Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Editor’s note: this editorial discusses plot elements in detail and as such contains spoilers.

One of the last of the Brutal As Hell team to get to see Axelle Carolyn’s most recent film, the feature-length Soulmate (2013), it had been my intention to just write a straightforward review – side-stepping the censorship issues which first Nia and then Ben have already discussed, to concentrate on the film we have left in its legal-and-above-board state. I will still be doing that, but the more I try to review the cut film, the more difficult it feels. For starters, see that arresting image at the top of the screen, with lead character Audrey (Anna Walton) so desperate and alone in the wake of her bereavement that she’s attempting suicide? Well, that scene – which had been Soulmate’s opening scene – no longer appears in the film as I saw it at all. All two and a half minutes of it have been excised.

I knew about the decision to trim such a large amount from the film, although until sitting down to watch it, I didn’t realise that the attempted suicide scene was how the film should have started. The effect of this is oddly alienating; you know you are meant to have seen something more; you’re even aware of the still image and might guess at how it would look on-screen; slowly, though, you understand that the suicide attempt has already happened in this version of the story, albeit in a hush-hush way, now hidden from the audience eye. My first impressions of the film were twofold, then – on one hand, aware of the outrage over the cuts, and on the other, landed with an odd sort of absence.

I would estimate – as this is all I can do – that the complete removal of the attempted suicide scene impacts upon all of the subsequent plot developments, and it did feel that way to me: that supreme low point in Audrey’s life should have been shown, to enable the audience to appreciate her mental state, to show us why she feels so frail that even her own family are too much for her, and to justify her decision to flee everything, heading to rural Wales in the hopes that she can recuperate. In terms of the supernatural development in the plot, this, too, hinges on us understanding completely what this woman has gone through. We are meant to be shocked by suicide or attempted suicide. But by being confronted with it, this shock would have aligned us with the idea that something so extreme in Audrey’s ‘energy’ prompts Talbot’s appearance. As the film stands, this idea still comes across, but in some important respects it has had its teeth pulled – not least because in the censored Soulmate, we don’t get the same idea of the circularity of Audrey’s plight – first, she’s struggling to end her life by cutting her wrists, then she’s struggling to save it, as she bleeds from the same area and the same type of wounds. Not that we see much blood…

Mention of ‘strong violence and gore’ used in the BBFC write-up of Soulmate seems laughable, given many of the films which have sailed through the censors unharmed. Not least of which was Jörg Buttgereit’s 80s shocker Nekromantik, passed at last with flying colours in the same month a quiet supernatural thriller like Soulmate took the bullet. If the argument made is that the BBFC need to restrict access to scenes of ‘imitable behaviour’, then how does one define imitable? Isn’t corpse fucking imitable if someone really, really puts their mind to it? In fact, isn’t anything imitable within certain bounds; so long as it isn’t supernatural, or requiring means beyond most people such as an army of their very own, behaviour can be copied, can’t it? It is beyond ridiculous and wildly patronising to assume that suicide is nothing more than a sort of latent stupefied urge, one which would lie dormant unless activated by a scene in a film, or indeed that in the age of the Internet, anyone would rent a film to find out what they could Google in a moment.

In fact, in this age of the internet – when you can find out how to make a pipe bomb, or see a real person being hacked to pieces, or join a militant organisation, or bring down corporations with computer viruses – the BBFC seem even more determined to hang onto their old-school arbitrariness and protestations about the Greater Good, with their occasional ludicrous consumer surveys and politics-of-the-day-laden edicts. They come across like King Canute, but they’re not even facing the right way. The sum of this anachronistic, paternalistic nonsense is in bizarre decisions like the Soulmate cuts.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy Soulmate – that’s not my purpose in writing this – and I’ll review it shortly. But my heart goes out to Axelle, her cast and her crew that they have had their film offered up in this way, just so that someone, somewhere can feel they’ve kept us all safer. It’s very hard not to share that frustration, especially when you feel you have to preface a review of a good new horror film with a proviso.

By Keri O’Shea

For many horror fans who first came into contact with Edgar Allan Poe via an illustrated volume, it’s likely that, in their minds, Poe’s fiction is forever associated with one artist in particular. Other artists before and after the illustrator in question have turned their hand to Poe, not least the great Decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley, but the 1919 illustrated edition, masterminded by an unassuming Irishman called Harry Clarke, seems to have become irrevocably intertwined with Poe’s tales.

