Back to Back 44 - Do the Rite Thing
Comparing two films which get into the ritual side of esoteric horror
The Devil Rides Out (1968) - director Terence Fisher, writer Richard Matheson
A Dark Song (2016) - writer/director Liam Gavin
We all have our little rituals, though for most of us it might be no more than a cup of morning tea brewed exactly just so, or a workplace routine to get us settled in to the swing of a working day. If we're religious we might do a prayer or two - or if you're hardcore, a rosary or two in a hair shirt on your knees with spikes sticking into your flesh, like an Opus Dei bloke I knew who made sure everyone understood just how much he was mortifying his flesh, mostly by keeling over in a dead faint every so often. Because if there's one thing Catholic God really loves it's an old-style drama queen.
But even the Opus Dei nutter pales in comparison to the most extreme of rituals, such as the zen sokushinbutsu process, completed over 3,000 days of the strictest fasting on a mountaintop, the zen monk dining only on pine needles and pine kernels, mediatating all the while until all the fat on the body was gone. At this point the monk ceased drinking water and soon passed over while chanting the nenbutsu mantra, and the body remained behind as a perfectly-preserved mummy.
Within the Western esoteric tradition the closest thing to this marathon of self-denial must be the Abramelin Ritual, a rite described in a medieval text (possibly composed by a kabbalist Jewish rabbi) in which magic circles, squares, inscriptions including word squares with Hebrew letters in palindromic formation, invocations, fasts and ancilliary rituals, are to be employed in a process performed over eighteen months. The aim of the ritual is to finally manifest one's Guardian Angel, which can then be requested (or perhaps compelled, the source is unclear) to offer a great and powerful favour.
One of the most famous magick practitioners to perhaps perform even a part of this ritual is the self-publicizing poet/mountaineer rich-kid Aleister Crowley, who in 1900 bought Boleskine House near Loch Ness precisely because its physical layout matched the description of the geomancy demanded in the ritual text. He paid double the market price in cash to acquire the property, but then got distracted by cultist political intrigue and abandoned the ritual, if indeed he ever started it. Rumours persisted of demons unleased by Crowley's unfinished ritual prowling Boleskine for many years after this incident.1 His shadow will loom large over both the films considered today, which take the whole esoteric ritual process as seriously as such things could ever be taken by entertainment media.
The Devil Rides Out brings together some of the finest British traditions into one cinematic delight: Hammer Horror, Christopher Lee being magnificent, Charles Grey being suave and menacing, classic cars, the English countryside, Aleister Crowley-style toffs being posh and magical, and an English deep and abiding suspicion of foreigners, who may or may not be the devil in disguise - but probably are.
The story originates with ultra-conservative thriller writer Dennis Wheatley back in 1933 wanting to write a novel about the menace represented by satanic worship. He asked his friend Tom Driberg (gay and ultra-leftist socialite and gossip columnist, possible Soviet double agent, but posh and therefore pukka2) to present him to Aleister Crowley (considered to be deeply wicked and libertine, if not actively satanic, but posh and therefore pukka) so that Crowley could tell him all about magick and ritual.
Although this might not be Wheatley’s only occult source. According to the book Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult by Richard Spence "Wheatley was connected with 'Rosicrucian' sex rites performed by his aristocratic friends Charles and Joan Beatty," and so knew a thing or two about kinky goings-on in country houses already. In return for his magic knowledge, Crowley would, through celebrity gossip/spy Driberg and more serious spy Wheatley (who would, during the Second World War, join the ultrasecret London Controlling Section of military counterespionage), gain a way into the world of British espionage. Spying chaps were famously tolerant of eccentric behaviour, only requiring loyalty to Crown and Empire - and not always even that.
Wheatley's focus in his novel was not on the growing Nazi threat, though he did bewail the fact that the perfectly good Hindu occult symbol of the swastika had been debased by Hitlerites, but on the subversive potential of women and imperially subject peoples. The real menace would be that black Africans or Indians, or women of any colour, became powerful and threatened the Imperial heartland, an attitude that finds its way into this film, made thirty years later in a very different climate.
