Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Keri O’Shea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Keri O’Shea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Keri O’Shea

Portraiture of tyrants from history is a curious thing indeed; so often, what we see in their paintings seems to belie what you might expect, given their recorded character traits. There are of course lots of reasons for this: painting techniques and styles, the ideals of the day, and of course issues relating to the sitting itself. You’d hardly be likely to paint Mehmet II warts and all if you thought your intestines would end up spilled all over the palace floor for your troubles, after all. Still, and even accepting that all historical sources have their limitations, it’s interesting to consider the distance between the reputations and the appearances of some of our better known despots. Vlad Tepes, the Romanian voivod, stares with purpose out of his best-known depiction, but the face hardly matches up to his known excesses. Erzsebet Bathory – the 16th Century noblewoman alleged to have bathed in the blood of young women to stave off her own ageing – has come down to us via a portrait which suggests petulance at worst, a child-like serenity at best. The incongruity between the faces and the deeds is vast.

Another such figure (and one with several similarities to Tepes, incidentally) is one of Russia’s most infamous, and yet still celebrated rulers – Ivan Grozny. The name itself is most commonly translated as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ in English, although Grozny is probably more accurately translated as ‘tempestuous’, as it has its origins in the word ‘stormy’ – perhaps similarly to how in English we might positively describe someone as a ‘whirlwind’. Regardless, Ivan the Terrible it has become. This 16th century ruler – famous for uniting the Kingdom of Russia and for dealing with the sprawling, corrupt power of his nobles – has, like many comparable figures, a legacy of brutality to balance his positive actions. His cruelty and paranoia have become legendary. And yet, as with the other figures mentioned here, contemporary portraiture shows him as a benign, passive figure, heavy with the vestments of the Russian Orthodox Church. He hardly looks like someone who could have been a living figure, let alone someone guilty of the worst crimes – including filicide.

The human animal is by nature more appalled by instances of individual cruelties than by cruelty on a mass scale. We can to an extent surpass it, but it seems like we are hardwired to respond to wickedness in the detail. This is perhaps why, even from a man who has been known down through the centuries for widespread acts of barbarism, it is the fate of his eldest son – also called Ivan – for which he is most infamous. Ivan Grozny, perhaps unsurprisingly known for having a vile temper, quarrelled with his son one day at court. As young Ivan remonstrated with his father, Grozny in a rage struck the young man on the head with a heavy walking cane – probably fracturing his skull. Young Ivan died of his injuries almost immediately, leaving Grozny without the heir he had deemed most suitable and meaning that he would be succeeded by his second son, a young man ‘mentally unfit’ for the task. In effect, this one moment’s deed deprived him of a son he loved and of any confidence he might have that his legacy would be passed on. Whatever we might know or indeed think of Grozny, we can imagine how devastating this would be, and the gut-wrenching regret he will instantly have felt.

It took three centuries before this scene was committed to canvas with the gravitas and horror it deserved. The man who proved himself able is arguably Russia’s best-known painter, certainly its best-known Realist painter. That man was Ilya Yefimovich Repin, who returned to historical painting in 1885 to complete ‘Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan’. It is to my mind one of the most haunting pieces of art ever created.

The differences between the Realist style used here and the idealised, unrepresentative portraiture of the day is exaggerated hugely by the savagery of this piece. Repin chose to paint the exact moment of Grozny’s revelation; the awful moment of stillness after the manslaughter of his heir. The two men, one living, one dead, are presented alone in a room whose fire-lit warmth gives the lie to the scene and its circumstances. That warmth, and its crimson finery is ironically juxtaposed with the blood on young Ivan’s head, which is the brightest red here, and the rich, geometric-patterned drapery in the background forms another contrast with Ivan’s curved, inanimate body, fading into nothingness before the grisly focus of the scene. There is evidence of a struggle; furniture is upended, and Ivan’s leg has disarrayed the silk rug beneath their feet – but now all is still. Horribly, terribly still.

