C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 19

#EldritchGirl S03E22 – This Revolting Graveyard

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Wes guiltily fulfils Ricky’s last request even though he goes through with his betrayal… but is it too late?

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CWs: emesis, gore

Intro/Outro Theme Music: Gemma Dyer

Reblog: Book Review of The Day We Ate Grandad by Meredith Debonnaire

Book Review: The Day We Ate Grandad by C.M. Rosens

#EldritchGirl S03E21 – Let Us Now Depart In Peace

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Ricky sees through Wes’s subterfuge and is not impressed; Katy steps up and leads the exile ritual, but the night ends on a worrying note.

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CWs: sheep death, body horror

Intro/Outro Theme Music: Gemma Dyer

Here For The Horror – 50 Frightful Films

I’ve reached the 50 film milestone for my movie challenge, and thought I’d share the list here! You can find the list as it grows on Letterboxd, linked below.

List on Letterboxd

If you’re unfamiliar with the challenge, it is to watch 100 new-to-you movies that are listed as “Horror” on IMDB/Letterboxd from 01 August – 31 October. The challenge was created by SpookySarahSays on Letterboxd.

My movie list so far, grouped by theme, not in order of viewing:

Eco Horror/Creature Features (films 1-4)Welsh Gothic (films 5-6)Gothic Horror/Romance (films 7-10)Family Horror (films 11-25)Demons & Cults (films 26-33)Hauntings & Curses (films 34-40)Vampires (films 41-44)Revenge (films 45-47)They Don’t Know Best (films 48-50)

Scroll through to the headings you like the sound of to see what I’ve watched so far!

Eco Horror/Creature FeaturesFROGS (1972) dir. George McCowan – anxieties about human meddling with nature, mainly in the form of pesticides, and the idea that creatures in the ecosystem that feed on insects and are impacted by US American pesticide use would fight back. In this film, they do so in the same way as Zoo , the James Patterson novel (and TV series adaptation). Instead of mammals, though, it’s reptiles, amphibians and arachnids, all teaming up and led by mutated bullfrogs of unusual size. Included in the film is the downfall of the old, all-American patriarch, elderly, failing, and tyrannical, whose fault this is in the first place. This paves the way for a new structure that elides race and class, led by the Young People (but especially the young [white] men), which gives the illusion of hopeful equality but in practice just upholds the status quo in a new generation. A pretty subtle metaphor for a US film SLUGS (1988) dir. Juan Piquer Simón – anxieties about genetic mutations with pollution as a cause (iirc), but it’s an exploitation film with all kinds of gnarly body horror, including the memorable explosion of someone’s face at a restaurant after accidentally ingesting a slug that infected him with parasites. Apparently not a soul knew that sodium chloride (salt) works on slugs, as nobody tries to salt them. They do come up with a dramatic lab chemical to elaborately destroy them all, though. A very 80s film, in the way FROGS feels very 70s.BATS (1999) dir. Louis Morneau – anxieties about animal experimentation and genetic modification, wrapped in a 90s blanket of fun family action thriller, led by a gorgeous blonde girlboss and her sassy Black (guy) sidekick, whose comic relief role is similar to other films of this genre/era, like in Evolution. Also as in a lot of these films, the bad guy is a scientist, and the other antagonist (due to stubbornness and unwillingness to listen to the experts) is the US Army General. It’s a case of the niche experts who get their hands dirty coming up against their superiors who are presented as mad, bad, or both, which is a specific kind of US American educated middle class against their superiors. Good Experts vs Bad ‘Experts’ on the eve of a new millennium full of scientific progress.MEG 2: THE TRENCH (2023) dir. Ben Wheatley – anxieties about a fucking big shark. Well, also, corporate corruption, disrupting the natural equilibrium, polluting and exploiting the ocean’s resources. I hadn’t been to the cinema in ages so I treated myself to an Everyman to see this, complete with sofas, table service, and a cocktail. Absolutely worth it. Just me, and the two gents behind me who apparently had a membership. Had a great time. Welsh Gothic

So far only two of these: DARKLANDS (1996) which I have written a post on, and GWEN (2018) which is a great counterpoint to it.

