Month: September 2021

An Under-Seen Italian Classic

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Sometimes there are those films that you really know you should have seen by now, but it’s somehow hard to finally pull the trigger on.  This was one of those for me for the longest time and I’m so glad that a few months ago, I finally remedied the situation:

Black Sunday AKA the Mask of the Devil (1960)

Mario Bava’s first directorial credit really stands the test of time as an (occasionally flawed) masterpiece of gothic horror. It exists in an interesting space between the old Universal classics of the 30s that preceded it and the rougher terrain the genre would come to tread over the course of the next couple decades.  If you’re looking for spooky old castles filled with cobwebs and riddled with secret passages, it’s got you covered. If you want to see a hot brand burning flesh, it’s got that too.  How about a carriage eerily racing through moonlit fog in slow motion? A giant bat attack in a ruined crypt? A young girl fearfully running through a dark forest, the spindly branches of trees seeming to reach out as if to grab her? This is your movie.  But what if you want needles being driven through eye sockets? The face of a loving father melting in a fire? A shambling corpse bursting out of wet earth? A spike filled metal mask being sledgehammered onto a witch’s face? But of course, Black Sunday, all things to all people, is there for you as well.

The story begins with a prelude set in Moldavia in the 17th century, two hundred years before the main action of the film. Princess Asa Vajda (Barbara Steele) is a witch (or possibly a vampire—the film plays fast and loose with its supernatural terminology) being ceremonially put to death by a robed and hooded inquisitorial mob for her wicked deeds, along with her brother and consort, Javuto (Arturo Dominici).  She is branded as a witch and a “Devil’s Mask” is hammered onto her face before she is set on a pyre to burn.  A storm prevents the job from being completed, but she is entombed in a coffin with a glass lid so that she can always see the cross above, which should theoretically keep her evil contained.

And so it does until a couple hundred years later when two doctors on their way to a conference happen upon her tomb, accidentally shatter the cross, break the glass atop her coffin (leading to a scratch on the hand that gives her a resuscitating drop of blood), steal a religious artifact that had been placed on her (it may have been helping to hold her down, but will also provide a useful user manual to defeat her later), and remove her Devil’s Mask (with some effort—it had been nailed on quite forcefully).  Then, having done everything wrong they possibly could, they have a chance meeting with the local princess (bearing a striking resemblance to the witch) whose family crypt they’ve been defiling and make their way to an inn for the night.

Said princess is Katja Vajda (also Barbara Steele), Asa the witch’s descendent, who has just turned 21 and is feeling some unnamable dread whose source she cannot identify. Long story short: Asa raises Javuto, has him kill and basically make vampires of one of the doctors, Katja’s father, and a few household servants, all so that Asa can steal Katja’s youth, beauty, and ultimately her life. 

Fortunately (I suppose), the younger of the two doctors and the inevitable romantic lead, Dr. Andrej Gorobec (John Richardson), teams up with a local priest to fight the vampires (dispatched by driving a spike through the left eye rather than a stake through the heart), defeat the witch, and save the girl (who has a real fainting problem—it’s a good thing she ends up with a doctor).

Bava based the story on a Nikolaj Gogol story, “Vij,” which I understand was far more faithfully adapted in the Russian film, Vij (another great movie). Here, the main points of connection seem to be the dark spookiness and folkloric quality of Eastern Europe, a witch, and, based on my viewing of the Russian film (not having read the Gogol), some kind of supposedly learned men who are actually quite useless. But the distance between source text and film is inconsequential.  This is Bava’s film, not Gogol’s, and as a piece of visual storytelling, it is significant.

On a compositional level, Black Sunday is decidedly effectual.  The lighting here is key—stark, casting heavy shadows in all directions, and creating striking looks throughout. In an early scene, the innkeeper’s daughter is sent against her wishes through the woods at night to milk the cow (who, for some reason is kept far from home, in a barn directly next to the cemetery where Javuto was interred beneath unholy ground and is now due to rise).

As she makes her way, terror-stricken to this ill-placed shed, she appears somehow lit from below, such that her face seems to be this one point of light and the darkness seems to close in on all sides.  It isn’t realistic if you stop to consider it, but it succeeds in evoking a very active darkness and her fear is contagious.  The camera frames spaces claustrophobically; the elegant clutter of a palatial manor or the shattered remains of coffins in an abandoned crypt are both used to create a sense of an invasive space. Elements that surround figures seem to move in on them, as with the darkness and creeping branches hunting the dairy seeking adolescent.   

