I did a podcast a while back discussing Kier-la Janisse's massive folk horror documentary, Woodland's Dark and Days Bewitched, in which one of the panelists (not me) suggested that the parameters of what constitutes "folk horror" might be too broad to be useful. His suggestion was that all horror is folk horror or none of it is. I've been thinking about this idea lately because there's another big folk horror box set on the horizon and because I remembered something after the podcast that's been preying on my mind. There's a section in Stephen King's Danse Macabre in which the author plays a game with the reader. He asserts that all good horror movies are folk tales of a sort or another and suggests describing the plots of well-known horror movies beginning with the classic opener: "Once upon a time." He offers twenty examples. Here's one: "Once upon a time, three babysitters went out on Halloween night. Only one of them was alive come All Saint's day." And another: "Once upon a time there were two children, very much like Hansel and Gretel, in fact, and when their father died, their mommy married a wicked man who pretended to be good. This wicked man had LOVE tattooed on the fingers of one hand and HATE tattooed on the fingers of the other." One more: "Once upon a time, there was a sad girl who picked up men in bars, because when they came home with her she didn't feel so sad. Except one night, she picked up a man wearing a mask. Underneath the mask he was the boogeyman." You get the picture. Thinking about these kinds of framings, I'm inclined to think that all horror is folk horror. It's all folklore and fairy tales. Some movies lean into that idea harder than others. Hard enough that "folk horror" seems like a subgenre when maybe it's not. But then, maybe it is.*
In any event, that big folk horror box looming on the horizon includes two films by Juraj Herz, a director probably best known for The Cremator. The one that caught my eye was the 1978 version of Beauty and the Beast (Panna a netvor, or "The Monster and the Virgin," as the copy I have translates it). This is a film I've had for a long, long time on a gray market VHS sent to me by a pen pal. It's been sitting unwatched in a drawer for decades. Its appearance on the list of films on the next edition of All the Haunts Be Ours prompted me to see if I still had it and if it was still playable. I did and it was. I was a fool to wait so long. It's good. It's very good.
Once upon a time there was a merchant who had three daughters. The two eldest daughters were greedy and desired of him dowries to lure promising noblemen to them for matrimony. The third daughter, the fairest, doted on her father and wanted only what was best for him. She had no matrimonial ambitions. The merchant's fortune was reliant on the arrival of a caravan of goods that was late and getting later. The caravan had taken a shortcut through a wood that was reputed to be haunted and there fell afoul of the inhabitant of the crumbling castle at its center. They were massacred to a one by this beast. Ruined, the merchant sells all of the goods of his household save for the portrait of his wife. When pressed by his greedy elder daughters to sell it for what he can get for its frame, he sets off to find a buyer. He, too, finds his way into the haunted woods and after a bad turn loses him his horse, he takes shelter at the haunted castle. There, he is provided food, and is gifted treasure to resurrect his fortunes, but on the way out, he plucks a single rose. His youngest daughter asked only for such a rose where her sisters demanded wealth, but the lord of the castle rages at the merchant. How dare he take a rose after enjoying such hospitality. The beast demands his life in exchange, but he has seen the face in the merchant's painting and will relent should one of his daughters freely take his place in the beast's castle. The greedy elder daughters refuse, and even the merchant, once beyond the forest, intends to renege on his promise. But his youngest daughter will have none of it. A promise is a promise, and she rides to the castle to take her father's place. The Beast has a sinister purpose in bringing her to his castle. The devils that live inside of him urge him to kill her to prolong his life and his curse. Upon looking on her and seeing in her the portrait of her mother, The Beast refrains from harming her. Is there hope that he might break his curse by winning her to his side? Or will his darker nature overcome him in the end...?
