts’ lands and so was not predisposed to giving unbiased descriptions. However, Roman descriptions are still invaluable. The impression given is of a warlike, powerful people with an Iron Age culture (3). More than this, the Romans found the Celts, particularly their Druid class, rather frightening. When the governor of Britain, Suetonius Paulinus, made a final push to suppress the rebellious communities of the Welsh island of Anglesey, historian Tacitus described “a serried mass of arms and men, with women flitting between the ranks. In the style of Furies, in robes of deathly black and with dishevelled hair, they brandished their torches; while a circle of Druids, lifting their hands to heaven and showering imprecations, struck the troops with such an awe at the extraordinary spectacle that, as though their limbs were paralysed, they exposed their bodies to wounds without an attempt at movement…” (4)

As the Romans gradually displaced Celtic tribes, the Celts were driven into the furthest reaches of the British Isles; Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Cornwall, as well as having established presences in Ireland and Brittany, and these areas are still associated with the Celts in the modern age. When the Romans departed a now Christianised Britain around 400 AD, they left an altered, but by no means defunct Celtic culture – a culture which has sustained a reputation of being somehow different from its neighbours: there was and is “a tendency of neighbouring Anglo-Saxons to belittle the people of the Celtic fringes of the British Isles by characterising them as (amongst other things) overly superstitious, possessed of a weak-minded fascination with fairies and ghosts that compares unfavourably with their own sturdy, commonsensical beliefs in Anglican Christianity” (5).

Samhain and Halloween: “Witch and ghost make merry…”

The Romans were renowned for their assimilatory attitudes to the cultures with which they came into contact, so even whilst suppressing or displacing Celtic peoples they largely grew to accept Celtic lore, adding their own panoply of gods and beliefs to the mix. For example, Samhain became associated with the Roman festival of the dead, Feralia; the worship of Pomona, the goddess of fruit and trees, was also slowly integrated into the Celtic New Year, although the Romans always considered the human sacrifices undertaken by the Celts at this time to be aberrant (6). Christianity was less accepting – and became less so as it became more organised and doctrinal – but itself understood enough about the persistence of the old practices to superimpose the holy calendar onto them rather than trying to quell them altogether: it was a sound way of currying favour with new congregations. Hence, the Celtic New year festival of Samhain was overlaid with the Christian festival of All Saints’ Day when Pope Gregory III moved it to coincide with the heathen calendar.

However, features of the original festival were persistent; people did not easily surrender their old traditions. This was because Samhain was originally celebrated by a pastoral society which did not disappear simply with the advent of monotheism: the calendar did indeed seem to be divided into two halves, one of light and one of darkness, and “Samhain marked demonstrably the end of one year and the beginning of the next” (7). With the pre-Wiccan understanding of nature as something cruel which would freeze and starve you, rather than embrace you as ‘the earth mother’, the gods had to be propitiated, food stockpiled. This was the time when, to ensure their own survival, people slaughtered their excess livestock – hence the association of this time of the year with blazing fires as people roasted meat, perhaps offering blood sacrifices to their gods.

There must have been a sense of change afoot, and the amount of death associated both with food and with offerings linked Samhain irrevocably with the dead and spirits, something which is still true of the festival of Halloween and which, naturally, lends itself to horror. The use of costumes, of death imagery (especially the death-grimace of the Jack O’Lantern), the belief that ghosts and ghouls are abroad, and what we now call ‘trick or treat’ – the arrival of masked strangers – have all figured in modern horror, and one of the most popular slasher films, named for the modern festival, has a masked psychopath making his way home on Halloween night where he passes for just another person in spooky fancy dress. But there are also examples of modern horror films which directly reference the Celtic roots of Halloween…one of which ostensibly belongs to the Halloween franchise, despite having little to do with the other films in terms of plot.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a quirky sequel which plays on the self-same anxieties expressed by the Christian critics quoted above; that Halloween’s pagan roots are decidedly sinister, and could even be dangerous. The film begins with the murder of a man named Harry Grimbridge, who is killed in his hospital bed whilst clutching a Halloween mask and proclaiming that “They are going to kill us!” After his death, we see his murderer leave the hospital and commit a fiery suicide outside. One of the doctors in the hospital, Daniel Challis, is naturally disturbed and intrigued by these events so, when he learns from Harry’s daughter Ellie that her father had been investigating the company who make these sinister masks, they decide to visit the vast Silver Shamrock factory in the hope of finding clues regarding her father’s death.