In addition to being Mario’s progenitor, Eugenio Bava was also known as the father of special effects photography in Italian cinema, and his son carries on the family business admirably here.  By today’s standards, some of these effects might look a bit obvious, but in 1960 they were apparently truly shocking (the film was heavily edited when released in the States and was banned for years in the UK before the edited American version was allowed to be released) and some of them still offer a visceral kick in the 21st century.  When the Devil’s mask is hammered onto Asa’s face and blood spurts out, or when a spike is driven through the ocular socket of a sleeping vampire with a sickening squelch (followed by the priest delicately wiping his hand with a handkerchief) , even a modern horror viewer, well inured to viscera, might still find themselves cringing a bit with appreciative disgust.

And there are some truly arresting sequences, such as a frightening scene in which Katja is hounded by some unseen menace that appears to chase her through the castle, upturning everything in its path as she shouts for help. Finally, she comes to her father’s room, where he still lies, recently dead, awaiting funereal rites. We know that he has been turned and that the sun is about to set, but she has no inkling of what’s about to happen. She falls on his berth, calling out for his support in the face of the horrors that beset her and as she lowers her head, the light can be seen disappearing from the sky. It’s a delicious moment. If only it didn’t result in her fainting again, but you can’t have anything.

The only thing that really stands out as unsuccessful is a romantic subplot between Katja and Gorobec. They’ve known each other for perhaps 36 hours by the end of the movie and it’s a big leap of faith to go along with their relationship.  It doesn’t help that the dialogue is so very over the top.  A certain degree of verbal extravagance is welcome in such a film when it pertains to vengeance and undying evil, but an otherwise milquetoast love scene featuring such florid text as, “Even if all Mankind abandons this castle, or even deserts these grounds, there is no reason why you should do likewise with your life and your youth” is just a little hard to buy. 

Though, honestly, the language of the film plays better when watching it dubbed in Italian with English subtitles, rather than having to hear these clunky lines spoken in English (as with all Italian horror of this time, it was filmed without sound and all voices were dubbed later for different markets, often utilizing multi-national casts with each actor speaking their own native tongue).  But these are small gripes in the face of the total effect of the film.

I don’t know that there is much to read into the story of the film itself.  The witch is bad. Her victims are good.  In the end, love triumphs and the dead die once again.  The sun will shine.  But in its simplicity, it well houses an effective and historic horror piece that honors what came before it and prefigures what was soon to come.

I read too: Tales of Dungeons and Dragons (1986)

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So, for some time, I’ve been meaning to finally write a post to justify having a “Books” button on the sidebar.  Therefore, I’d like to present Tales of Dungeons and Dragons, an anthology of short stories edited by Peter Haining.

Now, with a title like this, one may imagine ‘dungeons’ or ‘dragons,’ or something originating from Gary Gygax,  or at least some degree of high fantasy, but really, this is more of a horror collection than anything else, with the cover being the only connection to that expectation.  Inside, you’ll find 30 stories, grouped into three parts: Part I – The Sealed Section: Tales of Horror; Part II – The Ghost Section: Tales of the Supernatural; and Part III – The Wonder Section: Tales of Fantasy. Among many others, it collects stories from such luminaries of the dark fantastic as Bram Stoker, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Bloch, Stephen King, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury.

The whole volume is solid and generally worth one’s time, if one is up for a certain earlier era of writing.  As it’s not feasible to delve into the whole book, I’d like to focus on three stand-out tales. Each of them in some way surprised me (a good way, a bad way, or an other way) and has lingered in the mind in some fashion. Let’s begin with the most fun.

The Dualitists (1887) by Bram Stoker

Written ten years before Dracula, this story is honestly shocking.  Really. I don’t think I could duly prepare you for it without spoiling the tale entirely.  With an older film, I don’t worry about spoilers, expecting that a reader of this blog has had a pretty fair chance to have seen some much-discussed genre classic, but in this case, I expect few have read this so I want to tread carefully. Suffice it to say, it is suggested only for those with a particularly dark sense of humor.

