Jim Mickle. Joe R. Lansdale. When you hear those two names, chances are you immediately think of the horror genre – so, when both of those names can be mentioned in the same sentence, you’ll definitely expect a certain type of movie. Mickle has, after all, cut his teeth on the horror genre, from his earliest feature, the no-budget zombie movie Mulberry Street (which surprised me with the level of organic social commentary therein), then with the excellent Stake Land and last year’s remake of We Are What We Are, a film which proves single-handedly that remakes are not always a bad thing – far from it. As for Lansdale, even if you don’t know a thing about his books, you’d have had to be living under a rock to miss the cult influence enjoyed by Bubba Ho-Tep. And yet, here we are with Cold in July: a screenplay written by Mickle and friend/collaborator Nick Damici, based on a Lansdale novel, which has nothing to do with horror whatsoever. And the results are superb.
Cold in July is a crime thriller; set in the late 80s in Texas (naturally, given this is a Lansdale story), regular family man Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall) is awakened in his home one night by the sound of an intruder. Reluctantly reaching into a bedside cabinet to retrieve a handgun, he goes to investigate – and winds up using his weapon, when he is startled during a face-off with an (unarmed) man. He kills the guy stone dead.
Still, these things happen, right? The police, led by the charming and plausible Ray (Damici) assure Dane that none of this was his fault; what the hell was he meant to do when someone breaks into his place? – a man has the right to protect his wife and son. Turns out that the intruder was a wanted man and a felon anyway, so maybe he had it coming. Except said dead felon has a father, who via the press coverage of this story tracks the Dane family down, threatening revenge against them…
…And it was at this stage of the film that my enthusiasm and attention began to wane, to be honest. Firstly, I thought that the pace was jerking along in an uneven way, as if a quick set-up was just being used in order to introduce a Bad Guy who then proceeds to spend the rest of the ninety minutes terrorising a family. I worried for a while there that what I was about to sit through was some sort of love letter to Cape Fear, a similar scenario with a similarly omnipotent, omnipresent villain of the piece.
Happily, I was soon proved wrong, and this early element in the plot is in fact a stepping-stone into far more unfamiliar, unpredictable terrain. Mickle knows what he’s doing, damnit, and what he does here – just as my hopes were fading – is to transform the course of the plot, performing an effective about-face which makes what follows into a pitch-perfect, yet complex sequence of events. As Dane stands in line at the local police station at the end of what you could justifiably call ‘Act One’, a chance discovery leads him to doubt everything he has been told, even everything he has experienced with regards the shooting up until this point. The subsequent developments draw us into a haze of paranoia, doubtful identities, horrific acts, those sorts of ‘voyages of self-discovery’ which alter and darken.
I’m playing coy and throwing nebulous phrases around because it would be a crime to discuss too many of the finer points of the plot here; just know that Cold of July is Mickle’s most accomplished work to date, and his growing confidence – with perhaps the relish at getting to grips with something so unlike any of his previous work, too – allows him to extend his abilities in new ways. He’s always been good at crafting characters whose complete histories never need to be known; here he takes that further, weaving together a complicated and engagingly incomplete array of personae. This expert handling of complexities means that his characters here can appear differently to the audience, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively, which adds a great deal to them. This isn’t always as straightforward as it might be. The Dane family, for instance: I had a hard time liking them, even with sympathising with their ordeal at the beginning of the film, however unfair and frightening it is. Hall’s nervy, unworldly behaviour throughout is such a far cry from his work on Dexter that I had trouble recognising him at first – but in his flaws, he’s more believable. He’s a regular guy after all, flung into a series of events he’s unprepared for, and we’re reminded of this throughout. Sam Shepard gets stuck into his role as a con with relish, as does Don Johnson, playing a flamboyant yet deeply humane private investigator – and here, there’s another way in which Cold in July deviates from previous Mickle movies. It’s funny. Not bittersweet, funny. Of course this relates back to Lansdale again and the style in which he writes, but nevertheless it’s clear that the film’s comfortable enough in what it’s doing to provide some wry, but overt humour – not derailing what’s going on in the slightest, but adding depth to it. It’s a new one, but it works.
