When it comes to ghost stories—the foundational texts, be they written or oral, of horror—the Irish are tough to beat. Fear is a spirit. A ghost may take the form of what we’ve allowed ourselves to miss out on. A result of poor choices. A portion of the past that won’t leave us at peace—or that we can find a way to move beyond. Monsters may be different, but they possess the fundamental quality of the ghost, emerging from behind a veil of mystery and the unknown to occupy a portion of our lives, our hearts, our minds—often for ill, but sometimes for good, too. Ghosts are a lot like people. Some are worthy of being your friends; others no, nay, never, in the words of a Celtic rover.
The Irish horror tradition has always been based in the power of story and the passing along of narrative. There is something primeval about Irish horror, a throwback aspect of the cave, with the fire crackling and early humans crouched together as one of them weaves a tale of what happened out there in the night—but not so far away that you couldn’t encounter it, too.
Ireland lends itself to a connection between the ancient and somewhat more modern, though it also always resonates as a land and time apart from any other locale and era. The moorland, the bog, the peat, the bay, the smell of tinker’s smoke; one passing through a scene featuring the above might ask, “What year is this anyway?” Do ghosts check their watches?
The rural Irish tavern recalls that cave setting, only instead of fire, there is electricity with the lights turned down low. The rain pelts against the window. Another dram is taken. A person has a tale to tell. Something that happened to his great-great-uncle in the next county over. Other voices cease. Attention is paid. Words are hung upon like the draping of dreams over stars in the night.
This is the eternal oral tradition, which has its own second and third lives in the likes of literature and film. Every culture, every region, every country has its share of ghost stories. Every human life does, too. What Person A calls a ghost may not be a ghost to Person B, but that’s mere taxonomy, and never was there a label or a term to stop a ghost from being a ghost. The Irish have always been adroit spotters of ghosts, without a need to explain them away as anything else. Hence, the symbiotic relationship. Respect given and taken.
Anecdotally, at least, it feels like there are more English ghost stories—as in, works upon the page—than there are Irish ghost stories, which conceivably speaks to the phlegmatic nature of the one group and the voluble capacity of the other. With the latter, though, there arises certain conversational rhythms when words are set down on the page, and the sensation for the reader of being in on a pact, or what is tantamount to a spectral fellowship, the same as when a person at that table in the tavern is all ears for the story about his mate’s great-great-uncle and the alleged—but very probable—banshee who made herself known to him as he walked the fields.
We have the sense that Irish horror is meant for the enclave. The small group. Between neighbors. Kin. Tales are shared, which is rather different than tales being broadcast. Irish horror cinema tends to maintain a similar insularity, while not barring any would-be audience member. A story unfolds in a corner of the pub, but we are welcome to listen—or, in this case, watch.
St. Patrick’s Day—as a holiday in the United States—misses out on some of the best parts of Irish culture—including this fellowship with ghosts—in favor of a prevailing sloppiness. The drinking in the streets, the donning of the Boston Celtics jersey with its wearer strangely believing that they’re every bit the Irishman as William Butler Yeats, or would if they’d heard of him, anyway.
Better to spend your time with the ghosts and the monsters and embed oneself in the cinematic version of that pub where the storyteller connects his friends with his tale, and people connect with each other through spirits. Intimately shared horror is the stuff of community and communion. No wonder the Irish make the most of both their ghosts and the heavenly host. So: pour a pint or make that tea, pull up a chair, pretend that your comfortable home is also a cozy, rural Irish alehouse with its intoxicating fug of whiskey, fish, and smoke, and let the spirits of Ireland do their bewitching damndest.
We start with a short film that is rarely seen now and likely hasn’t been seen by many people before: Digby Rumsey’s The Pledge (1981), based on Irish writer Lord Dunsany’s 1908 story “The Highwayman.” If you haven’t read Dunsany, get thee to a library, go. He’s a difficult author to pin down—a weaver of fantasies, horror fiction, and mythologies; think of him like Lovecraft with a lighter touch, a better bedside manner, and teleological humor—as to who or what pulls the levers of life. Dunsany’s writing took chances. Sometimes, the payoff isn’t there—unless we’re to count a sort of incidental by-product of whimsy—and other times, there needn’t be a payoff; whatever is undertaken in the story is enough to be the story.
