Ghosts and Spines

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Guillermo del Toro’s early movies are thought-provoking and somewhat depressing.  The Devil’s Backbone, like Pan’s Labyrinth, puts children in the way of adult political unrest and war.  I suspect that sensitive people watching such movies can easily imagine that they could have been put in such circumstances, were things different.  Having said that, The Devil’s Backbone works as a sad, gothic horror movie.  Set during the Spanish Civil War, the film focuses on orphans not quite out of reach of the conflict.  There’s a ghost at the orphanage that, until near the end, we think that the bully among the kids had killed.  The point of view is that of Carlos, a new kid at the orphanage who encounters the ghost and eventually decides to find out what happened to him.  The movie’s nearly a quarter century old, but there will be spoilers below.  Maybe there have already been some—sorry!

As the children, war orphans, try to navigate how to become adults, they have limited male role models—the doctor, who is good, and the groundskeeper, who is not.  Jacinto, the groundskeeper, was raised in the orphanage and although he had a professional-level family, grew up alone and wanting better.  His response was to turn cruel.  We’re not given much of the doctor’s backstory, but due to his position at the orphanage, we have to assume there’s a sadness there as well.  A number of subplots are interlaced with this, one of which involves the title of the movie.  Originally set in Mexico rather than Spain, the Devil’s Backbone was named after a mountain range.  That has to be transferred to victims of spina bifida in the local village.  This medical name has to be explained to the audience and it adds to the gothic atmosphere.

This is an example of a bright, sunny location nevertheless being a fraught place.  The boys (there are no girls at the orphanage) make their own society—not quite on a Lord of the Flies level—because the adults are at their wits’ end due to the encroaching war.  In the end all the adults end up dead.  The future of the boys is uncertain, but they show themselves able to distinguish between good and evil.  Adults, meanwhile, perpetuate a war in which, in real life, half-a-million people were killed.  There’s a lesson here for those willing and able to learn it.  Horror often has a moral, and when the boys are carrying an old crucifix to the courtyard and one remarks that he’s “pretty heavy for a dead guy,” adults should be paying attention.

What You Can’t Show

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As I spend my life trying to figure out why I do what I do, I take book and movie recommendations.  I really should note who recommends what because it often drives me crazy trying to figure that out after the fact.  A friend recommended Censor, and since this friend told me where it was streaming for free I’m sure I got the right one.  Like several one-word title movies, there are several with the same sobriquet.  This was the 2021 movie and it’s a British horror film which raises the question of why we watch horror.  It does this through the eyes of the eponymous censor (Enid) who’s particularly tough on movies.  Set during the “video nasty” scare of eighties Britain, the question is whether such movies motivate real violence but with the twist that the censor is the one who turns violent.

Enid is haunted by her missing sister and she finds a video nasty star who looks like her sibling and becomes convinced that it’s her.  Enid gets to the set where her movie’s being shot (a remote cabin in the woods) and ends up killing the star and director (after accidentally killing the producer earlier, in self-defense).  She kidnaps her “sister,” and in her imagination—rainbows are everywhere—takes her home.  That’s where the real social commentary comes in because during this imaginary drive the radio announcer says these kinds of movies have stopped, and all crime and violence have ceased, and social harmony has returned to Britain.  This is revealed, of course, as a delusion.

Left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t have watched this movie.  I don’t like blood and gore—I’m more looking for gothic themes like haunted houses—but it turns out that this is a smart film.  That’s probably why it was recommended to me.  Intelligent but also with tongue in cheek at times.  Still, it’s a movie about reconciling with childhood trauma, which is something that speaks to me personally.  That’s a wound I don’t always like to have poked.  It’s one of those movies on which I’d like to see more analysis, maybe talk to Prano Bailey-Bond, the writer and director.  Horror with female directors is often thoughtful, and movies are really meant to be discussed (just like books are).  The question remains—why do we watch disturbing movies?  I know I’m not the only one who does.  And in this case I remember who recommended it, so perhaps I’ll be able to get some closure.

Small Hops

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It was about the cutest thing I’d seen in a month of Saturdays—a baby rabbit.  It was no bigger than my fist and it was looking lost on the sidewalk.  The front “lawn” of the next neighbor’s house is paved and there’s only a wide street in the opposite direction.  Our front lawn has a retaining wall well about the jumping height of the little guy.  I didn’t want it dashing into the street, so I circled around from that direction, but the poor thing couldn’t get high enough to reach our lawn.  It was young enough not to be certain something at least twenty-five times its size meant it harm.  It allowed me to get close enough to scoop it up and put it on our lawn.  It immediately leapt away and sheltered under a bush, before eventually disappearing down a hole that I hoped might be its home.