DARKLANDS (1996) dir. Julian Richards – this is about the Anglophonic anxieties of a Welsh-speaking Wales, complete with corrupt cult dragging Wales back to the barbarism of its un-Anglicised past. This is English speakers vs Welsh speakers, but not English vs Welsh. The critique and challenge comes from people who consider Wales as their home, and position Welsh Nationalists as extremists. This position comes with the protagonist having explicitly anti-indigenous views, while he is positioned as the victimised hero. There is even a graphic rape scene where he is drugged and forced to impregnate a woman from the neo-pagan cult, while restrained on an altar. So much going on there: read my post to get my full thought-dump and some context on it. GWEN (2018) dir. William McGregor – this is about the crushing of the Welsh rural way of life and family, and the destruction of community, by the representatives of modernity and industrialisation. Anxieties over the Welsh language have eased dramatically in media since the Welsh Language Act, and so these are not English-speakers vs Welsh-speakers, this is a case of Welsh industrialists vs Welsh farmers, and it’s very much a class issue. This also has a rape scene (of a woman by a hired thug of the quarry master), brutally disempowering the traditional matriarch and forcing/reinforcing a ‘modern’ patriarchal structure (it is set in the 1800s).

In both of these films, it’s about the factions within Wales eating each other, whether they are monoglot or bilingual, whether they speak English or Cymraeg, as opposed to positioning the foe as anyone outside of Wales. They are completely different in tone and style, but work together in some really interesting ways.

Gothic Horror/Romance

Let’s start with the Swinging Sixties: naturally, both these films star Christopher Lee.

LA FRUSTA E IL CORPO/The Whip and the Body (1963) dir. Mario Bava – psychological, psychosexual kinky Gothic Romance with murder and sexy whipping times. It has everything you could want from a classic 18th/early 19thC Gothic novel, but in glorious Technicolour. If you want melodrama, hysteria, mouldering corpses, mysterious and possibly supernatural murders, insanity, so many overlapping love triangles, a suicide backstory, a messed up family with secrets, and a lot of kinky whipping and bodice-ripping, this is for you.DIE SCHLANGENGRUBE UND DAS PENDEL/The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism (1967) dir. Harald Reinl – melodrama on steroids. Ignore the English title, he’s a Count, not a doctor, but there is a bit of mad science involved in his resurrection. Also magic. Magical Science. I really enjoyed it, to be honest. It’s a lunchtime film, where you can just stick it on and appreciate the highwaymen, the haunted forest, the ‘fear-inducing’ castle maze complete with both pit and pendulum of the original German title, the side character romance, the convoluted vengeance, the costumes, more hysterics, some snakes… It has it all. L’ÉTRANGE COULEUR DES LARMES DE TON CORPS/The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears(2013) dir. Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani – abstract Francophone Belgian cinema with overtones of giallo, non-linear narrative, a lot of sex and violence and secrets and murder, I have no idea what I saw with my human eyes or what was going on, but I think I probably witnessed Art.SPRING (2014) dir. Aaron Moorhead, Justin Benson – an indie horrormance or dark romance, I guess, with my absolute favourite thing – a fuck-up cinnamon roll who meets the love of his life, only to find she’s an eldritch creature. Some lovely body horror, musings on immortality, biochemistry, what being in love is… all in beautiful Italy. Just really enjoyed it. Family Horror

I love this shit, inject it into my veins. Here is a selection of horror films I’ve watched where the horror either centres on the family or is the family. The latter is my favourite. Included in here is the generational trauma theme, where that is the main (or a main) focus of the film.

I’ve ordered these A-Z as this list is longer.