There, they meet the charismatic and jovial owner of Silver Shamrock, Conal Cochran: it seems that his very successful line of Halloween masks (which are advertised with one of the most irritatingly catchy jingles in existence) have one important difference: they are each implanted with a tiny fragment of a stolen boulder from Stonehenge! Cochran wants to revolutionise Halloween, to bring it back to its decidedly bloody roots: on Halloween night, and via the use of magic, children wearing his masks will die when they receive a trigger from the Halloween jingle. “I do love a good joke,” explains Cochran to a mortified Daniel, “But there’s a better reason… you don’t really know much about Halloween… you thought no further than the strange custom of having your children wear masks and go out begging for candy…It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands, and we’d be waiting… in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal, and the dead might be looking in…to sit by our fires of turf. Halloween… the festival of Samhain! The last great one took place three thousand years ago, when the hills ran red… with the blood of animals and children.” The film neatly conflates two sets of traditions – old and new – in showing how the grisly older traditions might, just might find a way back through the seemingly innocuous practise of dress-up, as well as exploiting the idea that those of Celtic descent might still be privy to a type of dangerous arcane knowledge…

A more recent film which actively seeks to promote (or even revive) Samhain lore is the anthology movie Trick’r Treat (2008). Director Michael Dougherty explains in The Lore and Legends of Halloween, a documentary accompanying the film’s DVD release, that he wanted not only to explore the origins of Halloween, but to restore knowledge about the source; he’s not going as far as Mr. Cochran of the Silver Shamrock company of course (!) but there is a sense of a debt of honour to far older traditions which are relevant even in the midst of modern traditions in this entertainingly self-aware film. In each of the interlinked tales, it is due observance of tradition – or not – which seals the fate of the characters.

As the film begins, a young couple are arriving home after a fancy dress Halloween parade (yet another development, at least stateside, in Halloween practices). When Emma blows out a Jack O’Lantern before midnight, her husband remonstrates with her: it’s bad luck, he explains. “It’s Halloween, not Hanukah,” she hisses, but before she can bad-temperedly remove all of the decorations from the garden she’s murdered by a mysterious assailant. Though Trick’r Treat is deliberately framed as cartoonish, this intro to the film sets the tone: those who do not understand the supernatural origins of the festival, or fail to take due care to observe the traditions designated by their ancestors for protection from harm, might just meet a grisly end. An assailant (quite literally) masquerading as a supernatural being meets a genuinely supernatural match in the lupine Laurie (Anna Paquin); a gluttonous child who sees fit to destroy pumpkin lanterns whilst gorging himself on candy is given an earnest Halloween history lesson and then treated to a fitting demise; the ghosts of the dead are abroad – even though they’re dressed in modern Halloween costume – and they’re looking for vengeance on the one night of the year when the border between our world and theirs is thinnest…

Trick’r Treat is jokily admonitory but quite earnestly uses Samhain as a source of horror; Season of the Witch also nods towards the grisly earliest days of the Celts’ October festival, and both films derive their scares from suggesting that whatever sinister source provided Halloween just might overpower us if we fail to understand it. After all, if there are wicked entities and forces afoot, we might rue the day we became ignorant of how to contain them…

Originally printed in Diabolique Magazine issue 2 (2010). Part Two of Keri’s feature on Celtic horror coming soon…

By Keri O’Shea

“I’m Welsh, and the Celtic twilight sometimes descends at odd moments.” Vincent Price

Horror draws its influences from a diverse range of sources, in particular borrowing from the legends and lore of the past to conjure its contemporary demons. One of the richest seams for such forgotten horrors, ripe to terrify new generations, is Celtic mythology. For all that, it hasn’t been exploited with the same enthusiasm as some traditions, but perhaps this makes the instances when modern shamans conjure ancient Celtic evil via the magic of the screen even more intriguing and strange. For this Celtic twilight is a persistent thing; rudiments of Celtic folklore continue to exert an influence on modern culture, and it isn’t simply a very human fascination with origins which has helped this folklore to survive. There is indisputably something unique about the Celtic mythos – with its mischievous pucks, kelpies, leprechauns, fairies and hobs – and in its rich seams of mysticism, which has borne it along to the present day. We recognise the names of many of its supernatural denizens. However, many of us are more familiar with Celtic entities and deities via a version of Celtic mythology found in more benign fantasy literature – most notably perhaps in the fictions of Tolkien – or on New Age bookshelves, where headhunting and human sacrifices to the gods have been displaced by Mother Goddess ideals and a sanitised version of the Celtic calendar.