Besides being a hope-filled chance encounter with the wonder of nature, the incident also caused me to ponder what that leporine brain made of this learning experience.  For human brains, any sufficiently large animal is a monster, and anything even larger is a god.  While there are some bad folks out there, people don’t seem evil to me.  And although we’re certainly not gods, I wonder what that little rabbit thought.  What I was attempting was an act of kindness.  I’m sure it scared the timid tyke—I can imagine being lifted by an enormous creature that I can’t understand and it is a most frightening prospect.  But what if that monster were to set me down just where I needed to be?  Might not my assumptions about it change?

We don’t know what other animals think, yet it’s clear that they do.  Our yard has a fence and we have no dogs, so rabbits tend to like it here.  I often mutter softly and try to avoid direct eye contact and sometimes they let me get fairly close.  I like to think some of the larger ones recognize me, and maybe can tell that a vegan has nothing but their goodwill in mind.  We like to think this about God.  Larger, easily able to harm us, but that somehow being divine also conveys good will.  The bunny incident cast a pleasant glow over the rest of an otherwise anxious day.  It had calmed me and conveyed a sense of appreciation for just how helpful the world of nature can be.  I hope for some tiny rabbits in your life too.

Bad Movie Therapy

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I haven’t see Troll, but it doesn’t matter.  Troll 2 has nothing to do with it.  As a frequent contender for worst movie of all time, Troll 2 is an anti-vegetarian screed and campy horror film that’s impossible to take seriously.  It’s part of my bad movie therapy.  And it’s also an example of religion and horror.  But first, let’s set the scene.  The Waits family (Michael and Diana, and their kids Holly and Joshua) is doing a house exchange for a vacation.  Before they leave, however, Joshua’s dead grandfather appears to him to warn him about the goblins.  The goblins, who are vegetarians, make people eat/drink a special substance that turns them into plants so that they can eat them.  (Yes, it’s that bad.)  Ignoring Joshua’s concerns, the Waitses head for Nilbog (goblin backwards) and go ahead with the house exchange.

The locals (there are only 26 of them) can make themselves appear human and they try in vain to get the visitors to eat.  Joshua prevents his family from eating the plant food by peeing on it.  They go to bed hungry as the queen of the goblins plans her next move to get them floradated.  About midway through the film, we’re shown a church scene in which the minister preaches of the evil of the flesh.  Ironically, this is not far off from the teaching of some Christian denominations.   He tells the trolls what they already know—they have to get the visitors to eat so that they can eat them.  If nothing else, it will make you forget your troubles for ninety minutes, unless your trouble is that you’re being turned into a plant.

Any number of reasons have been offered for why the film is so bad.  While filmed in Utah, the crew was Italian, and most of them spoke no English.  The movie was low budget.  The acting is just plain bad.  All together, however, these features work symbiotically to grow a wonderfully therapeutic end result.  Some of the crew claimed that it was the intention all along to make this a funny film.  Comedy horror or horror comedy is a recognized genre, after all.  The only problem I have now, however, is where to go from here.  So how does the Waits family escape their peril?  I’ll need to offer a bit of a spoiler here.  The goblins are frightened away long enough by a double-decker bologna sandwich that the family can touch the magic stone and destroy the conspiracy.  What are you still doing here? Why aren’t you watching this already?

Hoppy Fourth

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Today is the one of the relatively rare summer holidays.  Modern industrialized nations tend to take a more relaxed view toward summers without having to give out too many prescribed company holidays.  This seems to follow on from school schedules because the kids are out in summer and adults need some flexibility when work demands collide with family needs.  The internet has made work-life balance a little tricker to achieve since work is always just a click away.  Some more generous employers gave yesterday as part of an extended four-day weekend, which is rejuvenating in a way that’s easily forgotten until you start to feel it.  The sense of obligation takes a couple of days to wind down, and then on Monday you realize “I’ve still got another day off!”  It’s a sublime feeling.  Why not watch holiday horror on it?