And, finally, this film’s burgeoning confidence is demonstrated in the fact that it doesn’t feel it has to sew up all of its loose ends. I had some questions left when the credits rolled, not at all because it felt like the plot didn’t work, but because it had worked. Good storytelling can supercede full exposition, without leaving an audience feeling ripped off, without leaving an audience feeling like the writers didn’t know what happened.
Bold, interesting and finely-tuned, Cold in July will almost without a doubt be one of my films of the year. I’ve followed what Jim Mickle has been doing for years now, and any slight reservations I have when a filmmaker declares he’s ready to move away from the ‘calling cards’ afforded by the horror genre into new territory have come to naught here. And, hey – I couldn’t help but notice what I like to think were a few friendly nods to horror during the course of this newest film, a little reference here, a little reference there. I like to think that was a thank you, and not a complete goodbye.
Cold in July is showing at selected cinemas in the UK now.
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.
We’re an unhappy array of meat-sacks, eh? Even in these times – in the Western world at least – of relative plenty and luxury (and before you argue, consider that you could have been born in the 14th Century) we treat our bodies like battlegrounds; when material concerns become secondary, we turn our gaze inwards, and when for many spirituality has slipped into the background, or disappeared altogether, then the body can become all, and for its own sake. Perhaps we starve it, or gorge, or puncture, or cut it, or surgically alter, or detest its component parts – but for many, a prolonged and considered hatred of their physical being is part of the daily routine. When this self-loathing becomes pathological, then the condition of body dysmorphia can hold sway. That very real, very irrational mental state is the basis for filmmaker Andy Stewart’s short film, itself titled Dysmorphia – and it’s not a film which plays coy with the grisly potential of the disease.
Our nameless protagonist – unknown to us, but evidently loved by someone, to judge by the family photo he keeps by his side, is a man who plans to take a very final step in his fixation with a warped, disfigured or somehow ‘wrong’ – in his eyes, anyway – body part…the end result is excruciating, engrossing, and brutally honest.
Sometimes you don’t need anything other than an unflinching focus on mental torment to bring the horror, and it is clear from this film that director Andy Stewart understands this; he judges the amount of scrutiny to give to the focus of his film very well (and no doubt there will have been some other considerations in how much of the injury to display) but for one thing, it at least makes a decent attempt to replicate just how damn difficult it would be to sever a limb. Take note, Fede Alvarez.
True, the epilogue of this short film stretches things a little, but not past the point of possibility; we’ve probably all read about people so fascinated with amputation that they’ve made their own attempts. What we definitely get here is a sense of the pain and sick determination to do something to one’s flesh that would appall most people, and the dialogue-lite screenplay, with its very realistic-seeming and prolonged non-verbal agony, adds hugely to its overall effect. I felt a sense of foreboding at the beginning of this film – and that definitely returned at the end. The constant compulsion to photograph and upload images added an unpleasant, oddly familiar veneer, too…we do seem to be living in the age of continually uploading every moment of our lives, so why not this?
Stewart is about to release his next short film, Split, onto the horror festival circuit – so check out the trailer, and be sure to give it a watch if you see it out there.
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.
“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.
Depiction of figures found on a shrine on Hadrian's Wall
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…
Editor’s note: this review contains mild spoilers (though nothing more than on the website or packaging blurb).