The Pledge falls into the latter category; the narrative by its nature puts us on automatic high alert. Highwaymen were—and still are—big in Irish lore. They ruled the roads, stepping clear of their hiding spots to utter their cry of “stand and deliver” to those who were hoping to reach their destination without being relieved of their possessions, their money, and, on occasion, their lives.
There’s a tinge of the romantic to the highwayman mythos—Robin Hood, after all, employed highwayman tactics. This romanticism is predicated on ignorance as per history; being unaware of—or choosing not to focus on—highwayman staples like rape and murder. In The Pledge, the three surviving—for now—members of what had been a four-man gang have repaired to a hostelry. They keep their voices low, for one of them has a plan—to liberate the body of their late friend from a gibbet where it has hung for the three months since he was brought to justice. The others aren’t keen to follow their leader, who makes the reasonable point that it just as easily could have been any of them.
We have expectations with a story of this nature; it comes to us pregnant with possibilities. There’s a body, a gibbet, planned interment in a holy crypt (as if soul-saving was a matter of being buried in the correct container), a middle-of-the-night mission, the possibility of capture and with that, three more bodies to dangle for God knows how many months in public view.
Rumsey shows us exactly what that rotting corpse looks like up close and personal. You ask yourself, “Will my flesh resemble this flesh someday?” All this 20-minute film needs to do, once it sets the mood and the plan in motion, is to occur. That’s enough. An eloquent—if pithy—postscript provides a nice kicker at the film’s close that is bound to stay with you. These men who do so much wrong have done wrong again but were closer to right than usual so that a few angels were able to crack a smile.
March means the onset of spring. People welcome the return of the warmth of the sun, but the spiritual centrality of spring plays out at ground—or close to it—level. The soil, the plants, the lakes and ponds fed with the new water of melted ice. The spring is a time for folk horror—a terror rooted in earth. Corin Hardy’s The Hallow is a British production that was filmed in Ireland. Watching it, you’d think that it’d have to be—otherwise, this would be a different movie even if everything else remained the same.
Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic play a married couple who’ve rented a home for an indeterminate amount of time, presumably for his work, which has to do with plants and conservation. They’ve been on the premises for a month, but backstory details are scant. We don’t need them. This family is there. That’s enough. The bits of information we are provided are dramatically intrusive, one could say, and ultimately undermining; explanations and finger-wagging warnings aren’t necessary in a horror piece like this—the occurrence of events is all that is needed, as with The Pledge.
They have a baby, who accompanies Dad—with the family dog—on his treks into the abutting forest, where he’s told by his neighbor (Michael McElhatton) not to go. Turns out there are these thorn people who live in the woods, with a yen for baby-nicking. The thorn people are an invasive species, which gets a touch confusing, considering that they predate humans and are as old as the spot they occupy. The creatures enter flesh and take over from the inside out. Said neighbor’s daughter wandered off one afternoon, never to be seen again.
Films like this raise an unavoidable question: why live where you live if these events and doings be true? There’s no equivocating in this movie: the thorn people are paces away. Always. Hell of a neighborhood problem. We get a cross between Straw Dogs—for this is also a home-invasion movie—and The Thing from Another World, with its murderous vampire carrot. As when it comes to your diet on the salubrious end of the spectrum, vegetables don’t muck about. Extrapolate that to woody plants. For all the film’s folk-horror characteristics—and a warning to the curious not to mess with the land, lest it mess you up, though botany isn’t exactly akin to pulling down every last tree—it’s equally, if not more so, a meditation on love, protection, and sacrifice. Death, yes, but renewal also. You’ll be touched by the conclusion, and not as if by nasty brambles.
In Aislinn Clarke’s Childer, we have another short and an additional example of folk horror with vernal overtones. Children—whom we gather are supposed to symbolize wild, feral beings, but instead look like kids playing at truancy—manifest themselves near a woman’s backyard garden.
Yet it is she that is the issue, not them. This lady is wrapped tight, with classic OCD tendencies. She’s a neat freak, a martinet, a lonely, stressed, overwhelmed—with sadness rather than tasks—tense woman who yells at her son, wilts at the prospect of a spill or a spot of dirt, and gives the mailman grief despite his kindly nature. The action takes place in autumn. Mom reluctantly makes the boy a Halloween costume—an attempt at a sufficiently perfunctory that she writes the word “boo” across the sheet.