The Wicker Man is a holiday horror movie.  One of my arguments in the book is that holiday horror has to derive its energy from the holiday, and not just be set on it.  For example, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Return of the Living Dead are both set on or near Independence Day but the movies don’t really draw their horror from the holiday itself.  It falls into the same category.  Frogs?  Well, maybe.  Perhaps holiday horror, it’s definitely in bad movie territory.  A rich southern family is dominated by a Trump-like grandfather who controls the money and measures everyone by loyalty to him personally.  On his birthday, the fourth of July, nature revolts and his adult children and grandchildren (apart from one granddaughter), are killed by animals in this eco-revenge groaner.  But is it holiday horror?

One scene may suggest that perhaps it fits the category, but the real significance of that day is that grandpa won’t let it be celebrated any way other than by his prescribed plan.  Even as the estate is overrun by frogs (mostly), snakes, lizards, alligators,  tarantulas, and even some birds (thank you, Mr. Hitchcock), he insists that everyone do what they always do on the fourth of July/his birthday.  The only scene that suggests holiday horror is where the eponymous frogs hop onto a cake decorated like an American flag.  I normally like nature-revenge films, and this one starts out well but quickly goes downhill.  The environmental message is there, but underplayed.  There are some firecrackers and a number of dead rich folks, but otherwise the film seems to have no message at all.  It’s a bad movie.  Holiday horror?  Not really.  Something to watch for a day off work?  Definitely.

Private Therapy

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A friend recently introduced me to the YouTube channel, Cinema Therapy.  While I had some vague notions already that cinema therapy was “a thing,” I had never looked into it.  This was so, even while consciously knowing that I use movies that way.  Most of what I’ve seen on the YouTube channel has been about Disney/Pixar movies, especially those that tug at emotions.  These have never been my favorite movies since I have unresolved issues from childhood.  Still I learn a lot from watching their analyses.  It can still be difficult to watch these films, though.  As a family we recently rewatched Finding Nemo.  It struck me pretty hard how growing up without a father figure left me the anxious, quivering mess that I often am.  I prefer movies where I can find a father, no matter how odd the choices may be.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

In fact, in my own form of cinema therapy, I use horror films.  (Even the YouTube channel parses M. Night Shyamalan.)  Part of this is clearly because such movies take me back to my childhood.  I’m not sure why I found monsters so comforting, but I did.  We had no father and I latched onto the strong men—particularly if they didn’t smoke or drink—that dominated movies  (it was the sixties, after all).  Somehow I felt that this made the world seem alright.  Or a little less scary.   I didn’t understand the biology of parenthood, I just knew that I needed a man in the family.  One who would protect me and show me how to be a man.  Well, that never really happened.  My step-father was verbally abusive and I seemed to be his special target.  I watched horror and listened to Alice Cooper.

Sublimation, in psychology, is where you put difficult feelings aside, acting as if everything’s normal.  I did that for many, many years.  College, seminary, doctoral program, full-time professorate.  Then it all broke down.  After the tragedy at Nashotah House, I found myself watching horror movies again.  It took about a decade of doing that to realize that I could write books about the connection between religion and horror.  With three published (the third about to be, actually), I have a fourth nearly finished.  The writing is therapeutic as well.  I have to wonder, however, if these Pixar movies that are so painful for me to watch are really helping me.  I don’t always feel refreshed afterwards, as I do when I see a good horror movie.  (Bad films are their own kind of therapy.)  I’m an amateur psychologist (no license), with a most intractable client (myself).  My way of dealing with him is to watch horror and call it therapy.

Out of Season

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Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, by Alvin Schwartz, has been a fixture since the early eighties.  I was a bit too old for Scholastic at the time, but my daughter had a copy that I read recently.  I heard about the 2019 film before it came out (and I’m having trouble believing it was all the way back before the pandemic).  It’s more of a Halloween movie and since it features young actors it had translated to a “kids’ movie” in my head.  I suppose the PG-13 rating contributed to that.  Sill, it turns out that it’s a proper horror film, but not too scary.  The story is partially by Guillermo del Toro, so I had some idea of what to expect.  I’m glad I watched it, even though the right season is still months away.  Therapy is welcome any time of year.