This version of Beauty and the Beast is one of the gloomiest films I've ever seen. The woods are dark and deep under the lowest, darkest overcast I've ever seen. The castle is a crumbling ruin right out of Ann Radcliff or Horace Walpole or a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. There is so much Gothic ambience here that it sometimes threatens to overwhelm the story. I would not necessarily call the most famous versions of this story horror movies, but this one creates such an atmosphere of menace and doom that it easily fits within the genre. The key elements of the fairy tale are still here: the magic castle, the dinners, the roses, the father's promise, the greedy sisters. It is not a substantially different version of the story than what you find in the Jean Cocteau version. It's the production design and the choices of emphasis that are different. It's fun watching different filmmakers reckon with the fact that the story is mostly a series of dinners and conversations. A kind of My Dinner With Andre as a fairy tale if you will. The filmmakers here have embellished The Beast's curse a bit to add horror to the story, turning those dinners into suspense sequences of a kind. The will-they, won't-they of a romance becomes a will-they, won't they of a different kind. Will he give in to his darker nature? Will her beauty and goodness turn that darker nature aside? That darker nature is formidable; we first encounter The Beast as he massacres the merchant's caravan and he leaves the body of a girl in the castle for the merchant to find. This all raises the stakes. And The Beast's inner demon wants to devour her, rendering his story into the proverbial human heart in conflict with itself. It works.
Beauty and the Beast is best known from the French version by Jean-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont and most versions set the story in France. I do not know where this version is set, but I think it's somewhere farther east. The filmmaking here is more of a piece with the surrealism of the Czech New Wave. Director Juraj Herz wasn't one of the core filmmakers of the Prague Spring--his piece for Pearls of the Deep, that movement's anthology as manifesto, was too long for inclusion for example--but he was a fellow traveler. There is a sense of the uncanny here that aligns more with the grotesque than it does with the whimsical. It reminds me a bit of the animated films of Karel Zeman or Jan Svankmajer. If there is a French influence it's Franju's version of Judex, which has a similar bird-headed character. This is not a colorful movie and parts of it are downright bleak. No one does bleak like filmmakers from Eastern Europe. There's no question it's a horror movie, from its grim opening scenes of violence to its ghastly birdlike Beast and his inner demons. It's a film that's scary in all the right parts. In spite of this, the film manages to navigate itself to happily ever after, perhaps the happily ever after one finds in the visions granted to Julia by the potion she drinks on her first night in the castle, but perhaps not. The film suggests in the end that the magic that creates that vision comes from inside of her, because all women have the ability to make their husbands handsome in their eyes. It's an ending that is in stark contrast to the rest of the film, suggesting that the darkest depths of its imaginings are intended to amplify its highs into a chiaroscuro. It's an effective technique if that is indeed what the filmmakers intend.
The success or failure of retellings of this story often hinge on the actors in the lead roles. Zdena Studenková is a splendid Julie (Belle in other versions). The Beast is a more complicated performance, with Jiří Zahajský providing the voice and Vlastimil Harapes as the man in the costume. The Beast is less two dimensional than Julie, given that the arc of his story vacillates between base violence and aspirations to be more than a beast. These impulses are often in conflict with each other in the same moment. Regardless of the end of the story, this is a Beast that has the mark of Cain on him, and two actors have managed to internalize that into their performance with both posture and voice. The Beast knows that he's damned. He knows, perhaps, that Julie may break his curse, but she won't alleviate that damnation. Studenková is sunny and carefree throughout. She doesn't fear The Beast. She finds delight in his gloomy ruined castle. That she does this without seeming a pollyanna is a small miracle. A viewer can well believe that she has the power to break his curse and, indeed, that she is his equal in their relationship.
On a purely personal level, Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite stories. Two other versions--the Cocteau version and the Disney animated version--are among my favorite films. It's a surprise to find another film version that deserves to be spoken of in the same breath, particularly so late in life when my cinematic prejudices have begun to harden. But that's the joy of movies and art. There's always more to see. There are always treasures to find. I am delighted to find one more box of wonders.
*It seems to me that there are genre signifiers that are specific to folk horror, enough to constitute a consistent meme pool that distinguishes it from the broader genre. Your mileage may vary, of course.
**A word of warning to the curious: this film has significant scenes of harm being done to animals. One of its first scenes shows the work of butchers at a town market slaughtering livestock, and there's a scene where the Beast runs down a doe. None of this if faked. Sensitive viewers should look elsewhere.
Welcome to this year's October Horror Movie Challenge. I'm participating in my friend, Aaron Christensen's annual fundraiser during this year's challenge. Aaron has chosen the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project again as this year's recipient for our community's largess, so if you've got a few bucks lying around, here's a donation link for the donor drive. You know what to do.
As usual with the challenge, I'll be prioritizing films that are new to me, so I'm off to a good start there. I'll also be prioritizing pre-Code, silent, and older international horror this year, because during the last few decades, the genre has gotten too big to really track. We'll see how it goes.
My current progress:
New to me films: 3
Total films:4
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