But greens dominate the compositions. You wouldn’t think winter is about to nip around the bend. There’s nothing creepy about the kids. Let any kid know that they’re irritating you—or any troll, for that matter—and what’s a kid going to do? Up their game, so to speak. The problem is the woman herself, and her eventual snapping. Let’s just say that her son ended up clean as could be in the end.
This is a film that’s meant to be funny, but without producing laughter. Mordant. Nothing is literal, but we’re also not in a fantasy realm. It’s a liminal state between the virtual and reality, appearances—as in, for appearance’s sake—and instability, with a debt to 1970’s Robin Redbreast from the BBC’s Play for Today series, despite that work’s much more put-together protagonist. Still, those masks in both: straight-line connection.
With Childer, a life too ritualistic has itself sired a susceptibility to rituals that are manifested via projection and are then thought to have been actually witnessed on account of neuroses, rather than observed as a result of them having been there anyway and through clarity of vision. People have a woeful knack for making our own ghosts whose existence we then believe in completely.
The inside of the home is immaculately ordered, partially because it’s so empty. We hear a great deal of talk about clutter, but it also seems that the people who own things—as film-loving DVD collectors can attest—have richer inner lives on the whole. So it goes with interests. Passions. This woman has her son, nothing else, save her obsessive fastidiousness.
The backyard, which is close enough to the woods that these prospective wild children are able to make their appearances, looks a lot like the inside of the house, come to think of it. We even see Mom trying to vacuum her lawn. Nature is going to nature. Ditto human nature. Attempting to override the one is bad enough, but both simultaneously? Look out below.
The Irish handle darkness well. (Do you?) They sing, they tell jokes, they cope with humor and a form of conversation that has as much to do with music—being a form of music, that is—as it does words. Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song is a joint Welsh/Irish/British film, but we know from its title that music is of the essence and light will be in the background, if it’s there at all.
Sophia (Catherine Walker) has lost her little boy. She searches and searches for a house that suits the requirements of the man she hires, Joseph (Steve Oram), an occultist with whom she’ll be locked away for months on end as he moves her through the forces of the netherworld, to eventually meet up with this wish-granting angel who can help her get what she wants, which she believes is revenge.
You know a movie like this can only end so well, and that it won’t do so for all the main characters, of which we have two, meaning this isn’t exactly tricky math. Joseph has his own issues. He’s an alcoholic, someone who plainly detests himself, and no wonder, considering some of the stunts he pulls. There’s a borderline rape scene, which only isn’t rape—one supposes—on account of a technicality, the absence of touch.
But sin-wise—and this is a film about sin—there’s no difference. Bad is bad. The demons that eventually end up on the premises—if you summon them, they will come—conjure the voice of Sophia’s dead boy. We feel her heartbreak as she talks to him, knowing this is someone—something—else all the while.
Almost all the action takes place in this rented mansion, which is what you’d have to call it. This is no mere house. Earlier on, Steve seals them in with a circle of salt around the grounds. There isn’t any leaving once the circle is sealed, he tells Sophia. Later, she attempts to do just that. Her car doesn’t work—those blasted demons again—and she embarks on a lengthy journey by foot. We watch as she moves from one landscape to another, only to return where she started.
A Dark Song is a movie you think about in bed that night after watching it, leafing through its composite of disturbing images. Some are worthy of Doré—you really don’t want to be dragged into the demon’s de facto inner sanctum where the fingers get clipped off—but despite the feel of a quotidian Inferno—in the domestic setting, with a stove, cups of tea, nights on the couch—nothing levels us as viewers in the picture like the sight of the exterior of that house after the all-for-naught journey. You suspect it’s coming—while suspecting that she doesn’t—which paradoxically makes it worse when it does. The devilry of dramatic irony.
If these films don’t have you ready to gather up your staff and drive away some snakes, then probably nothing will. But as that may not be a realistic option for you, depending on where you live, then consider tumbling out into the night after your movie marathon for a restorative dram or solid pint of stout at what passes for your local libation-serving inn. Cheers to life, cheers to death. You don’t get the one you want without the other, whichever one that may be.
See? Jokes. You must laugh through the darkness, or else no light’s getting in, which would also mean no movies, and then where would you be? 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
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