Anthology films often don’t work well, and this one manages to avoid that by constructing an overarching narrative.  The teens, visiting a haunted house on Halloween night, find a book by a hidden family member who’d hanged herself but who was rumored to tell stories to those who ask.  The book, written in blood, writes new stories featuring each of the kids, telling their bizarre deaths.  Since there are six main kids there are six main subplots and some of them are quite effective.  Scarecrows aren’t like the kind you find in Oz.  And two of the good kids end up missing while this is played off against the Vietnam War (it’s set in 1968).  One of the characters has been drafted and is being shipped off to the war as the film ends.  Since the final girls (there are two) are committed to finding the lost kids, a sequel seems inevitable.

The setting of fictional Mill Valley is a Pennsylvania town, and it’s nice to see my home state getting some attention outside M. Night Shyamalan movies.  I’ve always felt there was more creepy potential here than has been explored.  And autumn is generally beautiful in the commonwealth.  Although I watched the movie out of season (while it was free to do so on Amazon Prime), it has landed on my list of films to watch in October.  It manages to get that feel right and I know that come the autumn I’ll have a hankering for that sensation.  It’s not really that scary, but it manages to be worth an adult’s time and attention.  And it makes me want to read the book again.  And horror can work for therapy, even when it’s starting to get hot outside.

Release the Wicker

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One of the many fascinating things about The Wicker Man is that even its release date can cause confusion.  There should be nothing so simple as to look up when a movie first hit theaters, but especially in trans-Atlanic efforts the dates are often different between the UK and the US.  The Wicker Man had a limited UK release on June 21 (quite close to Midsummer, it turns out) of this year.  It’d been released before, of course.  The initial UK release date was December 6, 1973 (twenty days before the US release date of The Exorcist).  Making its way to the US, it was first released on May 15, 1974—not long after May Day.  One of the features of the curious history of the movie is that it lacked support from its own studio.  Not surprisingly, it performed better overseas, particularly in America.

Release dates can be important, and can make a difference in a film’s success.  Again, the quirkiness of The Wicker Man reveals this—although set in late April-early May, it was filmed in November.  Actors had to suck on ice chips to prevent their breath from being visible.  And who’s thinking about May Day when getting ready for Christmas?  All of these factors swirl around in a mythology that the movie has developed.  My book went to the printer yesterday.  It should be out in August-September, hopefully in time to catch the interest of those who’ve gone to see it in theaters again.  I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen it.  I’ve watched all three released versions.  It feels like an old friend.

From the beginning, the plan was to release my book this year, due to the fiftieth anniversary of the movie.  It’s funny how simply surviving half a century can make something interesting to people.  There are plenty of 1973 movies that aren’t getting any particular boost this year.  The thing about The Wicker Man is that it became a cult classic.  Although it was never a mainstream hit, it has sent out its tentacles far and wide.  I notice references to it is unexpected places.  If you’re attuned to this you say to yourself, “that movie really made an impact.”  And it did.  When I first pitched this book idea to the editor of Auteur, I told him I’d do whatever I could to make a 2023 release.  Of course, I started writing it before Nightmares with the Bible came out.  My next book after the Wicker Man doesn’t have an anniversary release in mind.  That’s good, because like a moon-shot it’s nerve-racking to aim for such a narrow target, years in advance.

Meeting Places

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It’s one of those quirky British television plays that’s its own movie.  It was part of the Play for Today series.  I turned to Penda’s Fen after receiving some very distressing news, as a means of self-healing.  (I may seem distracted for some time, please forgive me.)  Sometimes considered folk horror, it really isn’t a horror film although it may be treated as one.  The dialogue is heavily religious, involving a lot of theological discussion of Manichaeism, the “heretical” belief in the struggle between the powers of light and powers of darkness.  It plays out through the maturing of Stephen Franklin, son of the local vicar who is, unbeknownst to himself, adopted.  He also discovers his homosexuality as he begins to rebel against the strictures of his private school education.  Underlying all this is the fact that he lives in Pinvin, in reality Penda’s Fen.

The story deals with the past interrupting into the present as Penda’s pagan kingdom never really fell.   A local writer claims that there is an entire escape city beneath the British landscape to which those deemed “important” to the government are to be evacuated in case of emergency.  In reality, the kingdom beneath, and overlapping, Pinvin is that of Penda.  Penda was an actual Anglo-Saxon king and here he encourages Stephen to know himself—one of the mottos of the school.  That knowing involves coming to question the conservative, Christian belief system he has wholeheartedly embraced.  His adoptive father, the vicar, has broader beliefs, including the reality of other gods.  Stephen discovers this and learns of his adoption, making for some heartfelt religious dialogue.

