It's not unusual for a horror movie to take us on an
adventure in history; to a time when life was ghoulishly harsh, and one
man with a sword and a banner to fight under was far more monstrous than
any nightmare manifestation that could be found lurking under a child's
bed. Witness in the past the mass murders perpetrated, not by
werewolves or vampires, but bold, religious and political movements, fueled by ignorance and intolerance, and leaving vast swathes of death, devastation and hurt feelings in their
wake. For us, these dark events provide an almost unlimited supply
of smashing horror movie scenarios. When the fascist leviathan of
the Nazis nearly succeeded in overrunning the earth, it was a cinch that
they would have a monopoly on mad-scientist roles for all time to
come. One example that really lies in the roots of horror
itself, though, is the phenomenon of the Burning Times. From the Spanish Inquisition and first
widespread witch crazes in Germany and Scotland in the 13th century, until
end of the 15th century, when the witch trials of colonial Salem, Massachusetts
marked the general abolition of the practice, the putting to question and consigning of witches to the flames had
become a sort of theological spectator sport. The number of
accused witches who were hung, burned, crushed, drowned or tortured to
death during this time remains a point of disagreement, with estimates
from a mere hundred thousand to the rather more sensational figure of
forty million.
Even now, in the 21st century, witches have been burned
in lawless regions of Africa and Indonesia, with episodes of religious
mass hysteria still surprisingly prevalent for the age of genome
mapping. But for most of us, the burning times represents an ethos
that is difficult to ponder. We like to think that frail old
women, far from being able to bring down satanic pestilence and misery
upon their communities, are really quite harmless, and that torturing
and burning them would accomplish nothing. There is something
compelling about images so alien coming from our shared past.
Our adventure in history brings us to a cinematic nightmare. What has come to be known as traditional horror often features witches being burned at the stake, shouting curses
at the ignorant villagers or religious tribunal that had conspired against
them.
Benjamin
Christensen's quasi-documentary silent film
Häxan
(1922) seems to be the first film to delve unflinchingly into this
forbidden subject, and it's fair to say that it's the most striking
cinematic rendering of the burning times to date. The startling
visuals would inspire notable witch hysteria films like Ken Russel's
The
Devils, and Michele Soave's
The Church
(with
imagery echoing Häxan's distinctive black mass scene). Häxan is not surreal in the way of the German
expressionism of the time, but alternates between historical
representations of the burning times, and a world of fantasy and
dementia; a dimension teeming with demons, iniquity and black magic, as
envisioned, no doubt, in the fanatical minds of the zealot
inquisitors. A pitiable vagrant woman is accused of witchcraft and
driven by torture to confess to the leering tribunal that she bore
children to Satan, and attended black masses. Christensen boldly
presents this exhibition of lunacy in all of it's starkly lurid glory,
with witches kissing the ass of a lewd Satan figure, spitting upon a
cross and sacrificing an infant. It's clear that Christensen
intended some of this diabolical imagery to be comic in it's
excess. The movie visits all the sites, from torture chambers, to
orgies, to a convent plagued by demonic influences, leaving no stone
unturned, and ultimately leaving no mistake as to Christensen's intended
statement. Beyond it's satirical nature, Häxan endeavors to
illustrate how such horrific events as these could come to pass.
1935's The Black Cat does
feature a satanic cult, lead by Boris Karloff, but audiences were
largely spared from the horrors of the witch hunts; particularly in the
years after World War 2, with it's eerie parallels. It's actually
a comedy, I Married A Witch (1942)- later
the inspiration for the 1960's sitcom Bewitched- that stands alone in
this era of popular cinema as having the subject of the witch hunts for
a major plot point. Witches, Jennifer (Veronica lake), and her
father are condemned to death by the inquisition only to rematerialize
in modern times, to exact vengeance on the male descendent of the head
prosecutor, Wallace Wooley (Fredrick March), a community pillar who is
running for local office. Lake accidentally drinks the love potion she
intends for Wooley, and falls madly in love with him, much to her
warlock father's distress. The endearingly troublesome witch does
manage to lay waste to Wooley's short political career and drive away his
frigid fiancé, but she ends up marrying Wooley herself, and is forced
to banish her father back to the astral plane for threatening to spoil
their poison-induced marital bliss.
Mario Bava's
The Mask Of Satan
(released in America as
Black Sunday),
marked the horror maestro's directorial debut, as well as the film that
launched Barbara Steele's career. One of the roles Barbara Steele
plays in Black Sunday, a 17th century Ukrainian princess named Asa, is,
as the movie begins, about to be condemned to death by the Inquisition, for consorting with a known, local warlock,
Igor Javutich. Asa
swears satanic vengeance on her killers
before a hideous bronze mask lined with spikes is hammered onto her
face. As the
two malefactors are about to be put to the torch, however, there is a
fortuitous cloudburst, and the inquisitors elect to bury Javutich in
unconsecrated earth, while entombing the princess in the family's
castle. This establishing scene is striking and evocative, and has
been mimicked by many horror productions great and small since.
The story leaps forward to the late 19th century, as one of the
protagonists manages to stumble upon Aja's crypt, removes her mask and
inadvertently revives her by getting cut on glass and bleeding into her
sunken eye-sockets. Igor crawls up out of his grave in dramatic
fashion that night, but Steele's witch character is largely immobile for
the rest of the movie, able only to issue commands to fellow
vampire/witch Igor and grimace freakishly from her slab, her face still
scarred by the spikes of the mask. In the stories conclusion, the rejuvenated
Asa is tracked down by the peasantry, tied to a ladder, and burned once
and for all, reverting back to her original state as she succumbs to
the flames.