THE BANISHING (2020) dir. Christopher Smith – British 1930s haunted house horror, but with a lot of religious guilt and complicated dynamics in the nuclear family that is falling apart. Very typical of this genre, but Church of England rather than Roman Catholic.CANNIBALS AND CARPET FITTERS (2017) dir. James Bushe – carpet fitters come up against a family of cannibals in the British countryside. Low budget slasher with Hot Fuzz/Cockneys vs Zombies/Texas Chain Saw Massacre vibes.D@BBE 4: Cin Çarpması/The Possession(2013) dir. Hasan Karacadag – Turkish franchise linked by the central concept (explained in each film) that the internet is predicted in the Qur’an as a mark of the end times. This isn’t really that important in this film, which works as a standalone tale of jinn possession, and is focused on the women of a family plagued by the possession of a young woman, Kübra. Her cousin Ebru is a sceptical psychologist, but she finds a Hoca, Faruk Akat, to come and exorcise her afflicted cousin and films the whole thing. It’s really about generational curses, trauma, jealousy, and betrayal, and the pursuit of wealth at the expense of one another as the root of evil in the family history.D@BBE 5: Zehr-i Cin/Curse of the Jinn(2014) dir. Hasan Karacadag – another standalone film but it works really well as a double bill with Cin Çarpması. This time the focus is on a couple, but the themes of family and generational guilt (and communal guilt) are developed at the end, and I appreciated the twists and turns. This one also has the added vicious class commentary, present in Cin Çarpması (Ebru is a doctor in the city, while her cousins live in a poorer village), but really explicit here, with the wealthy preying on the poor, but the poor being complicit in their own oppression and willingly committing acts of evil for money. In this case, the creepy evil village was half Muslim and half Christian, as opposed to the village in Cin Çarpması, so nobody gets to feel superior in this franchise. A lot of religious angst and unresolved family trauma in this film.DESOLATION (2017) dir. Sam Patton – USA film, where a widow goes hiking with her son and her sister but they are stalked by a hunter who treats them like prey. It doesn’t deliver on the action of the premise so don’t go into thinking it’s a revenge film or action-packed thriller, it’s another atmospheric slowburner that doesn’t quite work with the silent stalker as a metaphor for grief/trauma, but could be read that way. It works better as a film about family bonding in the face of extremity, where it’s easier to deal with the present, tangible threat, than it is to deal with the weight of something existential like grief and loss.قطرة دم/A Drop of Blood (2015) dir. Nasser El Tamimy – Emirati film focusing on a divided family, where the stepmother secures the services of a magician to summon a jinn and torment her stepdaughter. Shot in a very overexposed way that makes it look like a 1960s film to me!HEREDITARY (2018) dir. Ari Aster – US American family explore generational trauma and curses in a very literal fashion, but it’s a really good, twisty film. I enjoyed this one. There’s no ambiguity about the ending, which I found fairly blunt, but I really liked how it was shot and how things developed. Exploration of grief, a lot of references to mental illness, mentions of suicide, DID, and schizophrenia.ILE OWO/House of Money (2022) dir. Dare Olaitan – Nigerian horror that feels very much like a dark folktale, focusing on the descendants of a rich man nicknamed Owo (patriarch of the house of Owo), who in the modern world are billionaires but with a very sinister secret. Ready or Not meets The Invitation.LUZ/Luz: The Flower of Evil(2019) dir. Juan Diego Escobar Alzate – Colombian folk horror fantasy, slow and atmospheric, with the dispassionate landscape and an angelic looking blond boy who says nothing (trauma), imprisoned by fanatical preacher El Señor in the belief he is the Messiah to be (I guess?) the physical representation of a silent God, chained in the theology of the preacher. I don’t know. There’s a lot going on in this one, including graphic miscarriage and infection from miscarriage as a central plot point.MALASAÑA 32/32 Malasaña Streetdir. Albert Pintó – Spanish haunted apartment horror, set in 1976 Madrid against the background of political unrest, but big cw in this for historic transphobia and ‘hurt people hurt people’ narrative, especially in context of ‘people who can’t have their own kids steal other people’s’. Plus a bit of the magical /mystical disabled person trope. I have a feeling that this is all meant to be symbolic of the political climate of the 70s in Spain, maybe something analogous to historic abuses twisting things out of shape and refusing to allow Spain to manifest its national consciousness in certain ways, I’m not sure. Making the evil ghost a trans woman was unnecessary, and it doesn’t really allow for any kind of positive reading on that, to be honest.MALIGNANT (2021) dir. James Wan – not what I expected in any way, but I enjoyed it?? I think??POLTERGEIST (1982) dir. Tobe Hooper – while this is arguably about the fears of US Americans regarding whose land they’re on, their treatment of the dead/those who have gone before, and the consequences of rampant capitalism that puts profit over people, it centres these anxieties on the quintessential middle class white US American family and targets the innocent angelic little girl, so that the whole battle is for the soul of the nuclear family, and to do this, the trauma of the past and the corruption of the present must be unearthed and confronted. The second film in the series makes it clear that the villain is not a Native American (and it’s the town’s own burial ground, not a Native burial ground, that’s the issue in this film), but the Beast who wants Carole Ann is a cult leader whose followers died as a result of his fanaticism.PSALM 21 (2009) dir. Fredik Hiller – I watched this right after Silent House, and got a double whammy of child abuse that I wasn’t expecting, so that wasn’t fun. This is a Swedish religious/psychological horror which looks at historic family issues and secrets. Additional cw for victim-blaming by the mother of the perpetrator; very apt as recently the mother of Luis Rubiales has been on hunger strike, supporting her son as a sexual abuse investigation has been opened against him (the unsolicited kiss of a player at the world cup final being the catalyst).SILENT HOUSE (2011) dir. Chris Kentis, Laura Lau – I didn’t realise this was a remake or I would have watched the original first. This is the US American remake of an Uruguayan film, La Casa Muda (2010), based on an incident that took place in a village in Uruguay in the 1940s. This updated US American story works very well though, but if you are avoiding films that deal with child abuse, avoid this.SPIRAL (2019) dir. Kurtis David Harder – domestic horror/thriller where the main source of horror is being gay in the 1990s in the USA. There’s a lot going on here, but especially the dynamic between the central couple (interracial as well as gay, plus a slight age gap dynamic), where Malik was the only one who could see the danger in their new home that his older white partner – who had been straight-passing and married with a kid – just couldn’t see.Demons & Apocalyptic Death Cults