Clarke, a Dubliner, grew up immersed in the emergent, very modern schools of art which continued to blossom during and after the deliciously-vibrant fin de siècle years. At this time, an upsurge in experimental art, music and literature rang out the Victorian era in an effusion of lurid colour, moral questions and questionable morals. Aesthetic representation at this time in some senses seemed torn between old and new, the heady and the sparse; the crowded symmetry of the Arts and Crafts movement (think William Morris) segued into increasingly stylised human forms, meticulous detail becoming itself unrealistic.

Clarke worked tirelessly during his lengthy career within illustration and stained glass (which has to be seen to be believed – go to Dublin to do so) and during this time, he dealt with a wide range of subjects, but – like many artists who fell under the Decadent influence in their formative years – he was drawn towards literary works which focused on ‘the perverse and sinister’. To return to Beardsley, an artist who undoubtedly had an effect on the young Clarke, he is well-known for his illustrations of Oscar Wilde’s works as well as of Poe, Wilde himself being drawn to Decadent themes such as the ‘femme fatale’ and deviant psychology. When it comes to Poe, he is therefore in many ways an obvious choice for illustration, for anyone interested in such themes.

Clarke’s illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination are relentless, recognisable and still remarkable. This is not a verdict which has developed over time, either; they were instantly popular, and although their style was innovative, people took to them happily and quickly. Even in 1919, the edition was selling for a staggering 5 guineas (easily several hundred pounds in today’s money). Although the illustrations themselves do owe a debt to Beardsley’s own, utilising a similar level of fine detail and stylised nature, for example, Clarke’s own work adds more fluidity, more natural lines. Significantly, he doesn’t shy away from depicting the key moments of horror, either. In terms of unflinching focus, Clarke’s work seems to tip the hat to the sensationalist popular literature of the ‘penny dreadfuls’ of previous years in places; he isn’t afraid of peopling his pages with the more-dead-than-alive Madeleine Usher, or those in the throes of torture, or those committing murder.

There are twenty-nine illustrated tales in all, and illustrations for each. Rather than discuss them all here, I have picked three which I particularly like or find particularly significant – though, if you haven’t yet seen the full array of these brilliant pieces of artwork, I recommend you to find the rest.

The Premature Burial

The fear of being buried alive still exists, even in the modern and medicalised world – and it’s become a mainstay of modern horror on its own terms. The opening scenes of Broken (2006) depict an agonising struggle to escape a premature burial; go back beyond that, and with typical overkill, Fulci shows us that the only thing worse than waking up in a coffin is the method of rescue. Still, it isn’t a going concern for us – at least in the West – in the way that it was in Poe’s day. When Poe was writing, and for decades beyond that, people actively feared being buried before death. Primitive health care, frequent epidemics, a tendency for people to die at home and an inability to store corpses hygienically there or anywhere meant that the time between death/’death’ and burial could be very short indeed. Tales abounded of people sitting bolt upright at their own funerals; grave-robbers disclosed that on occasion, their prizes would be unearthed with their knees forced up, as if trying to kick away the coffin lid, or the coffins would bear scratch marks on the inside; you could even purchase a ‘safety coffin’, designed to allow you to alert others should you succumb to live burial. Perhaps Poe’s protagonist in ‘The Premature Burial’ isn’t so insane after all, given all of this, but yet his level of obsession with the risk that his catalepsy would mean he’d share this fate is so extreme that he cannot live his life ordinarily.

Clarke captures that moment of utter terror and panic which Poe’s character fears so much. Clarke’s is an ambiguous figure, however; the tree’s roots have passed the coffin’s lid, insinuating a length of time has passed, but the buried man (looking directly at the viewer) still appears alive; his hands look skeletal on first glance, but not on another. Clarke has effectively communicated the terror and the torpor of the character; the great space between coffin and surface emphasises the hopelessness of his fate.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

Hypnosis to us is usually the stuff of light entertainment, but when the practice of ‘magnetism’ was first pioneered by Franz Anton Mesmer in the late Eighteenth Century, it was viewed as revolutionary, a sort of mysterious half-way house between science and magic when any understanding of the workings of the mind was notional at best. Its recognised potential to fix the unfixable – health ailments, mental disorders – allowed it to cement itself into fringe health care where to an extent, it remains. Edgar Allan Poe, being Edgar Allan Poe, hyper-extends the possibilities of hypnosis to pose a devious question, a morbid ‘what if?’