Satanism joined feminism and anticolonial liberation movements in the category of Things That Endangered England, by Wheatley's estimation, and of course foreigners in general were always a menace, be they Nazis, Commies or just bally Froggies. Possibly to give a sheen of devilry to his protagonist, who was much less explicitly Christian in the book than in the film, he was named the Duc de Richleau and given a French provenance including a past in the French Escadrille Lafayette, but was shown in the film to be posh, and tied closely by blood to the English upper class, and therefore thoroughly pukka. But Frenchness and a certain exotic Satanic power would hang over him like a scent of fine cognac throughout.
The film is Hammer and therefore possessed of certain advantages and disdavantages. The advantages include a stable of fine actors with Christopher Lee at their head, a tried and trusted director about to do his best work in the shape of Terence Fisher, and a commitment to filming on the best grade of Technicolor film stock, which gives all Hammer films such a rich saturated texture. The weakness is a certain lack of budget for both production and marketing when compared to the great Hollywood studios, which shows at times in moments requiring spectacular action or special effects. A big helping of viewer imagination is required to make the magical threats actually scary when they appear.
The strengths are on full show at the beginning, in a credit sequence of great force and effectiveness, making use of magical glyphs and sigils and a powerful score by James Bernard to create an impression of epic threat to come. This establishes the film very much in the classic school of horror; in the same year Polanski's Rosemary's Baby would move the goalposts in horror based on dark satanic power, making it something deeply intimate and disturbing. Just comparing Rosemary's experience in that film with that of her equivalent in this film, Tanith (Nike Arraghi), shows how external is the perception of supernatural threat in this world of classic horror, how much based on what we see from outside rather than what the characters experience as an 'expressionistic' phenomenon, which would become the dominant mode in horror from then on.
So the film is old-fashioned in so many ways - set in a past time long gone, a British Empire of 1929 about to fall under the pressure of external forces (military rather than satanic in nature), with gents in country houses with a lot of time for leisure pursuits, be that hunting, classsic cars or esoteric magick, and with a classic mode of presenting horror and the supernatural. But if it is a film style whose end is nigh, it's undeniable that it is going out in a blaze of dignified glory. Leading-man trio of Christopher Lee, Leon Greene and Patrick Mower could stand for a Platonic ideal of the perfect gentleman in three phases, while Charles Grey is very simply the most suave and sophisticated villain ever to grace a screen.
In a purely narrative sense, you could criticize the film for playing its master hand too soon - Baphomet, the devil himself, appears in a scene early on, and is banished by means of a crucifix chucked his way. After the Big Bad has been so easily dealt with, at practically no cost to the protagonists, what threat is left to really manifest for later stages in the story? But this is where Grey as the evil Mocato steps up, in many ways becoming more potent and terrifying a threat than Satan himself, with his magic aura of being able to bend others to his will, and channeling said will through those most strongly influenced to make them do literally anything he wishes.
It's at the end that the film shines, with its evocation of countervailing rituals, one of protection and one of deeply sinister necromancy, the terms of the rituals being taken with great seriousness. That's to say, when the Duc draws his magic circle of protection, he means what he says when he warns that outside the marked zone all is danger - which leaves us to wonder why he left a little girl in the house with only a frail old butler to protect her. Did he think the deepest and most unscrupulous evil wasn't going to strike at an innocent child? It seems old French noblemen with thoroughly English accents have alot to learn about evil.
— INTERMISSION —
Billed as a horror but very much not a horror in the contemporary commercial sense, this film is rather an occult drama, one of the very few films to take esoteric magic rituals seriously, more or less on their own terms. I appreciated the way it treats this whole topic of magic - though not a believer in magical practice myself, I think it merits just as much respect in its incorporation into drama as religious belief, and should not be cheapened by horror schlock and cheap scares. If anything this film goes the other way, resolving to be such a slow burn that nothing even approching 'supernatural' action occurs until well over an hour into the runtime.