Some of its darker traditions continue to haunt us, despite having been inevitably altered by the course of thousands of years – as with Halloween, a festival with decidedly pagan roots which continues to trouble some practitioners of the Christian religion. “Halloween is filled with different kinds of pagan characters and customs that Christians should avoid,” opines religious author Jenna Robertson, whilst evangelist Richard Ames adds, “Should we follow our neighbours, like proverbial lemmings, off the dangerous cliff of pagan practices?” (1) Whilst the majority of practicing Christians would happily turn a blind eye to Halloween festivities, it seems that Celtic folklore, with its spirits, its stories and its ambiguities still retains the ability to engender anxiety in some quarters. It’s no surprise that its influence can be felt in modern horror, for here we have another domain of dark storytelling where ambiguous characters, supernatural entities and the interplay of sex and death hold sway, and another area which continues to be of concern to some within mainstream cultures.

As much about the Celts has come down to us through the legacy of their folk tales and the ‘little people’ in whom they believed – particularly after the widespread Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century – as it has through conventional channels of archaeology and documentation. Much of the origins of the Celtic peoples themselves are swathed in mystery: we do know that they were a group of tribes who gradually colonised what we now know as Brittany, Britain and Ireland between roughly 500 and 100 BC, though whether they arrived from Southern Europe, or rather originated in Central Europe and were then driven north and west is controversial. Despite differences between groups – the idea of Celtic identity is a very new one, and would have made little sense to these fractious tribes – there were some overarching similarities in language, religion and culture, particularly in the importance of oral culture and storytelling.

This emphasis on story and the development of religious beliefs centred on locales and natural features, “standing stones, wells, springs, tumuli, groves, even individual trees [which] were regarded as sacred and possessing a resident spirit” may help to explain the tenacity of Celtic beliefs and perhaps how “of the Roman gods there is hardly a trace” (2) – their gods and their temples all but lost, despite the Romans arriving an organised, efficient colonising force. Indeed, much of our information about the Celts in Britain comes from the Romans themselves who were already a literate culture, although of course a culture which ultimately sought to conquer the Celts’ lands and so was not predisposed to giving unbiased descriptions. However, Roman descriptions are still invaluable. The impression given is of a warlike, powerful people with an Iron Age culture (3). More than this, the Romans found the Celts, particularly their Druid class, rather frightening. When the governor of Britain, Suetonius Paulinus, made a final push to suppress the rebellious communities of the Welsh island of Anglesey, historian Tacitus described “a serried mass of arms and men, with women flitting between the ranks. In the style of Furies, in robes of deathly black and with dishevelled hair, they brandished their torches; while a circle of Druids, lifting their hands to heaven and showering imprecations, struck the troops with such an awe at the extraordinary spectacle that, as though their limbs were paralysed, they exposed their bodies to wounds without an attempt at movement…” (4)

As the Romans gradually displaced Celtic tribes, the Celts were driven into the furthest reaches of the British Isles; Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Cornwall, as well as having established presences in Ireland and Brittany, and these areas are still associated with the Celts in the modern age. When the Romans departed a now Christianised Britain around 400 AD, they left an altered, but by no means defunct Celtic culture – a culture which has sustained a reputation of being somehow different from its neighbours: there was and is “a tendency of neighbouring Anglo-Saxons to belittle the people of the Celtic fringes of the British Isles by characterising them as (amongst other things) overly superstitious, possessed of a weak-minded fascination with fairies and ghosts that compares unfavourably with their own sturdy, commonsensical beliefs in Anglican Christianity” (5).

Samhain and Halloween: “Witch and ghost make merry…”

The Romans were renowned for their assimilatory attitudes to the cultures with which they came into contact, so even whilst suppressing or displacing Celtic peoples they largely grew to accept Celtic lore, adding their own panoply of gods and beliefs to the mix. For example, Samhain became associated with the Roman festival of the dead, Feralia; the worship of Pomona, the goddess of fruit and trees, was also slowly integrated into the Celtic New Year, although the Romans always considered the human sacrifices undertaken by the Celts at this time to be aberrant (6). Christianity was less accepting – and became less so as it became more organised and doctrinal – but itself understood enough about the persistence of the old practices to superimpose the holy calendar onto them rather than trying to quell them altogether: it was a sound way of currying favour with new congregations. Hence, the Celtic New year festival of Samhain was overlaid with the Christian festival of All Saints’ Day when Pope Gregory III moved it to coincide with the heathen calendar.