Whilst Vincent Price is rightly revered for all of his extensive filmography, it’s often the slightly more unconventional, the more unorthodox roles in which he truly stood out. That may sound like a very silly thing to say, when you consider that so often he acted out plot-lines which were anything but orthodox, compared to more mainstream cinema at least – but if he become known for anything at all then it was a certain overblown quality, a manner of enunciating his lines, a grandiose style. When he did something other than that in his work, then it was noteworthy. His performance in Witchfinder General, three years prior to making the film under discussion here, was quite unlike anything else that he’d done; this came about by accident, as he was bitterly miserable in grey England and at loggerheads with the film’s upstart young director Michael Reeves, but the end result was phenomenal. And, whilst Cry of the Banshee, made soon thereafter, has many merits – the next role he acted which, for me, is really stand-out is somehow an unholy marriage between Price’s older style and the pared-down performance he gave in Witchfinder General. Price’s turn as Dr. Anton Phibes, is both flamboyant but mordant, ostentatious but solemn – apart from anything else, it’s a role in which he is not seen to enunciate a single word.
The plot is, in a nutshell, that something despicable is happening in 1920s London. Surgeons and doctors are dying, in a series of increasingly bizarre ways; insect attacks, animal attacks – and not native species either. The common link seems to be the earlier death of a Victoria Phibes at the hands of these medics; it is recounted that her distraught husband, a Dr. Phibes, was rushing to her side, when he too tragically died – he in an accident, her on the operating table. We are made privy in the opening reels of the film that a mysterious personage wearing a mask seems linked to these events, but the exposition which completes this story is anything but predictable. The film plays out as an ingenious revenge drama, interspersed with equally ingenious horror scenes and what can only be described as musical interludes. It’s part Grand Guignol and part vaudeville.
If that sounds disparaging then believe me, it’s not intended as such. One of the film’s chief appeals is how uniquely it marries its different elements. It never feels like a camp comedy with some horror thrown in, nor does it feel like a horror film gone awry. There are some occasions at first when you wonder if you’re meant to be laughing – the investigating officer’s name-related gags, the simply fabulous murders (death by gilded unicorn?) but soon you realise that director Robert Fuest intends you to do just that, and there’s plenty to laugh at here – the very presence of that British institution Terry Thomas will do it alone. Another factor which adds massively to the appeal – and something which largely benefits from the Blu-ray treatment – is the unique, weird aesthetic on offer. It may be set in the 1920s, and the Art Deco trappings might be there, but this film feels and looks incredibly 70s. From the colouration to the fabrics, it’s the charmingly unconvincing period setting which sets off the plot developments so well. Vulnavia (Virginia North), Phibes’s beautiful and mute assistant (whose attachment to him is never questioned nor explained) looks every inch the 70s glamour girl. It’s a style which is crazy enough to work.
And then, there’s that strangely prescient theme, considering how horror’s developed in recent-ish years – the specific revenge taken against each of the allegedly-culpable surgeons, doctors and nurses. Brutal as Hell editor-in-chief Ben noted as we watched the film that it has a lot in common with Seven; it has the biblical link, the systematic approach and the ritualised, torturous deaths. If Saw upped the ante from Seven and spawned a sub-genre, then Seven seems to owe a lot to Phibes. Add to that a twisted, but charming love story (with Caroline Munro as the uncredited, voiceless and motionless lost bride), and what you have, folks, is a classic cult movie.
So far, so good. It’s fair to say that most Vincent Price fans will have seen this movie in some incarnation anyway, and most of you will own it in some form already; I know I’m probably preaching to the converted. So should you fork out for the film on Blu-Ray? I have to say, although I’d advise it on the strength of what we saw, we didn’t see the whole package, as we didn’t receive the lot. Arrow is releasing both the first film and its sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again. On top of all that, you get a slew of extra features; the usual commentaries, trailers and a collector’s booklet, an interview with Victoria Price (Vincent Price’s daughter) and an interview with David Del Valle, Price’s biographer. What I did see – and rather enjoyed, thinking it an obvious choice in so many ways – is the short interview with British horror comedy team The League of Gentlemen about their love for the film. They have clearly let their love of horror bleed into their work, and it was nice to hear them chat happily about their influences. The transfer itself is impeccable – sometimes almost too much so, as high-definition picks out little flaws which would have passed us by on a less polished format, but then for every string-attached-to-bat you’d rather not see, you do get to enjoy the vivid colours as they were intended.