However, for all of that, it is Grozny’s haunted expression which retains its capacity to shock. His wide eyes stare into nothing, he is lost in his thoughts; those eyes contrast utterly with the now unseeing eyes of his son. There is a lone tear on young Ivan’s cheek, as he is cradled in death by his now-penitent father, Grozny’s hands clasped ineffectually to the fatal wound. Even knowing the circumstances of this crime, I find Grozny’s expression deeply moving. To my mind, it seems like a Realist take on the Goya painting ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’ – the same blank expression, the same desperation, the same destruction of one’s young. It also creates something which often features in horror – sympathy for the monster, regardless of their deeds. This disturbing image has shocked many through the years; not least, in 1913, when Grozny’s face was badly slashed by a man called Abram Abramovich Balashov. Balashov was removed from the scene shouting, “Enough blood! Down with blood!”

Conventional portraiture has long been restrained, limited, concerned with mythologising rather than with representation. By reversing this process – turning a mythologised man into a human being – Repin has crafted one of the most arresting historical paintings ever. Here, we have a man bereft, appalled by his own immense and self-stifling cruelty just as we are appalled by it. It’s a moment of abject horror; Grozny will stare forever into the abyss, an emblem of the moment after the storm, the terrible understanding that one has to live forever with one’s actions. Repin has made a man out of an icon, then he has made his suffering iconic. The result is haunting in its poignancy and intensity.

Editor’s note: as this is a full discussion of Hostel, it does contain plot spoilers.

Whilst people being tormented is of course really nothing new in the horror genre, the advent of the Noughties did seem to bring about a change in the types of brutality we were seeing on our screens. From the hack ‘n’ slash movies of the Eighties, the hack ‘n’ slash sequels of the early Nineties and even the post-horror stylings of Scream, those under attack could, at least, run and hide from their assailants. By the time the new millennium turned around, though, we started to see a new type of horror movie take off. Sure, films like Saw (2004) and the film I’ll be discussing here, Hostel (2005) weren’t the first to implement torture on their protagonists. Far from it. But the levels of cruelty and the unwavering focus upon it certainly felt newly aggressive and confrontational, so much so that we soon had a new descriptive term…

‘Torture porn’. The phrase has come to haunt the genre over the past decade or so with more tenacity than anything supernatural. And, when it’s attributed to a film, it’s not typically intended as a compliment. Such a description (which refers, as far as I’m concerned, to that close-up, unflinching shooting style already mentioned rather than to anything sexual) usually means anything grisly, pointless and prolonged on-screen: horror as a pissing contest, nothing more, an exercise in endurance for fans, as perpetrated by crass filmmakers who want maximum bang for buck. Fuck knows I’ve complained enough about ‘tied to chairs’ movies in the past (look at my biog page here on the site, for instance) and I’ll complain again in future – where I see no evidence of plot or thought or originality – just more of the same, people being fucked up by household tools, The End. However, for reasons I’ll explain, I absolutely do not count Hostel as ‘just another torture porn movie’. In fact, I think that disparagingly referring to Hostel as a ‘torture porn’ movie at all is either wilfully misunderstanding the film, or just not getting it. Maybe it is, to an extent, judged by its legacy, and the 1,001 bad films which have tried to copy it. If so, then people need to knock that shit off and take another look. Hostel is very modern, very timely and a damn sight smarter than a lot of people are prepared to give it credit.

None of this is true by accident, either. Whatever you think of him and his work, director and writer Eli Roth understands horror’s capacity to mirror social anxieties, and the guy deserves kudos for saying as much when he was interviewed on Fox News about the ‘mysterious’ popularity of horror, during which interview he was clear about horror’s role as a safe space, a place which grants catharsis during times of trouble. Given that belief, it’s easy to see how Hostel operates as a nexus for a variety of contemporary anxieties, most of which relate to money, status and power.