I do love me an apocalyptic cult, which you may have guessed from reading The Day We Ate Grandad. Some of these films were hit and miss, but I did enjoy them.

THE EMPTY MAN (2020) dir. David Prior – a bit on the nose, this one, given the pandemic year, as the danger comes from the Himalayas and is brought back to the USA. It then gets esoteric and New Age-y and things go to shit. Police procedural with urban legend horror in the mix.THE SONATA (2018) dir. Andrew Desmond – this really belongs in Family Horror, but I’m sticking it here because the family element is the catalyst for the plot and the weird demonic cult stuff is the main mystery. It contains a trope I love: music as a language, and in this case, a language capable of breaking down barriers between worlds.DÈMONI/Demons (1985) dir. Lamberto Bava – Italian film where people get trapped in a West Berlin movie theatre as the demon apocalypse begins. Body horror, very much like a zombie film, but where demons later break out of the zombified bodies of the possessed. Amazing punk aesthetic. Back in the good old days where you could get a whole coke can of snow for about as much as a multipack of quavers.DÈMONI 2: LI’INCUBO RITORNA/Demons 2 (1986) dir. Lamberto Bava – a decent sequel, this time in an apartment block, with Asia Argento (Dario Argento produced it). Crossover cast in different roles, so keep a look out for familiar faces! Again, very zombie-like, but in this one you get to see more of the demons hatching from the possessed husks.LA CHIESA/The Church (1989) dir. Michele Soavi – Italian horror set in a Gothic cathedral, with body horror and giallo vibes, not a sequel to Bava’s Demons but it really could be part of a triple bill with those two films. I watched it first, and that felt like the right order to me.THE RITE (2011) dir. Mikael Håfström – I preferred this to The Pope’s Exorcist, I think. Anthony Hopkins did a great job, and I always like to see Welsh being used in mainstream cinema.THE POPE’S EXORCIST (2023) dir. Julius Avery – it was fine. I hope the sequel they are threatening us with has something else to it, because otherwise it’s the same story in a different location, and we have innumerable versions of this story already. For something a bit more subversive and slightly different on this theme, try the Polish film, Hellhole/Ostatnia Wieczerza (2020).제8일의 밤/The 8th Night (2021) dir. Kim Tae-hyoung – Korean action horror which I really enjoyed, where a monster’s eye possesses people to get back to its other eye and raise the monster. I’ve put this in here as an ‘apocalyptic’ type scenario, only in a Buddhist context so not in the religious sense of the word but in an ‘impending doom’ sense.Hauntings & Curses

I’ve covered the jinn films and quite a lot of the haunted houses in the Family Horror section above, but they are also in this genre too! So here are the films where either family is not central to the plot or theme, or the protagonists are not a family.

