One subtopic of horror cinema that never grows stale (when done right) is folktale-sourced religious mania. I don't mean the dull misogynist witch burning and repressed hysteria, I mean the hallucinating, stigmata-and-schizophrenia ecstasy and torment of the holy fools. I also like the literal interpretations of bygone era's living mythology, ala 2015's
The Witch, transferring to the audience the mentality that may well leave us all to believing witches were real. and the Catholic Inquisition saved humanity from a pervasive barbarous pagan evil that might otherwise have rendered mankind into a state of perpetual fear and savagery (instead of just being sexually frustrated maniacs unable to tell when they're projecting because Freud is still centuries away).
Myth is more alive than ever in our age of instant dissemination: just check out the supernatural documentaries on the Tavel Channel. The plethora of ghosts, aliens, shrouds of Turin exposed to radiation, miracles and youtube videos all runneth over and then repeat along with talking head commentary. Like all good myths, ghosts, demons, sea serpents, yetis, and aliens hover ever on the edge of consensual reality. Like true mythology, the best shows never quite cross over to pure fiction (and easily dismissed as hoaxes, paredoloia, reflections) or scientifically-consensual reality (which would move us wholesale into some world-shattering new reality paradigm). As long as there's no ultimate signifier 'real' to contrast our protagonist's experience, we never know what is real or imaginary (i.e. if Shelly Duvall walked past the Gold Room and saw Jack at the bar, talking to an empty Shining air, for example). Without that outsider/sane viewpoint, the first person experience of our main character has to be taken as real, in a vivid way we can safely experience in the safety of the theater or couch. We can, during this sacred temple space/time, believe everything we see, kind of. The best campfire tales are the 'true' ones, the ones that happened to a friend of a friend; your friend's friend swore it was real, that it really happened. When we know for sure you just made it up, that you're making it up on the spot--it loses a lot of its cachet. Even if there's just a .001% it could be real, then it's myth instead of fiction, truer than reality, wilder than anything the conscious mind can create. Watching a film that taps into this, we can feel it's real even when clearly fiction, ala The Blair Witch Project. The same does not hold true in direct experience, which we don't feel is real even when it clearly is. You can see this in the presidential election, where the middle American votes not from the bland truth of what must be done to save the budget, yes mom, okay mom, I I will mom; but instead hei votes his grandkid's oxygen right into the wallet of the robber barons, trusting that he, too, will become one, once the lottery comes through. He's already mentally spent half the money. Even if there's just a .000000000000001% chance it could happen, that's enough. That's not myth, though--that's fantasy, and there's a huge diff.
In myth, death becomes externalized and thus we become immortal, weightless, enraptured and divine. When there's no chance it's not real, our mortality crushes down on us like a great weight. We may not believe we have a good chance of winning the lottery, but if there was zero chance, it would crush us just as much as learning all the supernatural videos we watch are fake, or worse, real.
Myth, then is truer than reality, because it creates a coherent language out of the randomness of direct experience. In myth, the devil literally lurks within every temptation, appearing in a cloud of smoke when someone mentions selling their soul for a drink. Considering the reality of that (a night of heavy drinking being the perfect analogy: a night of loud bliss paid for by an eternity of flaming hangover). Just because he acts invisibly, his dark energy infusing its way into one's soul via fermentation rather than sulfur and smoke, doesn't make him any less real. The extremes of light and dark breathe in myth the way they never do in reality (unless you're manic, schizophrenic, insomniac, tripping, and/or an alcoholic). I can't speak for schizophrenics, but I've been, or am, all the others on that list, and have seen both angels and demons, I've ridden the snake and walked inside the dragon. I even experienced that super rare 'pink cloud' where a flickering rose-tint infuses personal perception. Any AA member who sticks the landing long enough to find the 'pink cloud' can tell you the same thing: the same Monday night meeting that was initially a kind of a sad shuffle of nicotine and bad coffee-scented boredom suddenly glows with a pink-hued love that makes just being there akin to paradise. It's the same meeting, bro. So which impression is 'real'? It's not the same meeting at all, is it?