Here, a man is mesmerised by his friend when on the point of dying from tubercolosis; seven months are allowed to go by with him in this condition, neither alive nor dead, with Ernest Valdemar held in a horrendous limbo. He has all the appearance of death, yet his consciousness exists – somewhere, and can be questioned, although his answers are unenlightening. He is, he communicates, both ‘alive’ and ‘dead’. Eventually, they decide to release him from this condition. Clarke has chosen the story’s gruesome conclusion for this piece of art, where Valdemar is at last released from his hypnotised trance, and suddenly dissolves, into seven months’ worth of “detestable putrescence”. His decayed form, stark against the white bedlinen, oozes and leaks as he finally sinks into death-proper. To all intents and purposes, he looks like a forerunner of our own dead-alive, zombies.

The Tell-Tale Heart

Aberrant mental states were Poe’s bread and butter and this tale – the first Poe tale I ever read – is in many ways one of his absolute cruelest. The protagonist (antagonist?) of The Tell-Tale Heart murders a defenceless, elderly neighbour on nothing more than a whim; he admits as much, conceding that the old man had never done him any harm, but he carefully plans his murder regardless. It’s a Poe story, like The Black Cat, which I find uncomfortable reading even today. And yet, in reading about his meticulous planning and cover-up (a clear influence on Poe reader and scholar Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment), I can still feel some grain of pity for this troubled criminal. The more he protests his sanity, the more it’s clear he’s insane.

Clarke illustrated two stages of the story, but I have chosen this one – which is after the crime itself – because I think it’s incredibly interesting, not to mention ahead of its time. Here, the certainty and focus of the young man shown as he commits the murder is gone, and Clarke shows some evidence of the fracturing of his state of mind. He stands, haunted by his perception of the old man’s beating heart from beneath the floorboards where he’s concealed. He’s half-terrified, half-transfixed.

Clarke has shown the man’s awareness of the beating of the ‘hideous heart’ in a way which foreshadows comic book art of generations to follow: a pattern of numerous human hearts is shown gracefully emanating from the floor, their tendrils reaching out to the protagonist, inescapable. It’s a novel technique and a skilled balance of the beautiful and grotesque. The whole room is distorted and unreal, with a bizarrely-curving floor and a nightmarish eye adding to the effect of persecution and paranoia.

Then, of course, there’s the figure of the dead man itself; our criminal is lost to us, looking elsewhere as he is haunted by his deeds – but the old man peeps out at us, looking straight at us, wild and reproachful. The result is a disturbing one. Just as Poe forces us to confront the murder, so does Clarke’s illustration – by giving us an idea of how this culpability feels to Poe’s character. Like all of Clarke’s work on Poe, it’s both unflinching and insightful.

By Matt Harries

When I consider the word ‘horror’ in cinematic terms, I think almost instantly of Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. “The horror! The horror!”, his utterance perhaps an expression of a kind of resigned revulsion at the depths of the human condition, witnessed by and yet simultaneously perpetuated by him. Regarding the connection with Jacob’s Ladder, both obviously deal with aspects of the Vietnamese war. What further unites them beyond some examination of a historical conflict though, is their investigation of what Roger Ebert described as “the dark places of the soul”. This is something that Jacob’s Ladder delves into literally – the battle for the soul of one man between forces of light and dark, the true nature of which is only revealed toward the films culmination.