However, features of the original festival were persistent; people did not easily surrender their old traditions. This was because Samhain was originally celebrated by a pastoral society which did not disappear simply with the advent of monotheism: the calendar did indeed seem to be divided into two halves, one of light and one of darkness, and “Samhain marked demonstrably the end of one year and the beginning of the next” (7). With the pre-Wiccan understanding of nature as something cruel which would freeze and starve you, rather than embrace you as ‘the earth mother’, the gods had to be propitiated, food stockpiled. This was the time when, to ensure their own survival, people slaughtered their excess livestock – hence the association of this time of the year with blazing fires as people roasted meat, perhaps offering blood sacrifices to their gods.
There must have been a sense of change afoot, and the amount of death associated both with food and with offerings linked Samhain irrevocably with the dead and spirits, something which is still true of the festival of Halloween and which, naturally, lends itself to horror. The use of costumes, of death imagery (especially the death-grimace of the Jack O’Lantern), the belief that ghosts and ghouls are abroad, and what we now call ‘trick or treat’ – the arrival of masked strangers – have all figured in modern horror, and one of the most popular slasher films, named for the modern festival, has a masked psychopath making his way home on Halloween night where he passes for just another person in spooky fancy dress. But there are also examples of modern horror films which directly reference the Celtic roots of Halloween…one of which ostensibly belongs to the Halloween franchise, despite having little to do with the other films in terms of plot.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a quirky sequel which plays on the self-same anxieties expressed by the Christian critics quoted above; that Halloween’s pagan roots are decidedly sinister, and could even be dangerous. The film begins with the murder of a man named Harry Grimbridge, who is killed in his hospital bed whilst clutching a Halloween mask and proclaiming that “They are going to kill us!” After his death, we see his murderer leave the hospital and commit a fiery suicide outside. One of the doctors in the hospital, Daniel Challis, is naturally disturbed and intrigued by these events so, when he learns from Harry’s daughter Ellie that her father had been investigating the company who make these sinister masks, they decide to visit the vast Silver Shamrock factory in the hope of finding clues regarding her father’s death.

There, they meet the charismatic and jovial owner of Silver Shamrock, Conal Cochran: it seems that his very successful line of Halloween masks (which are advertised with one of the most irritatingly catchy jingles in existence) have one important difference: they are each implanted with a tiny fragment of a stolen boulder from Stonehenge! Cochran wants to revolutionise Halloween, to bring it back to its decidedly bloody roots: on Halloween night, and via the use of magic, children wearing his masks will die when they receive a trigger from the Halloween jingle. “I do love a good joke,” explains Cochran to a mortified Daniel, “But there’s a better reason… you don’t really know much about Halloween… you thought no further than the strange custom of having your children wear masks and go out begging for candy…It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands, and we’d be waiting… in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal, and the dead might be looking in…to sit by our fires of turf. Halloween… the festival of Samhain! The last great one took place three thousand years ago, when the hills ran red… with the blood of animals and children.” The film neatly conflates two sets of traditions – old and new – in showing how the grisly older traditions might, just might find a way back through the seemingly innocuous practise of dress-up, as well as exploiting the idea that those of Celtic descent might still be privy to a type of dangerous arcane knowledge…

A more recent film which actively seeks to promote (or even revive) Samhain lore is the anthology movie Trick’r Treat (2008). Director Michael Dougherty explains in The Lore and Legends of Halloween, a documentary accompanying the film’s DVD release, that he wanted not only to explore the origins of Halloween, but to restore knowledge about the source; he’s not going as far as Mr. Cochran of the Silver Shamrock company of course (!) but there is a sense of a debt of honour to far older traditions which are relevant even in the midst of modern traditions in this entertainingly self-aware film. In each of the interlinked tales, it is due observance of tradition – or not – which seals the fate of the characters.

As the film begins, a young couple are arriving home after a fancy dress Halloween parade (yet another development, at least stateside, in Halloween practices). When Emma blows out a Jack O’Lantern before midnight, her husband remonstrates with her: it’s bad luck, he explains. “It’s Halloween, not Hanukah,” she hisses, but before she can bad-temperedly remove all of the decorations from the garden she’s murdered by a mysterious assailant. Though Trick’r Treat is deliberately framed as cartoonish, this intro to the film sets the tone: those who do not understand the supernatural origins of the festival, or fail to take due care to observe the traditions designated by their ancestors for protection from harm, might just meet a grisly end. An assailant (quite literally) masquerading as a supernatural being meets a genuinely supernatural match in the lupine Laurie (Anna Paquin); a gluttonous child who sees fit to destroy pumpkin lanterns whilst gorging himself on candy is given an earnest Halloween history lesson and then treated to a fitting demise; the ghosts of the dead are abroad – even though they’re dressed in modern Halloween costume – and they’re looking for vengeance on the one night of the year when the border between our world and theirs is thinnest…

Trick’r Treat is jokily admonitory but quite earnestly uses Samhain as a source of horror; Season of the Witch also nods towards the grisly earliest days of the Celts’ October festival, and both films derive their scares from suggesting that whatever sinister source provided Halloween just might overpower us if we fail to understand it. After all, if there are wicked entities and forces afoot, we might rue the day we became ignorant of how to contain them…

Originally printed in Diaboliue Magazine issue 2 (2010). Part Two of Keri’s feature on Celtic horror coming soon…