Also, it is very much in the public domain, so here’s a link to check it out for yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I think this is a special one.  Written in a very literary, almost archaic style, its pretensions of class belie its wicked, impish desire to shock.  Here, with deepest irony, we follow the adventures of two ‘heroic’ young boys who set out to perfect their chosen art. This art just happens to be more than a bit destructive.  Perhaps the most fascinating feature here, besides a brutality you might not expect from a pre-twentieth century text not written by de Sade, is the way that its young heroes are always described in such shining, heightened terms.  Despite the extremity of their actions, Harry and Tommy are never characterized as anything other than brave, adventurous juveniles, engaged in an exciting and daring effort:

“The minds of these youths were of no common order, nor were their souls of such weak nature as to yield at the first summons of necessity. Like Nelson, they knew not fear; like Napoleon, they held ‘impossible’ to be the adjective of fools; and they reveled in the glorious truth that in the lexicon of youth is no such word as ‘fail’.”

And so, the effect is all the greater when you start to realize where they are going.  A dread grows as they move towards the apex of their artistry. And even though I could see the direction the story was taking, I was wholly unprepared for how totally it would go there.  The horror lands, but it does so with the unstifled guffaw of disbelief at its extremity.

I hope I’m not overselling it.  Anyway, maybe check this one out.  Maybe.  

The Eighty-Third (1916) by Katherine Fullerton Gerould

So whereas the first story was shocking in a very successful and enjoyable way, this next one brought a different manner of jolt.  And not a pleasant one.

First, it must be said that the writing here is effective and the story telling works.  A picture is clearly painted and the tension, fear, horror, and anger of the protagonist is stark and striking.  The narrative does suffer from a common pattern in horror fiction of situating its main character as a mere witness to horrors with little power to affect the course of events, but that lack of agency is part of the horror as well.  So I can say it is generally good, effective horror writing.

But ye gods, it is so very, very, very racist.

Just as Stoker’s piece was shocking in its extremity, this tale left my jaw on the floor in just how ugly its sentiment is.

Ok, so here’s the story and though a full text may be available out there, I don’t feel the need to link to it. Look it up if you like.

Published in 1916, this tale assumes that World War I would end one year later, but that the war to follow would be the one to really end human civilization. This story takes place during that next war. The narrator is a citizen of one of the few remaining neutral countries and is trying to work his way through war-torn lands to pass a border into temporary safety.  Along the way, he hears tell of some nightmare regiment called “the eighty-third.”  No one can agree about what it is and why it is so horrible, but it is generally known that it only travels by night, and that it is somehow wrong.

One night, taking shelter in a shack on the edge of a village, the narrator wakes to discover a local peasant woman hiding with him, driven there by the coming of the dreaded eighty-third.  She summarily faints in fear and he fearfully watches through a crack in the wall.

This gets ugly. Basically, the eighty-third consists of a multi-ethnic collection of disfigured soldiers who are carted from village to village by the conquering force to use rape as a weapon of war, such that “those who did not go the clean, cruel way of death should be defiled past hope.” The narrator observes these assaults being carried out in cold, calculated fashion, his gun pointed at the unconscious peasant woman should their location be discovered and he have to spare her the horror.

Finally, they pass and he continues on his way, sharing what he has seen and building to a multi-page diatribe about how the white man is an endangered species and bemoaning the end of all things.

Yeesh, right?

I debated writing about this one. I suppose I did because it is noteworthy how seemingly uncontroversial this text was. When published (in Harper’s Monthly, a reputable magazine), it was reportedly much lauded, one of the most popular short stories of the year.  One prominent critic called it “the most completely realized study of horror that American Literature has produced since The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Ok, but that was more than 100 years ago. This kind of material wouldn’t fly today, or at least wouldn’t go unremarked on, right?

Well, this collection was published in 1986. Only thirty five years ago. Now, it’s not that I’m necessarily appalled by its inclusion. As I’ve already written, it is a very successful horror story and probably of historical interest, an artifact of its time and place.  What blew me away is the fact that in the introduction to Gerould’s racist tract, its vile nature is entirely unengaged with. 

I’m not one to ‘cancel’ things, but I can’t imagine anthologizing this text without some kind of contextualization, simply presenting it rather, as one more great story.  Here’s a story about a vampire. Now, here’s one about a ghost. Now here’s one about the coming horde of non-white peoples who will defile all the white ladies.

I don’t recommend the story per se, but its existence, and it having been held in a place of some honor, is of some note.