Essentially, Arrow have been turning out quality products for years now, and this is no exception. You could do a damn sight worse than add this release to your collection, and whether you’ve seen this film never, once or fifty times, there is more than enough here to reward your hard cash.
The Complete Dr. Phibes will be released by Arrow Video on 16th June 2014.
If you don’t know who Richard Corben is, you need to go back and retake Horror Comics 101. Luckily for you, I wrote the curriculum on horror comics, so I’ll fill you in. Corben is an artist who first cut his teeth on old horror rags from the sixties and seventies. With his unique art style and painful attention to detail, he quickly built a cult following, expanding further into the weird world of indy art, and became a regular contributor to Heavy Metal Magazine. As his fame grew, he began working on comic adaptations of famous authors, something he continues to this day, and between 1986 to 1994, even started his own publishing imprint and self-released his work. In short, he’s pretty damn bad-ass. Not one to retire anytime soon, he has recently hooked up with Dark Horse Comics and has been creating more fantastic famous story adaptations, this time going to back to his favorite horror writer, Edgar Allen Poe.
So, I’m not going to claim that I know all of Poe’s work and this is definitely a comic where my ignorance shines through. So while many of you have read these two stories, they are brand new to me and I’m going to describe them like they’re brand new to you too. The first story, titled Morella, is about a resentful husband who spends all his time cursing his wife, who he has grown to hate. Everyday, she spends hours playing with black magic and when her husband finally threatens to leave, she falls ill and dies. But before she goes, she warns that her daughter (his stepdaughter) will come to be his new wife. True to her word, the girl, named Orella, arrives, a spitting image of her mother. But who is she really and why is she deathly afraid of being called her mother’s name? The second, and better known, story is Murders in Rue Morgue about a grisly murder of a mother and daughter inside of a locked room. Though clues are vaguer than the lead detective when he solves the mystery, the answer leaves everyone shocked. SHOCKED!
One of the great things about this comic, especially if you’re a Corben fan, is that he really goes back to his roots. It’s been argued that some of his best work has been horror adaptations and it’s easy to see why. This is a man who understands the bizarre, underlying tones of a written horror story and manages to bring it to the forefront of his work. He’s got a passion for the Weird Tale genre that few have succeeded at with the type of precision that he has. This current title is a perfect introduction to his work as he attempts to bring another classic Poe story to life, one in a long line of Poe tales that he has done. The art is perfectly unsettling as his characters race down the filthy streets and back alleys of gaslight America, scrambling away from unnamed horrors and the creeping fingers of death and insanity. You can practically hear the crows call as the bell tolls for another victim of his sinister macabre. I know, it sounds so cheesy, but this comic is so perfectly Gothic, you’ll be popping in a tape of The Cure as you sip a glass of absinthe under the pale moonlight.
If you read this comic and are digging Corben’s style, he literally has decades of work for you to pilfer through. On top of his own work, his illustrations for Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella are easily available. He has also done work with the more lurid characters of Marvel and DC such as the Punisher and a five issue run on Hellblazer. This is a man who has been quoted as saying that he will work until he dies and at age 73, the proof is in the blood pudding. A master of his craft and a revolutionary in his own right, this is a guy no one can afford to miss.
A couple of years back, Horror in Short ran a double-feature by the title of The Can-Cannibals; if you missed it and you have a soft spot for neo-grindhouse, then by all means, check it out here. The director of The Can-Cannibals, Matthew Ragsdale, has been busy since that time, and the film you’re about to see here – entitled Mass – was his entry into the much-feted ABCs of Death Part 2. Unfortunately the film wasn’t selected, but as there have been so many entrants for that prestigious compilation, a lot of the entrants now have big plans of their own. Watch this space for more on that…and onto the film itself.