Where Jacob’s Ladder really succeeds is that for much of the film, the viewer is left guessing as to what extent the nightmarish visions of Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) are mere hallucinations, or glimpses into a very real hell that lurks tantalisingly close, behind the veil of everyday perception. From the opening frames (the ubiquitous slow motion, dawn footage of choppers in the jungles of Vietnam), to the grime and squalor of New York (rust, urban decay, the homeless), to the stale bureaucracy of the hospital reception, we are grounded in a very recognisable reality. Singer, clearly still traumatised by the memories of the Mekong Delta, begins to sense a malign presence in his life, a feeling enhanced by vivid nightmares recalling the savage final events of his military service. It isn’t hard to imagine these creatures being supernatural, otherworldly beings, but we learn that despite the tentacles and thrashing, inhuman heads, and the chattering, snapping teeth that lunge for him in waking moments, the root of these beings seems to once again be man himself. In this case that old protagonist the Scientist, represented by a “hippy chemist” Micheal (Matt Craven), recruited by the army to add a little chemically-enhanced battle-lust to the grunts on the ground back in the ‘Nam.

This facet of the film echoes the infamous Project MKUltra, the U.S government’s human research project that ran through the 50s and 60s. This controversial program was designed as an investigation into the efficacy of a wide range of drugs in the application of mind control, among them LSD and BZ (which is mentioned in the film’s closing credits). Although BZ was rumoured to have been applied to soldiers in Vietnam, there is no evidence to suggest it actually turned them into killing machines. Nonetheless, there are anecdotal references to a CIA operative who acted as a test subject, and after being dosed with LSD entered a psychotic state in which every passing car appeared to contain monsters. For Jacob, such vehicle-bound creatures almost end his life at one point in the film. Is his battle through this personal hell merely the result of clandestine human research gone badly awry?

Sadly for Singer, munching a tonne of grapefruit isn’t going to help him here. As he struggles to make sense of his decaying mental state, and becomes more and more withdrawn and paranoid, he is embattled not only by demonic hallucinations, but by his own girlfriend Jezebel (the excellent Elizabath Peña), who herself takes on some devilish qualities and who may or may not be in league with the Hellraiser-like entities that continue to encroach on Jacob’s life. When he makes contact with other survivors from his ill-fated platoon, he seems to be honing in on a truth of sorts. Aided by the redoubtable Lou (Danny Aiello), his philosophic chiropractor, Jacob stumbles toward epiphany…

To say, as the blurb on the back of the case states, that Jacob’s Ladder is both mystery, thriller and horror, would be pretty accurate. The way Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, 9 ½ weeks) handles these elements is one of the film’s key strengths. Frightening though they are – the dance scene at the party is an excellent example of Jacob’s monstrous visions impacting in the most mundane of situations – the moments of ‘horror’ are kept relatively fleeting. Indeed, the director is careful to never place these creatures in the same shot as Jacob himself, thereby reinforcing his isolation.

There are some disturbing notions and scenes which have nothing to do with fell beasts, which adds to an increasingly claustrophobic and paranoid tension, The shadow of human experimentation spreads from the field of battle to the grotesque depths of a hospital where the residents resemble thalidomide victims – another indictment of science perhaps? Nonetheless, there is a supernatural element which keeps us guessing until an ending that, in lesser hands, could have slipped into mawkishness. Luckily though, Tim Robbins does a great job as the suffering Jacob, and by the end of the film it would take a wooden heart not to feel he doesn’t deserve a little peace. The somewhat scary Elizabeth Peña does a nice job in not committing completely to either side of her personality, thereby keeping the guessing game going right to the end. The supporting cast have a familiar look to them, but Danny Aiello as Lou stood out for me. Sometimes rambunctious, sometimes wise, Jacob sees this manipulator of spines as his own personal overgrown cherub. ‘Lou’ though…which biblical name does that remind you of? As Lou says himself, with his final piece of advice to Jacob –

“So, if you’re frightened of dying and… and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth”.

Is Lou, Jacob’s saviour, possibly not so much Cherubim, as Lightbringer? While the exact nature of his role is never made explicit, he does illuminate a way out of the hospital, in the bowels of which Jacob faces the inquisitor-surgeons that seem to represent these dualistic devil/angels.

Although Jacob’s Ladder reveals itself to be a complex film that seems to suggest a reality torn between the earthly and the fantastical, its portrayal of the cycle of guilt that seems to anchor Jacob within his personal hell, seems strongly evocative of religious ideas of guilt, sin and repentance, of punishment and purgatory. Always, despite the Old Testament intensity of his hallucinatory foes and paranoid visions, the common thread is that mankind, in his cruelty, predisposition towards violence and affliction of suffering against his fellow man, holds both the keys to his own damnation, and at the same time his own redemption.

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.