The Lighthouse (unfinished/unpublished) by Edgar Allen Poe (sort of)

Having loved his 2015 film The VVitch, I was stoked to see Robert Eggers’s 2019 follow up, The Lighthouse, and it did not disappoint, leaving me giddy and delighted, with a sea shanty in my heart.  I’m bound to write about it at greater length in these pages before too long.

So, I was quite excited to discover that this odd collection contained Poe’s last, unfinished story, upon which the film had been based, but I had never read. Or at least, a posthumous collaboration between Poe and Robert Bloch who, 6 years before penning Psycho, was commissioned to finish Poe’s manuscript. It was an interesting and intriguing read, and I continually wondered at what point Bloch had taken over.

In summary, the story takes the form of diary entries by a man who has come to serve as a lighthouse keeper. Alone. Already it doesn’t seem like a great idea, but it is his most fervent wish to have time to himself to work on a piece of writing of some import.  It’s mentioned at one point that he’s supposed to be here for one year (which is hard to imagine), but by the end of the first week, he’s already going mad and by the end of the first month, our story has reached its end.

I first read this one during the first lockdown of the Coronavirus times and it was rather appropriate.  There are some things that seem relatively easy, even pleasant at first, that can quickly sour.  I particularly appreciate a passage where he writes of how hard it is to turn himself towards the book he’s meant to write.  He has all the time in the world, but he can’t do it.  I think that would ring true for many a creative type locked in their apartment for the last year:

“I seek to write – the book is bravely begun, but of late I can bring myself to do nothing constructive or creative – and in a moment, I fling aside my pen and rise to pace, to endlessly pace the narrow, circular confines of my tower of torment.”

Who hasn’t been there?

Finally, it builds towards a climax that I was certain could not have originated with Poe. I don’t want to give too much away, but the presence of a certain vampiric shark lady (who, sure, may have been a product of madness, but still…) materializing out of a storm before being fought off by the narrator’s faithful dog just seemed somehow less Poe-ish.

So then I worked my way back through the story, trying to determine where lay Poe’s final lines. I had some theories, but looked it up to check…

Out of a 14 page story, he had written the first 1.5.  Of course, Fantastic, the magazine where this version had first been published, made little mention of this fact when heralding “a new Edgar Allen Poe masterpiece.”

Basically, Poe wrote of the keeper coming to the lighthouse and being pretty happy to have some time to himself. The only hint of trouble was the final line of day three, in which he noted that the foundation of the building seemed to be made of chalk.  The next day’s entry was blank.

It’s unknown if this was to be continued as a short story, fleshed out to a novel, or if perhaps this was the whole piece, and that it just ends abruptly and enigmatically, suggesting that things will not go well. Either way, this was an interesting exercise. I think it might be fascinating to even have a whole anthology of different authors completing the text in their own way—doing justice to his suggestions, his style, but then branching off in their own directions.  That could be a book worth picking up.

Anyway, the building dread and madness are characteristically enjoyable and the fish lady was a real surprise.

A Friday film on Friday

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Lest it seem that I’m only writing about great, older, classy movies, here’s a discussion of a great, older, trashy movie.

Friday the 13th, part 2 (1981)

A cheap cash grab. A totally uninspired, throwaway slasher flick. A body count film. A dead teenagers movie. All of these could be ascribed to Steve Miner’s film, and I expect they have.  They would even be accurate. Doesn’t matter.  This is simply a terrifically entertaining movie that knows exactly what it is, and has great fun doing it.  It delivers solid suspense, scares both cheap and earned, a generally likeable group of young people that you mostly don’t want to see eviscerated, teasing play with audience expectations, and one of the all-time great final girls, who you really want to root for. And on top of all that, in spite of the fact that it seems to so knowingly draw on slasher conventions that it almost seems to be sending them up (coming out at the height of the post Halloween slasher boom—there were at least 30 released in 1981 alone), it also actually takes its antagonist seriously—probably the only Friday the 13th film in which there is any real psychological underpinning to the character of Jason.

The story is as simple as can be. After a cold open wherein Alice (Adrienne King), the lone survivor of the first film, replays nightmare memories in her head, recapping the key points of the first outing of the series (a lot of camp counselors getting killed, the revelation that the killer was Mrs. Voorhees, the mother of a developmentally disabled boy, Jason, who drowned while some counselors were having sex, Alice decapitating Mrs. Voorhees, Jason rising out of the water of the lake, apparently less dead than had been thought), she wakes up and, in a genuinely suspenseful sequence, gets creeped out exploring her apartment. Oh, it’s just the cat being thrown through the window. Whew—nothing to worry about…Nope, actually she finds a head in her refrigerator and then gets an ice pick to the noggin.  The opening titles literally explode and we’re off to the races.