Mass is, according to Ragsdale, inspired by ‘mondo cinema, Church of Satan footage and the fashion of Chelsea Wolfe’. My first thoughts when I watched this were, ‘This looks uncannily like the Satanic ritual footage from Faces of Death’, so I guess that would at least kind-of tick two of those boxes from the start. I’m a big fan of Chelsea Wolfe too, and absolutely adore Krist Mort’s photography so aesthetically, this film is great for me. Its premise is that a covert female cult who worship a female Deity are interrupted by a crazed Fundamentalist. This, folks, is Mass:
Although not a Satanic cult, this group of worshippers certainly have a dark occult vibe about them, with the veils and cowls going on; Ragsdale has stuck with the grainy 70s style of film, too, and here is looks pretty convincing. I felt like Mass wouldn’t look out of place on a grindhouse trailer reel, sandwiched between Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and The Devil’s Rain, maybe. There’s also more of a film structure here in terms of a storyline, whereas the earlier films we featured felt a lot more like tasters of a film would could potentially follow. That said, I wanted to see more here – it did still have that taster-reel feel, and I’d love to see what would happen if that aesthetic and the subject matter were played out more fully (and yeah, I know for the purposes of the competition that couldn’t be – I’m talking generally, for future reference here).
Mass is a neat, aesthetically-pleasing film, and underground cults give good viewing. That is a truism. Now, I’d love to see these calling cards branch out into something more, so it’ll be interesting to see where the director goes from here. As for the new compilation project – currently under the working title World of Death – we hope to have more details on that in the near future…
I’ve mentioned the minor anthology movie comeback on the site before; whether the genre has gone through something of a spike on the indie scene thanks to the notoriety of the recent V/H/S films (which I’ve still yet to see) or whether it’s just one of those things, a style that’s just come around again, I’m still glad that it’s happening. It’s a neat format which potentially allows different directors and writers to collaborate on at best a brilliant compendium, and even at worst a curiosity, because after all if you find a chapter you don’t like, it’s not going to last for the whole of the film. There’s a lot of room for play in how the film gets framed too: Dead Girls, a brand-new anthology movie, refracts its own three chapters through a uniquely female perspective, making all of the key protagonists women. Zero budget or not, the results are surprisingly bold and ambitious.
It’s evident from the get-go that the writers involved here know their horror and are happy to play around with things viewers might expect, because the initial set-up is a clear nod to a horror trope. We start with a screaming woman, fleeing into the middle of nowhere to escape her male, armed pursuer. So far, so familiar. Similarly she spots a house up ahead and makes her way there, finding the door unlocked – which she quickly locks behind her, taking a moment to feel safer before she begins to hear indistinct voices coming from upstairs. She goes to investigate…and from here, we leave one story and segue into the first of three chapters, this one being Over My Dead Body.
Over My Dead Body places us in an unhappy house party: girlfriend Suzy (Aubrey Joyce Tunnell) is far from pleased with her boyfriend Travis’s conduct. Seems he’s been flirting with another lady, with very few fucks given whether Suzy sees it, reacts to it, or anything of the sort. Suzy goes off on her own and wanders by a room where a tattooist is offering his services; she asks him if he can give her a tattoo which encapsulates the message, ‘Don’t fuck with me’. He says he can – though it evidently doesn’t work too well, at first at least, as it seems she hasn’t seen the last of Travis…or he of her. What follows is a Tales From The Crypt style story of wronged women and vengeance. There are of course limitations on what can be shown on screen when budget and so on is taken into account, but this segment manages a nice amount of atmosphere, whilst keeping that overblown, dark-cartoonish vibe.
Next up, we go far further into that dark cartoonish vibe, adding a dash of what feels in a few ways like 80s horror with a schlocky, grisly sideways swipe at frat/sorority culture in Theta Phi’s Never Die. Ah, the sorority house: an aspect of American culture which seems enough of a horror all on its own to this outsider, but some girls seem to want to be part of these establishments – as is the case with friends Courtney (Ali Hadley) and Avery (Mia Doran), whom we meet on their way to a pledge night at one of their campus’s most desirable houses. They get lucky – if you can call it that – and get invited to stage two, the initiation, with mousey, unworldly Avery singled out for special honours. Uh-oh. Well, she impresses the girls alright – in her own way. Theta Phi’s Never Die is very entertaining and has a few twists too; it kept me engaged throughout, and I liked how it interwove the smallest dash of disdain for this type of culture into an otherwise fairly light-touch horror yarn.