It's so hard to justify a witch threatening the distant
descendents of her Inquisitors, that it's no surprise that the device
isn't seen much in good horror movies. Asa, at least, intended to
steal her descendant's body for her own. Why a witch would want to
come back as a severed head, as in The Thing That
Couldn't Die and Horror Rises From The
Tomb, challenges the
imagination. In the shlocky Mexican horror The
Brainiac, the evil warlock Baron Vitellius returns to earth as a
hideous, brain-sucking beast , dropped off by a passing comet after 300
lonely years in space. Why does the witch never use her awesome
power to save herself from being put to death in such a horrible manner
as burning at the stake? How many inquisitor descendants would be
found living in the same basic area centuries later? Would the
prospect of harm coming to these strange, far-flung, descendents make the
inquisitors regret their actions in any tangible way?. How do you
bring your witch, or other gothic horror, to the present day to threaten
protagonists we have some chance of identifying with? Alas, seldom very
convincingly.
1960's City Of The Dead
opens in the square of the dismal and fog-enveloped colonial
town of Whitewood, Massachusetts, where a torch-bearing mob has
brought condemned witch, Elizabeth Selwyn for sentencing and
execution. Selwyn, an older woman, is grimy, haggard
and has clearly endured weeks of torture at the hands of her
captors. She is secured to the stake, and the tinder is
lit. A man in the crowd, evidently Elizabeth's consort,
quietly beckons Lucifer to come to her aid. With unnatural
speed, storm clouds gather and darken the sky. Even as the
flames rise up to envelop her, Selwyn utters a curse upon the
village and it's inhabitants, and vows to live eternally in
service of Satan.
This curious tableau is
revealed to be a mental evocation of creepy, present-day
anthropology professor Christopher Lee, a man who clearly feels
strongly about the subject of witches, and visibly bristles at
the suggestion that witchcraft isn't real. One of Mr.
Lee's students, a lovely blonde named Nan, is intrigued enough
to accept her teacher's invitation to write her term paper on
the witches of Whitewood. She finds Whitewood to be
unusually desolate; a veritable ghost town, aside for the strange people who
stay at the local Raven's Inn, an abode at the site of the infamous burning
of the professor's story. It turns out that the professor is in truth
one of a coven of modern Whitewood witches, lead by the not-so-modern
Elizabeth Selwyn herself (who hasn't aged a day in 300 years), and has
cleverly lured his student to the remote town for sacrifice in a satanic
ritual. Unfortunately, Nan's little excursion wasn't a secret to her
boyfriend and her science-professor older brother, both of whom have a
natural suspicion of her oddball teacher. The boyfriend goes off of
the road on the way to Whitewood after the illusory image of Elizabeth
Selwyn, burning at the stake, appears in the road in front of his car.
He eventually makes it to the town, just as the coven is about to take
another victim at the cemetery there, at the clock strike of thirteen. Learning that the shadow cast from a
crucifix can kill the witches, the mortally injured boyfriend
picks up a grave marker and uses it to immolate them in it's
shadow before perishing from his wounds.
The fictional town of Whitewood is obviously modeled
after Salem, Massachusetts, though no witch cult was known to
exist in the Americas. Nor, in fact, is there substantial evidence that any
such religious movement existed in the seventeenth century, or was in
any way at the roots of the witch hysteria at large. Witches were
usually, low, ill-reputed women, completely helpless in the face of
their politically advantaged accusers. Their stories of
black masses and intercourse with the devil were merely lurid
fabrications made under torture, likely scripted by the inquisitors
themselves.
Salem, Massachusetts is today celebrated
for it's infamous Witch Trials of 1692, the cornerstone
of the city's tourism trade. The last great
witch hysteria began when a pair of pre-teen girls,
minister's daughter Elizabeth Parris and her older
cousin Abigail Williams began to exhibit signs of demonic possession,
starting a panic that ultimately sent 20 accused witches
to the gallows. Hundreds of people were accused
and over 200
arrested and interrogated before the incident drew to a
close.
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There is no witch cult or black magic hexes in AIP's
The Conqueror Worm
(1968); the monster of the story is rather a corrupt magistrate during
the chaos and anarchy of the English Civil War, who exercises his
authority in the practice of witch-hunting, for fun and profit.
Mathew Hopkins (Vincent price), was indeed a dreaded inquisitor of the
period, and the movie does portray him, as far as I can tell, as no more
villainous than he must have been in life. That said, The
Conqueror Worm (a.k.a.: Witchfinder General)
is basely exploitative, indulging in scenes of torture and violence,
where any real dialogue or character development would be drowned out by
piercing screams, anyway: A priest under question is repeatedly stabbed
with pins by interrogators looking for his "devil mark"; a
woman is beaten to a pulp before being burned alive in front of an
astonished township; "witches" (actually just people deemed to
be Catholic sympathizers) are bludgeoned, whipped, stabbed, drowned,
hung, raped and burnt. In between is mostly men engaging in
fisticuffs and gunplay, along with occasional tidbits of historical
exposition. It's outlook is pointedly nihilistic, with children
with sticks poking the bones of the burnt witch in the embers, and a
climax in which it's made clear that there are no winners, and nothing
better to hope for.
To be continued...