This time we find ourselves across the lake from Camp Crystal Lake at the Packanack Lodge Camp Counselor Training Center where a nice bunch of youngsters have come to learn to be better camp counselors, and generally drink and screw around in the woods.  With one exception in the form of a sleazy, sexually aggressive dude who eventually gets his comeuppance for consistently harassing one of the girls by being hung upside down and having his throat slit, the rest of the trainees are nice kids that are easy to spend time with. It’s a shame that they find themselves in this movie, but oh well. 

The last to arrive is Ginny (Amy Steel) who rolls in late and gives Paul (John Fury), the owner of the Center, a good natured hard time. It’s clear that they’re an item and in this, we immediately get something a bit refreshing for the genre.  For all that the tropes have been pretty well established by this point and that this series never shied away from the regrettable Reagan era Sex = Death slasher formula, Ginny does not quite fit the mold of the ‘final girl’.  I mean, sure, it is technically possible that she is a virgin—it’s never explicitly stated, but the sense is that she is a self-possessed young woman, in a relationship and free to express her own sexual desire, who has a life and interests beyond mere survival (she’s studying childhood psychology—which becomes relevant by the end of the film); and she does survive in the end by trading on her wits, education, and empathy and not only running  and taking up a penetrative phallic object to use against her assailant (though of course, there’s plenty of running and stabbing).  In a crowded field, she stands out by really feeling like a person.

Anyway, most of the rest of the plot requires little description.  One by one, the kids start getting picked off until only Ginny remains.  She stumbles upon the shack in the woods where Jason has been holed up, building a candle lit shrine to his dead mother’s head and nice, chunky knit sweater, surrounded by the corpses of recently murdered teenagers.

 In a bit of quick thinking, she uses her child psychology super powers to get inside his head and, donning said sweater, speaks to him as his mother, gaining an advantage.  At the end of the day, everyone else is dead, Jason gets away (there are still 9 more films to come, after all), and Ginny seems pretty traumatized, but she makes it through.

Most of the plot itself simply ticks boxes and fulfils viewer expectations.  But moment by moment, the movie takes real pleasure in subverting some of those expectations.  Time and time again, the audience is teased with the suggestion of prurient subject matter which then doesn’t pay off (in the sense of shower scenes and kills, this one is much less explicit than you might expect), and then there are solid jumps when suddenly the knife flashes into view or the wire wraps around the throat, or the spear…, well, you get the idea.  It really feels like the film makers are playing with the form.  And it is fun and funny when the movie successfully pulls one over on you.

And there is plenty of comedy throughout, particularly in the editing. Visual gags abound, such as when a cute little dog comes across Jason in the woods.  We don’t really know his policy on canines as opposed to humans, but we assume it will end badly for the pup. 

Quick cut to hot dogs roasting on a grill.  Later, at the end of the movie, just when it seems that everything is finally over and Jason has been killed, Ginny hears a sound outside. Oh no—what will she do? Wait. It’s just the dog.  Oh, good—it was ok all along. CRASH! Jason jumps through the window behind Ginny, grabbing her as we cut to black.  These little tricks seem so obvious, but when obvious works, it can’t be faulted.

Beyond this sense of play, and well executed cattle prod cinema, eliciting jumps and laughs at appropriate (and inappropriate) moments, a real strength of the film is that Jason gets to be an actual person, and for my money, that makes him scarier here than in any of the later installments.  In the first film, he basically doesn’t exist.  He’s a sad story—an impetus for revenge on all the naughty teenagers of the world who dare visit this lake.  In later films, he is an evil tank.  Wearing his characteristic hokey mask and mostly standing menacingly when he isn’t skewering somebody, he is the beefed up uber-version of the silent masked killer archetype. 

In this film, wearing a sack over his head and seen running, scrambling, desperate, angry, wild, he is a broken, dangerous human being—nothing supernatural.  Just a person who has had a terrible life and grown into a vicious killer, filled with rage over the death of his mother, the only one who cared about him.  The film sees him, and Ginny can empathize.  To be fair, this is repeated with Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldmen) in the fourth part, but it really lands here.