అశ్విన్స్/ASVINS (2023) dir. Tarun Teja Mallareddy – Indian film in Malayalam, set in Essex as the Othered landscape for a group of YouTubers hired to make a pilot episode of a new series by a London-based company. The haunted mansion belonged to an Indian businessman and his archaeologist daughter, who found pair of idols and brought them back with her, unleashing a demon in the process. There’s a lot going on in this film, where the horror is from India and happening to Indians, but is happening in an isolated English house in the U.K., so that adds to the sense of isolation, but also the relationship between Britain and India is brought into focus as well.ATERADOS/Terrified(2017) dir. Demián Rugna – Argentinian suburban horror that genuinely freaked me out. It plays with dimensions and energy, and the fucking corpse child is a huge bag of nope for me. Loved this one.BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2 (2000) dir. Joe Berlinger – turn of the millennium witchy psychological horror sequel, which pits shared delusion/hysteria vs witchcraft.咒/INCANTATION (2022) dir. Kevin Ko – Taiwanese horror that I really enjoyed, particularly the communal/community element, and modern urban attitudes (individualistic, coercive, manipulative) vs traditional rural ones (communal, self-sacrificing, respectful of taboos and old ways). There’s also that element of destruction, where taboo-breaking by the city-dwelling interlopers destroys the delicate balance of the cult/sect’s existence. But also, there’s a sense of loss of community pushing the protagonist into her actions, which creates a sense of sympathy and understanding, and the desire to create a family or even a found family group is thwarted by the situation she finds herself in.QORIN (2022) dir. Ginanti Rona Tembang Asri – Indonesian boarding school horror about teacher/student abuse, where the teacher, Ustad Jaelani, uses his power over the girls to summon their doppelgangers (the Qorin jinn), and create an army of jinn followers. (He also sleeps with the student doppelgangers – one student witnesses him commanding her own doppelganger jinn and seducing her, so that’s a fairly clear theme…)RINGU/The Ring (1998) dir. Hideo Nakata – I haven’t seen the 90s Rings, so changing that in this challenge. A classic for a reason, now I’ve seen them!RINGU 2/The Ring 2 (1999) dir. Hideo Nakata – enjoyed more of Sadako’s backstory and the 90s nostalgia. I do want to read the books (in translation), as they were recommended to me. VampiresBRAM STOKER’S VAN HELSING (2021) dir. Steven Lawson – small cast, low budget, missed opportunity to be BRAM STOKER’S LUCY WESTENRA which would have been much better with the focus on Lucy’s illness and brief vampire life.RENFIELD (2023) dir. Chris McKay – absolutely, unironically loved this film. Campy gorefest to the max, with a brilliant shot-for-shot remake of the 1931 Dracula (with Bela Lugosi), all the melodrama I want from a Dracula film, all the angst, all the action, and fountains and fountains of blood completely unnecessarily. Adored it. Bought it. Comfort watch it. If you would like a double bill with Barbie (2023) along the lines of getting out of bad relationships and sorting your life out, try this for the catharsis and the affirmations.VAMPIR (2021) dir. Branko Tomović – a Serbian vampire tale, which I really enjoyed. Slowburn, atmospheric folk horror, isolated man who can’t speak Serbian in a Serbian village looking after their cemetary to escape his recent past, while the villagers don’t speak English. So it’s not subtitled. If you don’t speak Serbian either, you’re as in the dark about what they’re saying as he is. I liked that as an experience. It’s very arty, hallucinatory, psychological and dark.VAMPYR: DER TRAUM DES ALLAN GREY/Vampyr (1932) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer – early German talkie based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story collection, A Glass Darkly (1872). It’s got so much in it, but I was too tired for it when I watched it first and need to watch it again.RevengeBECKY (2020) dir. Cary Murnion, Jonathan Milott – antiheroine 13yo (stubborn, angry, irrational, no thoughts only hormonal rages) who kills all the White Supremacist escaped convicts who break into her family’s cabin. Love to see it, but also love that hr choices are explicitly critiqued and advised against in the film itself, and she does the opposite what she’s warned about.MANDY (2018) dir. Panos Cosmatos – the most batshit Nic Cage film I’ve seen to date, in which he goes fully unhinged vengeance-taker on a gang of demonic coked-up bikers running on hallucinogens, adrenaline and the blood of their enemies after they kidnap and kill his wife.A WOUNDED FAWN (2022) dir. Travis Stevens – my mistake to watch this one, the worst thing for me is traumatic brain injury, and that is the premise of the entire film from Act 2 onwards. The ending is especially horrific if you find traumatic brain injury horrifying, as it’s just extended self-mutilation and taking forever to die. He is even coerced into digging out part of his own brain at one point, so there’s also that. So much no thank you.They Don’t Know Best

