Christopher Lee in in ‘City of the Dead,’ 1960
Christopher Lee in in ‘City of the Dead,’ 1960
It’s too late for Halloween, but “All the Haunts Be Ours Volume Two” is an ideal holiday gift for horror movie fans. The magnificent set pulls together 13 feature length films on Blu-ray plus a booklet with 12 short stories in the genre, commissioned for the project from writers ranging from Eden Royce to Ramsey Campbell.
The curators of “All the Haunts” describe the material as “folk horror.” The term calls to mind Wicker Man (1973), the culty British production about pagan survivals in a remote village, but it’s a broad idea covering any fiction rooted in primeval fear. Dracula (1931), inspired by Eastern European vampire lore, could also be called folk horror.
Volume Two in this series encompasses stop-action animation, features, shorts and documentaries. The artistry runs from masterpiece to schlock in films from North and South America, Europe and Asia spanning 1960 through 2024. Several short subjects were commissioned for this set. Here is a sampling:
Horror in the Soviet Bloc? Surprising films were made under the iron hand of Leninist censors, including Beauty and the Beast (1978) from Czechoslovakia. Slovak director Juraj Herz may have slipped past the dictates of socialist realism on fairytale grounds. Like Jean Cocteau, he followed the story’s familiar premise: a father of three daughters, two of them monsters in human form, the third a paragon of innocence, sets forth into the accursed woods and, kidnapped by the Beast, secures his release only if one of his daughter’s takes his place. Herz depicts the Beast as a man-size raven living in a mouldering mansion where fireplaces light themselves and darkness clings like drapery to the fearsome stonework. The mood is chilly, a perpetual November, but in the end, love triumphs over ugliness.
Set in medieval Japan, the Expressionist masterpiece Barenko: A Vengeful Spirit (1968) concerns an upstart tyrant and sexual predator who mauls his way to the top of his fiefdom. He will be undermined, eventually, by vengeful spirits human and feline, before being completely undone. Japanese director Yoshihiro Ishikawa was already no stranger to his country’s folklore of “ghost cats” and “ghost vampires,” having made earlier movies with those themes. Barenko was shot in black and white with monstrously long shadows framing squares of white (the story might not have played as well in Technicolor). The musical score sounds vaguely sci-fi, and the unsettling persistence of thunder enhances the film’s unease before becoming as surreal and disorienting as a scary dream. Did I mention that Barenko also has great samurai sword fights?
An Indonesian film critic mentioned the first-name-only Suzzanna in the same sentence as Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price. Starting in the ‘70s, Indonesian producers churned out droves of cheap horror for a local market numbering in millions. She became the genre’s biggest draw with her coldly alluring screen presence. “Say it with your heart,” she advised aspiring actors. American director David Gregory’s Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic (2024) pieces together her life along with comments from film and folklore scholars. The form of her horror pictures resembled bad American drive-in fodder, but the content drew from Indonesian lore of vengeful ghosts and malign spirits.
Pakistani-British director Jamil Dehlavi derived the intriguing metaphysics for Born of Fire (1987) from Islamic mythology. Suffering from strange apparitions and anxieties, a British flutist (Peter Firth) and an astronomer (Suzan Crowley) are drawn into a quest to learn about the mysterious death of the flutist’s father. They travel to Turkey where disconcerting topography and the ruins of an Armenian sanctuary provide an otherworldly backdrop for a battle with evil, represented by the Master Musician and his allies, the djinn. Born of Fireincludes fascinating concepts but hits many wrong notes; there is good acting and bad, hokey special effects and scenes of creepy suspense.
Could a “folk horror” collection fail to omit one of those British black-and-whites with Christopher Lee in a leading role? In City of the Dead (1960), he plays Driscoll, a sinister history professor who insists that witchcraft was real, clashing with materialist-science colleagues at his college. When he sends his star student Nan (Venetia Stephenson) on a research trip, the story turns into H.P. Lovecraft country, not the Cthuhlu mythos but one of his stories of a shunned New England town, off the main road and seldom visited by strangers. The plot disintegrates before the climax but not before some good performances and an unsettling idea. Quoth Driscoll: “The basis of fairytales is reality. The basis of reality is fairytales.”