No one could make the claim that the sequel to Friday the 13th, itself, a cheap American retooling of Bava’s Bay of Blood, is some kind of classic of world cinema, but it does what it does excellently and in my opinion, is the scariest, most fun flick this series has to offer. Miner went on to direct the next sequel one year later (in 3D: Dangling yo-yos! Eye balls jumping out of sockets! Popcorn kernels popping!) and managed to produce another fun movie, but for me, failed to quite catch lightning in a bottle the second time around.

The Persistence of Belief: Candyman (1992) and The Wicker Man (1973)

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I don’t know about you, but I find nature unsettling.  My wife, who is Polish, theorizes that this is a particularly American quality, grown out of a land of settlers pushing out into a wilderness, surrounded by threat, and haunted by the destruction inherent in that expansion (The whole country has, of course, been built on Native burial grounds).  I don’t feel that nature is my place – that I am welcome in it. Basically I feel it just wants to eat me.  Red in tooth and claw and all that. And yet, it is beautiful, mysterious, powerful, and essentially unknowable.

So, it is no surprise that I find folk horror particularly effective; the mutual draw and fear of the natural world and of people who live more closely to it. There is a seductive and uncanny atmosphere that comes with such work.

With this in mind, I’d like to focus here on a film which I don’t believe is ever really discussed in the canon of Folk Horror, Bernard Rose’s Candyman. I would argue that while it may not make sense to call it precisely a Folk Horror, it is useful to examine it through that lens. So to do so, I’d like to look at it in comparison and contrast with Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man which is, along with Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Witchfinder General, one of the earliest and most influential progenitors of the sub-genre.

Both will be discussed in detail, so if you haven’t seen them and don’t want them spoiled, I recommend viewing them first.  They are two of my all-time favorites and it is easily worth your time.

How they are the same

On at least a surface narrative level, the two films share many similarities. Both revolve around an outsider who comes from a place of privilege (the law, academia), who enters into an isolated community to conduct an investigation, certain of their superior world view. This outsider clashes with an element of local folk belief (Candyman, the old gods) and, on some level, seeks to disprove it.  There is a missing child who is sought after, but who was ultimately never really in danger and only served as a kind of bait. The locals treat this outsider with justified suspicion. Finally, he or she is burned by the community in a kind of sacrificial bonfire, offering up a feeling of the miraculous. 

Add in the utterly coincidental facts that both films feature performances by tall, seductive actors with silky, deep voices (Christopher Lee and Tony Todd), who get to pontificate poetically over the action, and that they both begin with opening credit sequences of helicopter shots of the given setting accompanied by droning music (the organ or the bagpipes, respectively), and it adds up to a surprising amount of overlap for two otherwise totally dissimilar films.

How they are different

For two films that I want to examine the similarities of, they are as different as night and day.  Whereas The Wicker Man is warm, sunny, rural, and lovely, Candyman is cold, overcast, urban, and bleak.  And in so far as Folk Horror is largely defined by its setting, only one of these films fits the typical pattern. Only one dwells in and celebrates the natural world.

What’s at the core

But, as I remember seeing in a recent David Attenborough documentary, cities are nature as well, with their own ecosystem, their own flora and fauna.  Thus, Candyman is actually no further from nature and the natural world than the other film.

But the most important shared element is their focus on the event of human belief, the need of human beings for a kind of faith, for story, for the continuation of something older and more mysterious than ourselves.  And in both cases, that faith which had been doubted or even mocked by the protagonist (obvious with Sergeant Howie, but even Helen laughs at her subjects as she collects their urban legends), wins out and persists in the end.

In the Wicker Man, Lord Summerisle explains how his grandfather had reinstated the old gods on the island out of not his own belief, but rather, expedience—to give the residents something joyous so that they would work harder in harvesting his produce, but that over time, those old beliefs took root.  In performing the ceremonies, in singing the songs, the beliefs came to life.  One senses that though they had been imposed from the outside only two generations ago, the current people of Summerisle, including the lord himself, are true believers.  Lord Summerisle is not deterred from this religiosity, even knowing explicitly of the initial artifice.

In Candyman, so much has been imposed from without on the community, the residents of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, a low income, public housing project.  They have been essentially trapped and abandoned in this neighborhood by economics, by banking policies, and by the imagination of the city at large.  The fact that this nightmare folk legend has grown up in this space is fitting.  In a way, Cabrini-Green is two things, one real and one a myth.  It is a real low income community with real problems when it comes to public services, poverty, crime, and policing. It is also a myth—the ur-ghetto nightmare of urban America. At the time of filming, it was considered one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America and the people living there had to carry the weight of not only real, material problems, but also that of this monstrous image.