Tons of overlap in the ‘Family Horror’ section with this, but it’s a better heading than ‘misc’ and it’s really the only theme I can think of that covers these!

BARBARIAN (2022) dir. Zach Cregger – it’s not just about an AirBnB, it’s also about #MeToo and US American patriarchal rape culture, plus the infantilization of Black women [by white women], abusive family, dark secrets, and the monstrous underbelly of respectable society revealed as the facade slowly crumbles away.BANSHEE CHAPTER (2013) dir. Blair Erikson – government conspiracies abound in this SciFi horror, where you can’t trust the (paternalistic) government who conduct unethical experiments on unsuspecting citizens. This was recommended to me as cosmic horror, and it does reference a Lovecraft story and have a sense of dread, but I’d mainly say it’s a don’t-trust-the-authorities, X-Files type thriller/horror.CHOPPING MALL (1986) dir. Jim Wynorski – if anyone says ‘let’s replace mall security guards with these killing machines, what could go wrong’, shoot them, destroy the machines, salt the earth, do not look back. Run. A group of teens are uber-policed by the mall security robots. Fear over machines taking over, attacking people, and causing havoc (while also reinforcing the preferred code of conduct of contemporary Conservative society, like most slashers, where having sex is punishable by gruesome death and only the chaste survive).

And that’s the complete list of films so far from 1-50! Which have you seen and what did you think?

#EldritchGirl S03E20 – The Terrors of the Earth

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Theo finally meets the Faceless Man, and the family is decimated by their gods. Wes makes a (bad) drunk/power-drunk decision.

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CWs: dub con (m/m, interrupted), gore, body horror, alcohol, brainwashed cultist POV

Intro/Outro Theme Music: Gemma Dyer

Welsh Gothic in Film: DARKLANDS (1996)

This is a mini-essay/thought-dump I had in my August newsletter after watching DARKLANDS (1996). It links back to my posts on Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic (UWP, 2013), so I thought I would post it again here.

CW: rape scene discussed

Pre-Devolution Horror

I’ve been doing the #100HorrorMoviesin92Days challenge and keeping my thread updated on Mastodon, TwiX and Bluesky.

My latest watch was DARKLANDS (1996), dir. Julian Richards, which has CWs for antiziganist tropes, anti-indigenous discourse, on-screen animal sacrifice/slaughter, and an extended scene of male rape (by a woman) during a fertility ritual. I first became aware of this film via the site Wales in the Movies, and this post, and totally agree with the assessment of it.

It’s The Wicker Man meets Rosemary’s Baby set in Port Talbot, with a black metal / industrial metal aesthetic that reminded me very strongly of the cannibal cult in Doomsday (2008), and I watched it mainly because the anti-Welsh Nationalism discourse was really interesting. (Port Talbot’s steel works and industrial skyline were the inspiration for Blade Runner (1982), by the way, and they also form a core part of the DARKLANDS aesthetic and setting.)

Photo Credit: Steve Hill CC BY-SA 3.0

This film is pre-Devolution as the referendum loomed, and I’ve written on post-devolution (1997-2013) Welsh Gothic here, summarising and commenting on a chapter of Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2013) that covers this period. Emma Schofield’s thesis, Independent Wales? The Impact of Devolution on Welsh Fiction in English (2014) is also worth a read for the post-Devolution period, but media like this in the mid-90s gives an idea of the counter-arguments and currents running through Welsh society.

I have also written on the context of Welsh Gothic fiction from the 1940s-1997 here, and done a chapter review on the Zombification of Wales in Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic here.