My reason for watching, apart from the much-needed therapy, was that it had been recommended as a piece of religion and horror.  There are some horror moments, but generally it’s difficult to say whether they’re hallucinations of Stephen or they’re really happening.  One is presented outside his viewing, which suggests that they are meant to be real.  One involves a demon, but not the scary kind of The Exorcist, which had been released just a few months ahead of Penda’s Fen.  In all, it’s a thoughtful movie, the kind you might expect when based on a play.  Given the themes, I’m not sure it was the best therapy, but it did engage the religion and media dialogue.  I hope to come back to it some day under better circumstances.  The dialogue is worth engaging with more depth than I’ve been able to muster here right now and there’s much I still don’t understand.

A Tumble

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So beautifully shot, Fallen is a movie worth watching despite its disjointed plot.  Worth watching for horror fans, that is.  Apart from the night scenes, this is art house cinematography, and that may be because it’s an independent movie.  What’s it about?  That’s difficult to say, definitively.  The night scenes are so dark that you can’t tell what’s happening and the plot seems to have been intentionally obscure.  (That’s hard to substantiate because the 2022 film hasn’t generated too much discussion.)  This may have been another case of mistaken identity, like The Entity, because my notes only had the title down.  There are at least three movies with this title.  I’m learning my lesson to jot down the year when I add a movie to my “to see” list.  In any case, here goes…

A young priest (?) is warned by an older priest that it is time to take up violence because the darkness has started.  The younger priest is called “Father Abraham,” but he wears a tie in church services, and a small pectoral cross, making identification of the denomination difficult.  Since this is religion-based horror you’d think that that much, at least, ought to have been sorted out.  The heavily accented dialogue is often delivered so low that it’s difficult to follow.  In any case, this minister, after fighting “darkness” for many years, is in an isolated farmhouse with his disabled daughter.  He hunts and traps for their needs and a local boy delivers groceries, and is secretly in love with the daughter.  The minister, who seems to be presented as a tortured soul, isn’t really likable.  At night the house is attacked by physical demons.  There will be spoilers in the next paragraph.

It’s finally revealed that Fr. Fallen (apparently that’s his surname) had killed his wife for being a witch.  His daughter is also a witch, out for revenge for her mother’s death.  She summoned the demons and eventually kills her father and leaves the farm.  Religious imagery is everywhere in this film and begs for interpretation.  The lack of coherence, however, makes that very problematic.  The disabled daughter is the only survivor at the farmhouse, and is healed at the end.  By the demons?  Or because she’s a witch?  The influence of M. Night Shyamalan is evident, but his clean plotting is absent.  Online discussion is minimal, but there could be something of substance here.  If only it were better put together.  If only it were more discussed.

World’s End?

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I’ve been writing on religion and horror for quite a few years now.  Sometimes you come across a horror movie, or novel, which addresses this directly.  Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World is one such novel.  A friend strongly recommended this, and indeed, the first half went impossibly fast.  This despite my dislike of home invasion stories.  It nevertheless kept me on the edge of my seat.  I should probably say there will be spoilers here (there will), in case you haven’t read this but intend to.  I’ll hold off on them until the next paragraph, though, so if you’re a faster reader than I am a writer you won’t accidentally run upon them.  So, a family consisting of two fathers and an adopted daughter find the cabin, where they’re vacationing, invaded by four people who believe the world is going to end.  Spoilers follow!

The world is going to end unless the family agree to sacrifice one of themselves to stop the apocalypse.  The strangers are armed while the vacationers are not.  And, as usually happens when those with weapons confront the innocent, the armed prevail.  But.  But the family refuses to sacrifice anyone.  Then the brainwashed four do something unexpected—they kill one of their own.  They continue to do this, attempting to convince the men that if the invaders all die, and neither of the men is sacrificed, the world will end.  Quite a bit of the novel then becomes a theological discussion regarding what kind of god would make such a demand.  Of course, if you read Genesis you’ll already know the answer, right Isaac?