Knowing these things can happen from firsthand experience, it make sense that the best movies I've seen in all of COVID--the age of internationally mandatory cabin fever--are about saints and spiritual pilgrims. The 2019 Irish horror film SAINT MAUD, one of the few newer films I've seen lately, is a slow-build minor masterpiece (written/directed by the improbably- named Rose Glass!) about a home care nurse (Morfydd Clark) sent to live with and care for Mandy, a terminally-ill dancer/choreographer (Jennifer Ehle) in a big artsy seaside mansion. Deeply lonely and an undiagnosed, the ascetic Maude gets these sexual current waves of pleasure when praying to her Catholic god; when the waves stop, she falls into a harrowing depression and puts broken glass in her shoes or kneels on pebbles for atonement, olidifying with ascetic intensity the link between modern self-cutting high schoolers and Middle Ages flagellants. When Mandy grows afraid in the dead of night she she momentarily rides the Maud god train, and even catches one of the waves (maybe) while they kneel together. Taking this as a sign, Maud takes it on herself to ward off the dancer's partying lesbian hustler (a kind of anti-Maud) in a move I'm sure she doesn't realize is the sort of thing abusive caregivers do. But if you think she's going hobbles and starves Maud, or and makes her write with a broken typewriter or serves her cold parakeets, you're mistaken, I'm glad to say.
So where is this going. Maud, what are you up to?
We can never be sure 100% she's not a modern day Joan of Arc since we see only see and hear what she sees and hears. Thus we know there's no evil in Maud, just what we
presume is her unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic hallucinations, misinterpreted as godly messages and interventions (as they often are). We feel for her especially if we've suffered from manic-depression or drug or alcohol addiction. She's addicted to the thrill of the touch of God, and when it dries up, she reaches out for booze and sex like she's drowning.
Saint Maud veers with deft drunk savant brilliance out of the path of the typical cliches and snags that so often ensnare neo-horror psychotic female-protagonists, avoiding--though exploring--torture porn obsessions with, auto-mutilation / self-cutting (The Skin I'm In, Thirteen), romantic desperation (May), performance/ persona intertwining (Persona, Always Shine, 3 Women, Clouds of Sils Maria, Mulholland Dr.) or incapacitated victim/mentally-ill caregiver endurance tests (Baby Jane, Misery), Saint Maud's only cliche'd element are the usual smash cut ruts (1). The film's dusky cinematographic beauty and wild, cathartic transfigurative ending makes up for any stale passages. And if we've recently seen Dream No Evil (1970) and longed for a Ridley Scott cut (i.e. remove the pedantic voiceover).
VIY is the other of my new mythic religious faves, a 1967 Russian comic-horror piece about a young monk and a witch he winds up ensnared by after a spring break sleepover at a peasant barn. Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol, Viy has the rock hard power of genuine myth behind it and a great, wild-eyed hero in clowning Leonid Kuravlyov. A monk in seminary school (with the terrible bowl cut and burlap robe to prove it) he finds himself forced to read prayers over a beautiful dead girl by a cossack landowner whose word is basically law, at her dying request. It does not go well, and by the third night the witch is calling out the big guns, enough trippy demons coming out of the walls to trigger any bad salvia flashback. Luckily, there is an endless supply of vodka... at least if you live until the cock crows.
Though we can see it working just as well in a trilogy ala
Black Sabbath (1963), this short film (70 minutes) never seems dull even during the many day and morning scenes of the Philosopher's incessant escape attempts. The Russian folk horror detail is rich we feel like we're hearing this told by the fireside after a hard day at the harvest somewhere deep in the vastness of rural Russia, where the closest law enforcement might be a three day ride away. Scenes such as when the Philosopher (as he's called by the cossacks) is ridden by an old hag across the sky like a human unicycle, have a fairy tale surrealism that both beguiles and amuses but proves genuinely unnerving, from her enigmatic stares and his own knee-jerk reactionary drunk monk-ishness. There's an almost Hemingway-esque--contrast between the cool, ghost-filled nights of terror and the idyllic pastorale of central Russian farm life: singing, whining, and napping in the warm sun, with big peasant food spreads laid out and a never-ending supply of breakfast vodka. The Philosopher keeps trying to escape, but there's only emptiness outside this weird daytime paradise/nighttime Hell.
The only drawbacks to
Viy are perhaps its length, it's not really a feature length story, and the over-the-top English dub (which is the only option on streaming). Me, watching it on Shudder inspired me to get the Blu-ray so I could watch it in Russian - much better. It reminds me of those days at camp, the way fear of the Goatman in the dark made us laugh and sing in the daytime, made Jesus alive in our hearts. We all slept with our bibles (it was that kind of camp) and the power of the Jesus made us alive with the kind of love and light that only those truly terrified of the dark old growth forests can have. We heard the Goatman in every rustle of leaves, every noise in the night; we never saw him directly, but no doubt he was there.
Viy and
Saint Maud both get it, both know he was there, too. Believing is seeing, claiming it's the other way around shows you don't know human perception really works, and how the warm glow of the pink light just can't exist without the cold dark night of the soul.
NOTES
1. You know what I mean, where boy meets girl with a kind of impersonal hello at some dingy bar and we smash cut to the last few seconds of some joyless hand job or mutually demeaning doggy style. Yawn. Maud, you're better than that!!