Last up is Vengeance is Mine, a story which plays with the ‘fallen woman’ idea. Maggie (Kelsey Sante) is a former Catholic ward who has wound up on the streets, turning tricks in the hope that one day she can escape her past – but one more encounter with her former benefactor turns particularly nasty one night, and she decides to take action against the people who let her down. Now, of all the stories here, I thought that some of the subject matter in this one sat a tad uncomfortably with the format. Sure, all three of the stories reference sex and violence, but I didn’t feel that some of the heavy topics (including abuse of a minor) could rightly be given an anthology treatment very easily. It also suffers a little by being the last story, but using the same modus operandi of those tales which came before. Still, I did like how the occult came gradually to play a part, albeit an ambiguous one, in the proceedings.
Through all of this, the frame – the house and its occupant – not only doesn’t go away, but plays a role in each of the tales, and I do think this is something to be commended. It shows that director/writer Neal Fischer and those who co-wrote with him here have some much-needed confidence in working with the film’s structure, adding some pause for thought and sophistication as the stories play out. It’s this sort of willingness to do a little more with a little less that can supercede budgetary restraints – and it be fair, it is clear that Dead Girls was made on very little cash. It has ideas, though, and that’s something that money alone can’t buy. That said, I think the film would be stronger without the (admittedly minor) voiceover which creeps in, because I thought that the film worked better with the mystery of the framework fully maintained.
Still, what we have here is a bold idea and a novel framework, a plot where wronged women call the shots (and hints of wicked magic move things along). I can live with a few quibbles on style for the sake of the good stuff. If you have a place in your heart for indie movies which are willing to try something new, then Dead Girls is a dark, quirky collection of horror tales with a twist.
Dead Girls via Roughcut Films will be released soon.
“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.
Depiction of figures found on a shrine on Hadrian's Wall
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…
Here at Brutal as Hell we have a nickname for ourselves: that nickname is ‘Contrary as Fuck’, because you can bet your bottom dollar that for every film which sparks a massive positive reaction in the horror world, at least one of us will at best shrug, and at worst actively reject it. For my part, where everyone seemed to be waxing lyrical about the merits of director Ti West’s supernatural thriller The Inkeepers a couple of years back, I actively hated it. The generic-looking ghost, the whiny hipster female lead…my good god. It was a real case of ‘is it just me?’ and I still think it might have been. That said, House of the Devil – which I caught up to quite recently – was diverting enough, and I have to admit I was more than a little curious when I saw that West had put his name to a modern-day version of the story of the Jonestown Massacre, thus moving into new territory altogether. This is The Sacrament, and – you know what? It’s a pleasant surprise in many ways.
The film begins with an introduction to an organisation, based in New York, called VICE – a modern-day media outlet comprising of three young men, Jake, Sam and Patrick, who use their expertise and the internet as a medium to report unorthodox, or otherwise underrepresented news items from around the world. They refer to their approach as ‘immersionism’, which really seems to be a multimedia form of gonzo journalism. This all takes a personal twist, when Patrick receives a letter from his sister, Caroline. Caroline had been drying out in a small Christian commune after succumbing to a drug problem, and she’s written to her brother begging him to come and visit her. When he tries to do so, he finds that she and all of the other family members have in fact left the United States, and he’s told where he needs to go to find them.