Sophia (Catherine Walker) hires occultist mage Mr Solomon (Steve Oram) to conduct an extremely arduous and dangerous ritual, the Abramelin Rite, in her enormous rented house. Her son was murdered by some "occultist teenagers" - a part of the story that is completely unexplored and underdeveloped - and she is seeking revenge. It resolves very quickly into a two-hander set in one location, a very difficult type of drama to pull off adequately. Everything then is based on the relationship between the two main characters, changing dynamics of conflict and harmony. For the most part this is done well, but is it enough to sustain so much of the runtime?
Consequently quite a lot of the early drama is based around Sophia's reluctance to come clean to Solomon about her motives. Sincerity is a key component of the magic and so all early efforts are completely futile. Time and again Sophia, who seems more than intelligent enough to understand the terms of the magical ritual she's engaged in, refuses to follow through on the committment she's made to be 'pure of intention' - not virtuous, as Solomon explains, but completely honest about her aims. Meanwhile Solomon is attempting to dominate her not just for his magical ends, but to get a bit of tawdry sex play in on the sly - a completely disastrous situation, then.
The film is shot in Ireland, and so magic can be quite easily evoked in the light and the way the clouds move, as well as the autumnal splendour of the house's gardens. Apart from that, it has to be conveyed in the words of magic practitioner Solomon, who says that he's seen things and understands the architecture of the cosmos. Oram is so good at conveying the complexities of this driven and flawed character that the viewer tends to believe it; besides, that same viewer has started watching what is marketed as a horror movie, so by the terms of that compact, magic must become real within the world of the narrative.
This is where the film falters. Having promised to be a horror story, it is nothing of the sort. It is in fact a grief story, in which the process of grieving and reconciliation are played out in magical terms, and the magical compoment, though treated with respect and seriousness, isn't really what's going on here. The film is in fact a trick, a personal drama about Sophia's loss and loneliness disguised as a story about the evocation of angels and demons. The bottle-drama nature of the setting, two characters sealed off in a single house, is a narrative contrivance to explore her isolation from human community and hope following the death of her son.
Comparable, then, to The Babadook (2014) in its intense, character-driven drama contained in a single house that relies on horror conventions to convey deep emotional meanings. But Jennifer Kent in The Babadook knew well enough to place horror-type action at key moments in the earlier part of the film. Here, the burn is of the slowest imaginable, with the actual supernatural action confined to the last 15 minutes of the film.
Writer/director Liam Gavin has clearly done his research, and is sensitive to the theme of loss, but is not willing or able to concede anything to the conventional expectations of a horror film. I admire the absence of jump scares and loud music stings, but still feel more is required to build faith in the supernatural conclusion as well as the rather insubstantial character of mage Solomon.
No wonder that there is such a disparity between critic reviews, nearly all highly positive, and audience reiews. Critics are prepared to sit through a character based drama about grief and trauma. Not all horror fans are, and clearly some felt betrayed by marketing (trailers, taglines, posters) promising a terrifying and spectacular journey into black magic. The old old story, then, of inappropriate marketing that may sell tickets, or gain streaming viewers, but which generates huge disappointment for viewers seeking the rush of horror thrills.
For those with expectations duly adjusted, seeking in other words a drama about loss that involves the occult as a vehicle for exploring themes of vengeance and grieving, and coming to view the story as a process of personal overcoming which is analogous to a magic ritual but not literally one, the film cannot be other than highly recommended.
STOP PRESS
After completing this I discovered that Dr Justin Sledge had done appreciations of both these films from the esoteric perspective. What an unexpected treat!
Esoterica - Justin Sledge - The Devil Rides Out
Esoterica - Justin Sledge - A Dark Song
Richard Kaczynski’s authoritative biography Perdurabo, The Life of Aleister Crowley [Revised and Expanded Edition] (2010) doesn’t come down on whether Crowley performed the ritual, even in a fragmentary form, before he went to Paris and London to intervene in Golden Dawn affairs.
‘Pukka’ is a posh anglicism for a ‘solid chap’ which invariably means another posh Englishman. It derives from the Hindi word for ‘solid’.
*too
"Perdurabo" was great. How was that Agent 666 book? I've been curious about it for some time. I love Crowley from an anthropological pov, not as a diehard Thelemite. Dude was so not a pukka.