Tremblay knows not to tip his authorial hand as to what’s really happening.  As the cabin becomes a mess of blood and gore, the television seems to be showing predicted apocalyptic events.  The invaders can’t reveal their source of secret knowledge because they receive visions telling them what to do.  The whole thing raises that most troubling of questions: who is really in charge?  Is there a bloodthirsty deity who requires a willing death or are the invaders simply good at acting out their paranoia and interpreting events to meet their expectations?  So it is that Cabin becomes a disturbing story—nearly a theodicy—asking age-old questions of what happens when religious belief conflicts with rational materialism.  There are enough hints of supernatural happenings to make the reader wonder.  And when it ends it affirms something many of us are exploring these days—religion and horror have much in common but neither is clearly understood.

Not Dagon

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There’s an aesthetic to bad movies.  And when your production company is Crappy World Films you’ve got to wonder if it’s intentional.  Chad Ferrin’s H. P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones, which was released in 2020, isn’t a great movie.  It is kinda fun, though.  I’ve had a weakness for explicit Lovecraft films ever since Stuart Gordon’s very moody Dagon.  That film was clearly the inspiration for this one.  With the “low” budget of only a million dollars (it feels strange to write that), it nevertheless has a clean cinematography that shows some artistry.  The story just isn’t that good.  A young couple is seeking a getaway at an oceanfront AirBNB only to discover it’s part of a “gated” community.  Their hosts, who are living in the boat down at the marina, keep on stopping in, not leaving them much privacy.

The set-up is very much a Rosemary’s Baby scenario.  The community, as the title suggests, worship the Old Ones.  They introduce Cthulhu early on, but the young man of the couple has never heard of him (he obviously doesn’t spend much time on the internet).  Speaking of the internet, the film makes the point that everyone spends too much time on it, and there’s perhaps some truth to that, but, if you’re streaming the movie you’re also participating.  In any case, the community wants women to offer to Dagon—and the monster here is clearly low-budget—so they can bear more children for the Deep Ones.  Well, not so much bear children for them as to be pregnant with tentacles that can somehow convert newcomers.  Once you’ve been tentacled, it seems, you’re a member of the community.

There is a kind of Lovecraft vibe to the film despite the often wooden acting and throwaway dialogue.  One thing Lovecraft had learned from Poe was the consistency of mood.  It’s here that the movie runs into some trouble.  At times it’s a little scary, at times dramatic, but too much of it just feels silly.  The case could be made that Lovecraft’s writing tends toward the puerile and there’s some truth to that.  It is never silly, however.  Sometimes when translated to the screen the outlandishness of Lovecraft’s view of the world comes across as so weird as to be funny.  It takes an able director, and a strong writer, to adapt him to cinema successfully.  It’s no accident, then, that the movie is dedicated to Stuart Gordon, whose Dagon is still difficult for me to watch, so full of Lovecraft as it is.

Der Golem

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The golem is a monster of fascination.  It has been the subject of movies from quite an early period.  The earliest, now mostly lost, seems to have been Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1915).  This film became the first of a trilogy, with the second (also lost) being, The Golem and the Dancing Girl (also originally titled in German, 1917).  The third film mostly survives and is therefore often called The Golem, based on the fact that it is the one we can still see.  Der Golem: wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World, 1920) is considered a must-see early horror film, although that designation comes from the fact of there being a monster.  It’s not scary.  It is, after all, a silent film.

Having watched some recent examples of Jewish horror I realized that I’d missed this one and set out to rectify the situation.  This film is actually the prequel to the other two, with Wegener’s golem having already established a cinematic presence.  I wasn’t sure what to expect from the story, but I supposed that it would be the oppressed Jews creating a golem to protect them and that it would eventually go berserk, as soulless people generally do.  It may have helped to have seen the two missing films, I suspect.  This golem is made to protect the Jews, but the edict against them is cancelled by the fact that the golem exists.  The emperor is impressed with the Jewish magic and allows the Jews to remain in their ghetto.  The golem, however, develops feelings for Rabbi Loew’s daughter, which is an interesting twist.

The rabbi does lose control of his creation, and it refused to allow him to deactivate him by removing the secret word revealed by Astaroth, under a star on his chest.  A little girl outside the ghetto, picked up by the golem, playfully pulls off the star and saves the day.  This really isn’t Jewish horror, at least not in the sense of more recent films.  It’s not very close to the Jewish golem legend and saving the Jewish community is left up to a gentile girl.  The ending clearly inspired James Whale’s Frankenstein some eleven years later, but the messaging of the film is pretty much what you might expect for a non-Jew trying to tell a Jewish story.  The fact that a demon is involved in bringing the golem to life puts us into a more Christianized view of things.  Still, this historic film, which is just over an hour in length, started something that has grown more sophisticated as Jewish horror started to come into its own.

