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…