Thus, this repository of the city’s fear (and from the beginning of Chicago’s time as a city, that area had been a slum, though it was originally Italian—only recently has it been gentrified out of existence) grows a literal monster, a monster of belief, of story, of racial violence, of terror of isolation, and of invasion.

On the inconsistencies of the Candyman story

I have heard multiple times that while the film works on many levels, the central story doesn’t make sense.  What does Candyman want?  Why does he terrorize ‘his own people’ rather than exacting some kind of vengeance? Is he just a boogeyman, standing behind you in the mirror, or is he a symbol of racial injustice, or is he a figure of lost love that continues beyond death? 

My answer is that all of these are true and that any inconsistency is, in a way, the point.  First of all, I don’t think he is a ghost. When the pompous Purcell tells Helen the story of Candyman, he states that the “legend first appeared in 1860.” He then goes on to tell a story that is about “Candyman,” not a real person.  There may have been a real artist, the son of a slave, who was murdered in Chicago for loving a white woman, but I don’t think Candyman is his ghost.  I think Candyman is the story itself.

When Helen is attacked by and subsequently identifies to the police the gangster calling himself “Candyman,” who, in killing and terrorizing the denizens of Cabrini-Green, is keeping the fearful story alive, she disrupts the belief of the community and hence, the story must make itself flesh and reassert its power, must offer a new ‘miracle.’  He says as much to her in a monologue taken directly from the source material, Clive Barker’s short story, “The Forbidden”:

“Your disbelief destroyed the faith of my congregation. Without them, I am nothing. So I was obliged to come and now I must kill you. Your death will be a tale to frighten children. To make lovers cling closer together in their rapture. Come with me and be immortal.”

Later, he expounds on his state:

“I am rumor. It is a blessed condition. Believe me – to be whispered about on street corners, to live in other people’s dreams, but not to have to be.”

Honestly, it’s beautiful.

Beauty

And here we have another meeting place of the two films.  Beauty. Generally, Candyman is ugly—grey, cold, sad, and heavy. But this element, this concept of immortality, is simply sublime.  And it is real.  Story does transcend base reality, the life of meat (and the film features plenty of very corporeal, bloody, dead flesh), “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” As long as the story is being told, remembered, felt, feared, it lives on. Thus, even a fearful, cruel story, of horrors untold, can, even if just for a moment, offer succor, can raise one up, regardless of life circumstances and make life more than-other than, can “procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” 

Oh that all horror content aspired to such heights, or perhaps depths.

On the other hand, the initial beauty of The Wicker Man is obvious.  Summerisle, as long as the crops don’t fail and you aren’t sacrificed to appease a hungry agricultural goddess, is truly idyllic. Earthy, sexual, boisterous, its citizens seem so well served by their local mythology.  Regardless of the veracity of its claims, they are happy people, living good lives.  And in the end, Sergeant Howie’s sacrifice (at least for the moment) is one of hope and celebration.  It is a chilling and gorgeous moment when he, burning, calling out to his god, in whose faith he has never wavered, sees through the wicker frame all of the citizens of the island swaying and dancing and singing with a very real joy in their own faith, nurtured and enlivened by his torturous end.

And how beautiful this internal tension between two fervent beliefs, at odds, neither with any concrete evidence to support their continuance? And such joy at a moment of such terror and pain.  Again, we approach the sublime.

In both cases, the story persists. The faith continues. The community comes together in ceremony and while in Candyman, there is an actual miracle as, head ensconced in a halo of flames, Helen manages to save baby Anthony from the bonfire, delivering an act of rebirth and becoming herself, a new story, for the people of Summerisle, the final moments of the film feel no less miraculous—life is borne again here as well. (at least for now—who knows what will happen next year, if the apples will return)

And so, in the end, given these elements of community experience, of communion and ceremony, given its being situated so precisely in its environment, a kind of nature, and most significantly, its focus on questions of faith and belief and story, I think it is fair and useful to look at Candyman in terms of the ideas of Folk Horror.  It may not exactly be a parallel to a film like The Wicker Man, but it is, perhaps, the other side of the same coin.