The whole premise of DARKLANDS is basically that Welsh Nationalism is a form of extremism, where Welsh is a vehicle backwards into a dangerous and savage past. The main character expresses views that the indigenous peoples of other cultures forced into Christianity by colonisers were cannibals and ‘savages’ anyway, so in need of civilising by the [white] Europeans. This comes up in a discussion about a religious (neo-Pagan) cult in Port Talbot returning to “Celtic” pagan ideas of Druidism and animal/human sacrifice, so a parallel is being drawn here with Welsh paganism that manages to be wildly and weirdly offensive in a few directions at once, which is about right for a 90s film.

There are other discussions too – the journalist character, when interviewing a Welsh Nationalist up for re-election, accuses him of alienating Anglophonic constituents who are just as local and just as Welsh as he is, and yet are being sidelined and pushed out of their own community where they were born by the imposition of things they never asked for and don’t want.

The journalist himself has a strongly Londonised accent, cannot speak or read Welsh, and is – or considers himself to be – a prime example of those he is concerned about.

The thing about this film is that it’s not as clear-cut as “those against Welsh Nationalism and its aims are the Outside Enemy”, because in real life, that is not and was not the case. The film does encapsulate a lot of shared feeling within Wales and the monoglot, Anglophonic population that posited that Welsh Devolution was a dangerous project. They were concerned – and angry – as previous bad experiences with ineffectual politicians and distrust in the party leadership coloured their expectations. Some sincerely believed that Devolution would set Wales back and yoke them to an extremist, self-serving, faction-ridden and therefore ineffectual, leadership. The whole project was deemed to be a vain white elephant that would end up impoverishing Wales as a nation even further, with very little to show for it. “Welsh Sovereignty” or Welsh Independence was not on the table at any time and not what Devolution was ever going to deliver. This wasn’t a case of “get a Welsh Senedd and you’ll be able to make your own decisions” – it was seen by quite a few people at the time as “get a Welsh Senedd, so Westminster can ignore Wales’s position even more than they already do, and the Senedd will achieve nothing and line their own pockets, mishandle the meagre budget given to them, and make everything worse.”

I’m not saying any of this was my personal view, or that I agree. I’m just saying that’s the perception I remember from those I knew who voted ‘No’ in 1997, and they were not alone in these attitudes.

Anyway, the year after this film was released, the Welsh Devolution Referendum (1997) squeaked in a ‘Yes’ vote by 50.3% only (second referendum on this, the first had been a ‘No’ vote for the reasons outlined above), and the fears of the ‘No’ crowd are pretty much allegorised and amplified in this film.

Read through this lens, the rape of the [white, English-accented] male journalist (drugged, strapped down on an altar/table and forced to impregnate a woman during a fertility ritual and clearly in pain during the whole thing) is fairly obvious as an allegory. This is the working class demographic coerced and forced into a world they don’t want to live in, and bring children into it who will grow up in this barbaric, exploitative, backwards-looking world and lose their own autonomy in the process. These working men themselves don’t fit into or belong in a bilingual or Welsh-speaking world, and are therefore going to be bulldozed and colonised by it, to their personal detriment.

Worse, they are being actively betrayed by prominent figures in the community (the corruption fears of the time, and concern about the political factions manifesting with cult-like adherence to certain personalities and ideologies within them).

This was not an unfounded or irrational persecution complex. This social anxiety was born of decades of slow neglect, and in some cases utter contempt, shown to multiple sectors and regions of Wales by those in charge. This is about the betrayals communities suffered time and again after disasters like Aberfan (1966), even by Labour governments that they voted for, and the mine closures and decimation of Wales’s industry during the Conservative Thatcher years. By the 1990s, the explicit feeling for a lot of people I knew was: whoever you vote in, they will betray you, so better the Devil you know. Where Devolution was concerned, this became: if you create a new ‘Welsh’ government, they will promise you the world and then turn into the lapdogs of Westminster, and you’ll only be betrayed again. But in the process, your own people will create a Wales in which you, who are just as Welsh as they are, no longer belong.

These fears are definitely explored in DARKLANDS, with a heavy dose of all things mid-90s. Read in this way, this film is also about the futility of trying to save Wales from itself/from the factions within it determined to drag it down, although in 1996 the writing was far from being on the wall, and in 1997 the referendum results looked set to be a ‘No’ until the count got well into the night. (At least, I remember it that way – whenever we went to bed it was ‘No’ and when we got up it was ‘Yes’).