This seems like too good an opportunity for VICE to miss, so Jake and Sam decide to tag along too, cameras in hand (natch) to record the event. They roll up somewhere in South America (Jonestown was Guyana, but the exact place here isn’t named), getting past a rather ominous armed guard, but eventually they find Caroline apparently happy, healthy and contented in an idyllic commune called Eden Parish, alongside a lot of other once-troubled folk – all now equally under the sway of an enigmatic figure known as ‘Father’. The small film crew are made welcome and permitted to wander around during their short stay, interviewing the residents and forming their own conclusions about life in Eden Parish. They find nothing particularly amiss, actually; there’s suspicion of them as outsiders, and they find it hard to fathom why people would sell their homes and their cash for the building of a remote project like this, but perhaps that’s just their urbane cynicism talking.
Whatever. You know damn well that it’s only a matter of time before there’s a sinister twist, and if you know even the leanest version of the history behind this film, you might wonder at how The Sacrament doesn’t colllapse beneath that weight. In truth, West accomplishes a great deal here. By bringing a version of the Jonestown tale into the modern day and giving us some largely likeable, plausible protagonists to play it out (plus some modern technological means with which to do it) he’s able to craft an effective, tense horror film. One of the ways he does this is by getting straight to the nub of the plot, by using a lot of on-screen text at the beginning of the movie. It’s a risk, but it works: we find out what’s going on and why, and then we are essentially on a par with our main guys, finding out what’s happening alongside them as they travel to the commune. Part of this is via the truly ubiquitous handheld camera shooting style with which we’re now oh-so familiar, but it’s carefully done here, for the most part. Sure, as ever there are some sections in the film where I could do without it, but in others, West manages to work the framing device neatly into the plot, even using it to give us a decent twist in one scene.
It’s remarkable really, seeing as the source material is so well-known, that this film manages to create such a sense of foreboding. Partly, this is because it is so able to take its time. There’s no need, thanks to the early exposition, to dwell on establishing who our protagonists or antagonists are or what they’re doing; we’re given plenty of footage of life in Eden Parish looking just fine, and the gradual rising tension comes on so slowly, that it’s almost painful. The superb performance by ‘Father’ (Gene Jones) has a substantial part to play in this rising tension; pitched wrongly, this part could have been laughable. As it stands, Jones manages to make his character recognisable, but crucially charismatic and plausible. Not to knock the good performances all round, but The Sacrament hinges on the role of Father, and Jones delivers. The dark, building, pulsing soundtrack acts as a signal that things are going to turn ugly, too – as does the Christian singing, which – ah come on – is creepy all on its own.
This isn’t a perfect movie; some of the signposting in the film is gargantuan and neon-lit, and as mentioned, if you have an especial aversion to tripod-less camerawork then you may grow exasperated with some sequences. However, as someone who’s been non-commital on West’s work to date, I found this film very refreshing and well-crafted; it kept me engaged and, in places, yes it did manage to shock me. Quiet and brooding it might be, up to a point, but it also (obliquely) shows things on screen which just aren’t shown at all in most movies, however grisly their reputations. Ultimately, the source material for The Sacrament is more disturbing and complex than most horror movies. West is aware of that, but has transformed it by changing it, dramatising it, and then humanising it. It all seems more disturbing when you’re made to see it that way, and by bringing it up to date, it reminds us that this shit hasn’t disappeared, twenty-first century or not.
The Sacrament is subtle and savage in equal measure. I for one didn’t see that coming.
The Sacrament will be released in UK cinemas and on VOD from June 6th 2014.
Happily, I was soon proved wrong, and this early element in the plot is in fact a stepping-stone into far more unfamiliar, unpredictable terrain. Mickle knows what he’s doing, damnit, and what he does here – just as my hopes were fading – is to transform the course of the plot, performing an effective about-face which makes what follows into a pitch-perfect, yet complex sequence of events. As Dane stands in line at the local police station at the end of what you could justifiably call ‘Act One’, a chance discovery leads him to doubt everything he has been told, even everything he has experienced with regards the shooting up until this point. The subsequent developments draw us into a haze of paranoia, doubtful identities, horrific acts, those sorts of ‘voyages of self-discovery’ which alter and darken.