Spider Planet

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Misnomers aren’t uncommon when it comes to click-bait.  I’ve fallen victim more than a few times.  But such misdirection is probably as old as humanity, and is perhaps part of consciousness itself.  (Some birds are known to practice deception, as are some other primates.)  Earth Vs. the Spider is drive-in-bait as a title.  In the 1958 horror-sci fi movie (also titled The Spider), the danger isn’t really to the earth but to one small town.  There is, however, a giant spider and somehow it’s not as scary as the real thing can be, writ small.  Occasionally, such as when a spider comes out into the open in the house, I ponder why this is such a deep-seated human fear.  I know spiders are beneficial to the ecosystem and that they pose very little danger, at least in places where I’ve lived.  So why are they so scary?

Scientists, including those of the mind, have proposed looking to our primate cousins for an answer.  They too are afraid of spiders, and it’s posited that since primates climb trees to escape danger and that spiders also climb, the phobia is hardwired.  For me it’s only certain body-plans that are scary.  I don’t mind the cute little jumping spiders that get in around the windows.  They don’t seem out to hurt anybody.  It’s the kind with long, grasping legs that bother me.  As a child I used to try to identify spiders with a picture book identification guide, but soon the guide started to scare me and I had to put it down.  I wasn’t cut out to be an arachnidologist, I guess.  The movie could’ve used one, however.  They kept calling the spider an insect.

The unblinking advocacy of DDT was the scariest part of the film.  Got a problem?  Spray chemicals all over it!  It gives me the same fear as when I see all those pallets of RoundUp every time I go to Lowes.  That stuff is deadly to the environment, and I’m kind of attached to the environment.  Spring arrived around here late this year, but it was spider season by the time I watched Earth Vs. the Spider as part of my minor quest to see the “so bad they’re good” movies.  They’re also part of the history of horror.  Apart from Psycho in 1960, horror was kind of on vacation for the fifties and into the late sixties.  Of course, movies kept being made.  It’s just that they couldn’t be taken seriously.  And even though drive-ins seem to be extinct, I still fall for drive-in bait from time to time. Even when watching alone.

Cat Nipped

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Holy Horror began with movies from 1960 on.  You see, I had watched the 1982 remake of Cat People without ever watching the original from 1942.  The remake has Paul Gallier, the brother of Irena, as a religious leader.  He doesn’t cite the Bible, so the movie fell outside the limits I set for that particular book.  I recently watched the 40-year older original version and was surprised to find not only the religion intact, but also the Bible as part of the story.  Both versions integrate religion and horror and some of the scenes are very close between the two.  The original centers around Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian immigrant.  In addition to originating the The Lewton Bus technique, the film also introduced a religious origin for the horror.  When Irena meets Oliver Reed, she explains to him that in Serbia, in her home village, some witches were driven out into the woods of the surrounding mountains by the Christians.  There they formulated a curse leading to becoming cat people when aroused.

Irena, fearing sexual arousal, spends time apart from Oliver after they marry, mainly watching the black leopard at the zoo.  One of the custodians warns her it’s an evil animal, a monster as described in the book of Revelation, which he quotes.  Of course, this leopard is an ordinary big cat, and the woman to whom he quotes Scripture is a cat woman.  Irena knows inside that she’s one of the cat people, but nobody will believe her.  The film also makes use of a quote from John Donne regarding sin.  Indeed, the film makes it clear, even after Irena dies, that she had never lied.  While she’s stalking Oliver and Alice in their office one night, Oliver pulls down a T-square, the shadow of which forms a cross on the wall, and he abjures her, in the name of God, to leave them alone.  Religion, the clash of religions, makes the monster.

Cat People, despite having had a mixed reception, was an influential movie.  Like much of early horror, it’s tame by today’s standards.  And yet it’s aged well.  I didn’t expect to be drawn in as much as I ended up being.  After all, I’d seen the remake first.  America at the time had a fear of the Balkan region, where mysterious eastern Europeans still had tales of vampires, werewolves, and cat people.  Of course, the last of these was invented for the film.  The director, writer, and producer wanted to create an intelligent horror film, which they did.  Moody, atmospheric, and based on religious tension, it is worthy of a Holy Horror sequel.