It’s also just a film with some dated and problematic stuff in it from the mid-90s that riffs on a lot of classic folk horror but is also industrial in setting and aesthetic.

Anyway: Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth, ry’n ni yma o hyd.

Until next time!

#EldritchGirl S03E18&E19 – Listen to Chapter 16-17 Now!

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Ricky lets Katy help with the ritual to restore Wes for the night, and finds himself bonding (uncomfortably).

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CWs: body horror, deliberate ingestion of weird parasite-adjacent things.

Intro/Outro Theme Music: Gemma Dyer

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Wes finds his power addictive, and shows his family what he’s capable of.

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CWs: body horror, violence, alcohol

Intro/Outro Theme Music: Gemma Dyer

#EldritchGirl S03E17: Bound By No Human Rules

Listen NowBuy nowTrue Face Worship: Inspiration

In this chapter/episode, Theo embraces being a vessel of the unmoored True Face, and has a visitation of his own. This is the last time we meet Myrddin (in this book) who keeps his word and backs off, but you also see how much more powerful he is than Ricky in terms of prophetic and oracular power. Myrddin can look at something mundane like the flame of a lighter and see mysteries – he can tell the future in the glow of a traffic light. He can’t help it. It comes as naturally to him as breathing. Ricky has to concentrate and has learned specific things – birds in flight, the weather, bones, runes. He struggled with interpretation in The Crows and his new form allows him to see the future much more clearly (except his own, still). He’ll have to take control of the crystal cave and the web of the wyrd in the Outside in order to see everything, but as he learned on his cocoon-trip in Thirteenth, that may cost him (it will hurt, and he didn’t trust it).

Meanwhile, the True Face doesn’t care about patterns and predictions, it’s pure chaos.

If you want to check out the Lovecraft short story that inspired a lot of these concepts, you can read Nyarlathotep for free here, and The Crawling Chaos for free here.

There’s also quite a bit of The Void (2016) in this, which is an amazingly low budget Canadian film with esoteric cults, pregnancy horror, medical horror, cults-cults-cults and some great effects they blew the whole budget on.

Another big influence for this was John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994), which I love, as part of his apocalypse trilogy [The first 2 in this loose trilogy are The Thing (1982), and Prince of Darkness (1984), both of which also had quite a lot of influence on my series too!]

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CWs: gore, violence, brainwashed/fanatic POV

Intro/Outro Theme Music: Gemma Dyer

#EldritchGirl S03E16: There Are Consequences

Listen NowBuy NowThere Are Consequences…

In this episode, Wes faces some hard truths of his new reality, and Katy takes care of him. I really enjoyed exploring the consequences for Wes suddenly being memorable, and having to actually guard his expressions and moderate his tone. He’s also got the added bonus of being subject to other people’s ideas of what is “attractive”, rather than being all things to all people by virtue of being a blank slate in people’s minds.

A lot of Wes was based on my own inability to remember my face and proportions, so it was really interesting to hear that others read in a metaphor (?) for gender dysphoria and/or see parallels with their own gender identity in his experience.

I’d love to hear if that resonates with anyone else! Wondering if that should be a content warning, as I didn’t initially think about that at all.

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CWs: temptation to relapse, flipped in loco parentis dynamic

Intro/Outro Theme Music: Gemma Dyer

The Poetry of Betrayal! Shop Update

Ko-Fi Members now get access to a free-to-download eBook I wrote in June! I’m writing more of this backstory and will eventually release it on general sale but this is a member exclusive 18K story.

Download from: https://ko-fi.com/s/05d617c17f

THE WILLOWS (Algernon Blackwood) meets THE WHITE PEOPLE (Arthur Machen) but sapphic, with a sensible hockey captain and a glamorous little madam. Featuring “and they were roommates”, first love turned to nemeses, creepy mirrors, dark secrets, and disturbing rituals on an island that isn’t always there.

(Don’t worry: as members know, these two get together by 1923, and have a full lovers-to-enemies-to-life partners arc. I’m looking forward to that, and also them ending up in Pagham-on-Sea to cause trouble there.)

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