At first, our main protagonists have plenty of all three, and they’re happy to say as much. Our group of travellers in Europe – two Americans, Josh and Paxton, and an Icelandic friend they’ve made during their trails, Oli – are almost from their first seconds on-screen gloriously easy to hate, the worst stereotypes of young guys abroad. We first meet them rocking up in the capital of clichéd decadence, Amsterdam (even Josh asks, as he looks around at the Eli Roth cameo during the café scene, “Are there any Dutch people in Amsterdam?”) and they seem determined to “rail chicks” from the get-go. When not debating whether it’s ‘illegal’ to fuck women in comas, throwing their weight around or having Josh declare “I’m an American, I have rights!” as they get thrown out of a club, first impressions of these guys are not great, no doubt intentionally so, but the point is – they’re behaving as countless guys of their age and wealth do. They have nothing and no one to fear. Whilst the current economic climate has lessened the effect which a wallet-full of dollars (or to a lesser extent, pounds sterling) used to grant to travellers moving around in Europe, particularly in former Eastern Bloc countries like Slovakia, it hasn’t killed it off entirely, and you do still see people abroad flashing their cash and acting like arseholes, certain that everything is going to go their way because of who they are and where they’re from.

Yet, in Hostel, it’s this belief that gets toyed with, this set of assumptions which provides the basis for the horror to follow, and it’s done well, reaching a nasty, memorable conclusion. We know this from the get-go too: we always know that some sort of comeuppance is around the corner for these guys. Before we’re invited to judge them, in fact before we see them at all, the opening credits have rolled over the interior of the torture chamber…we’ve seen sluices, blood, surgical tools, and worked out that it’s so commonplace for whoever-it-is cleaning the place that they can whistle while they work. We’ve been shown this for a reason; we just have to wait to see what will happen, and know that – somehow – that bubble is going to burst.

This type of foreshadowing goes on throughout the film, and it’s used very well. As an audience, we can pick up on clues that things may not always be peachy; if you’ve seen the film more than once, then you see more and more evidence that bad things are coming. Early in the film we get Josh thinking aloud, “Paying to go into a room to do what you want to someone ain’t exactly a turn-on.” Turns out it is. Still, their new friend Alex’s assertion that Slovak girls are ready and waiting for Americans (“They hear your accent, they fuck you”) is enough to convince the boys to head there, and their sense of entitlement ensures they believe every word Alex says. Why wouldn’t they, after all? Paxton, Josh and Oli have been humanised in our view to an extent by the time they reach their new destination: we know that they are variously not as one-dimensional as they seemed. Josh has suffered heartbreak. Paxton’s bright and, significantly, bi-lingual (more on that later) and Oli’s a father. Still, it won’t save them. They’re fatefully slow to grasp any idea of risk anyway and, when they arrive at the hostel in Slovakia itself, any doubts they might have had just melt away when they see their gorgeous, female room-mates…

Make no mistake. The women from here on in own the movie. It’s just that the guys are slow to get it, believing as they do that they’re the ones still calling the shots until it’s way too late for them. And the foreshadowing continues; when they all arrive, check out the pretty girl sitting on the tomb outside the hostel for one neat symbolic nod as to what’ll follow, and then of course Roth gets his horror geek on by allotting the guys Room 237. The beautiful women in this Room 237 might not take a supernatural turn like in The Shining, but it isn’t long before we get hints as to what they’re really doing: ever notice that it’s Willow’s Song from The Wicker Man which plays over their first seduction scene? By echoing the siren song one of horror history’s most captivating, but ultimately dangerous women, we’re left in little doubt that in some way, Natalya and Svetlana are not what they seem.

The extent to which this is true is, though, shocking to the extreme. Paxton’s pep-talk to an ever-doubtful Josh just before that poor guy’s last night on earth reminding him that they can “fuck these girls for one more night” before moving on couldn’t be more wrong. In the other sense of the word, they’re the ones being fucked. And they’re being more than played; they’re being sold by women. Oli and Josh might have realised this, or they may not have – but Paxton gets it loud and clear, when he returns to the hostel room and gets treated to the exact same routine which Natalya and Svetlana gave all three of them two days before, only performed by two different girls. The moment of revelation here is superb. Suddenly, he understands that he and his friends are part of a dangerous plot, the hostel is part of it and – those beautiful girls which they came there to exploit? They’re the ones in control, always have been.

Natalya’s parting shot to Paxton, as she finally escorts him to the ‘art exhibition’ where his friends have already been killed, is simple but hugely effective. He calls her a ‘fucking bitch’, a lazy retort often thrown at women for a multitude of reasons. Her laughing response, one pithy enough to get repeated over the end credits of the movie? “I get a lot of money for you – and that make you my bitch.” It’s an idea which, whilst of course a dramatic overextension, sums up a lot of fears held by certain types of travellers, particularly those travelling in lesser-known countries and cultures. Maybe those beautiful girls drawn to their sides don’t like them at all. Maybe they detest them, even. Maybe they’re even laughing about them in their own language, or making plans about them. Who knows? It’s also worth pointing out that men are carved up on screen more in this movie than women are. For all of their fist-bumping and over-confidence, it’s men that suffer for their assumptions in Hostel, and it’s women that exploit them.

Whilst putting its protagonists through the mill, Hostel touches upon other anxieties for travellers – other ways in which their assumed high status is threatened. A significant one of these is language. As an English-speaking person, I know all too well that I’ve come to expect people everywhere to be able to understand me when I speak. To an extent, this arrogance is borne out; a lot of people worldwide are exposed to Anglophone culture for their whole lives (TV, music and movies, for instance) and many see speaking English as a prestige form, a way to get ahead, and so they will try to learn it. Those of us who have English as a first language can therefore be seriously lackadaisical about those who don’t, and conversely, feel very uncomfortable when we’re reminded that we’re the foreigners, we’re the ones lacking.

Hostel gives us a language lesson along those lines – with bloody high stakes, of course. Our three protagonists all speak English (despite the fact that Oli is Icelandic and Paxton also speaks German) so they expect everyone else to do so too, in all situations. “How the hell are we meant to understand this without subtitles? Fucking gay,” exclaims Paxton of the foreign-language movie playing in the hostel lobby. Later, “speak English!” he demands of Natalya and Svetlana, when they lock him out of their conversation by speaking in a tongue he doesn’t understand. Here, an inability to communicate goes from being someone else’s problem, to an annoyance, to something downright dangerous. And whilst being able to speak German almost saves Paxton from the man about to hack him up at the disused factory, it doesn’t save him in the end: they just gag him, so the man no longer has to listen to his appeals for his life in a language he can understand. An inability to speak the lingo doesn’t just underline the vulnerabilities of being ‘so far from home’, though: in Hostel, it’s turned on its head and being English-speaking will effectively sign your death warrant too. The guard gets Paxton to ‘speak’: when he turns out to be American, that means they can ask the biggest bounty for him. Maybe this is an inversion of the relative newsworthiness of reported deaths abroad, according to some US news outlets, or maybe it’s just another way that the film shows that being American doesn’t always guarantee you all the power – just the opposite. Throughout, Hostel picks away at accepted power norms.

Hostel isn’t a perfect film: the last half hour is a sequence of happy (?) accidents which free up Paxton to execute his gun-ho revenge, and moments like Takashi Miike’s staccato cameo or the dangling eyeball scene feel clumsily-handled. However, I think it has been done a severe disservice by people who have dismissed it out of hand. It has been even more wrongly labelled ‘torture porn’.

This film is, after all, a great conspiracy movie. Moments of revelation in the film pack a punch because every time, they destabilise something our protagonists take for granted and which, perhaps, we would have taken for granted too. In fact, although the film is known for its gore, that gore is surprisingly low on screen-time until an hour is up. The real horror here is how three regular guys are made to realise their powerlessness, and their eventual treatment, becoming “exhibits” at an “art show” simply underlines how far they have been reduced along the way.

Sure, the ‘stranger in a strange land’ motif has been explored differently and more subtly in other films and other genres. I can accept that. Hostel doesn’t attempt to take away from that, nor does it attempt to own the idea either. What it does do, and what it does well, is to merge a modern horror movie style with an array of very modern concerns and preoccupations. As a calling-card for this particular set of anxieties and the particular time in which it was made, I maintain that Hostel deserves a great deal of credit and, although it has been emulated many times in the nearly ten years since it appeared, this should definitely not be used to dispense with it. Neither gratuitous nor aimless, Hostel has plenty to say for itself and as a bloody rap across the knuckles for a generation which may have once felt itself invincible, it’s still a clever and engaging horror story.