Wolf

Casual readers of these pages may assume that the numerous entries on the horrible and supernatural betoken an unhealthy obsession, but this is not the case. What we perceive in our world, the mundane simplicity of money and biological needs, is only a fraction of what might actually exist. That doesn't mean, of course, that the monsters stalking us when darkness falls are any realer, cached away in some corner that conspiracies and good luck prevent us from ever detecting (not impossible, but very unlikely). Nor do they express, as pseudo-science has put forth in their computerized mumbo-jumbo, unconscious desires to kill or enslave; those urges are nothing more than the products of very sick minds whom reason, love, and charity might never reach. No, all of this has nothing to do with reality because it has to do with the greatest mystery of our world, that of the human soul. We neither rightly know whether we possess souls, nor, if we do, what on or beyond earth might happen to them when our bodies twitch and exhale for the last time. Some faiths are convinced that our souls move on somewhere – to another body, another plane of existence, even perhaps another dimension – and those bodies are not limited to fellow humans. And although this review's title is also a translation of my surname, it actually refers to this diverting film.

Our protagonist is Will Randall (Jack Nicholson, in a last hurrah before age triumphed), a literary editor and loyal employee of publishing magnate Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer). Randall's rapport with his staff, who obviously care about his well-being, perhaps extended his long and generally productive time at the publishing house – exactly enough time for Alden to take Randall's steady work for granted. As it were, the fiftysomething Randall with his soft reserve, mild manners, and inability to come up with new ideas almost obliges Alden to look towards a future with someone not a few years from social security as the house's steward. The future turns out to be a smarmy and revolting fannycushion by the name of Stewart Swinton (James Spader), who also happens to be Randall's protégé and in every way his foil. While Randall is good-natured, dull, unimaginative, and sensitive, Swinton's boisterous creativity is devoted utterly and completely to his selfish advancement regardless of the obstacles or societal conventions. Alden breaks the news to Randall with the smug cowardice of someone who thinks that he's being kind to lower creatures ("Will, you should really consider working for our East European section" – contempt that only the rich and merciless can think of as honesty). Despite booming political interest in the region, East European books were more popular when they weren't allowed to be published in their home countries; there also lingers the unsubtle hint that a second-rate editor should be handling the "second world." Randall is shattered; Swinton's blinking claims of innocence are undermined by his greasy, almost fanged grin; and the new East European editor retreats to the childless house he shares with his indifferent wife (Kate Nelligan) – a physician who often looks at him as if he had just been pulled out of a morgue drawer – and, exhausted, he falls right asleep.

It is still dark when he awakes. His wife returns home and informs him that it's eight o'clock – in the evening. How tired does someone have to be to sleep twenty-two hours? A good question that Randall does not immediately answer because he's too preoccupied with a weird realization: not only does he feel completely rejuvenated, his five senses have been heightened to superhuman levels. He walks through his office building and distinctly perceives the details of phone conversations a few hundred feet away; he can smell the vodka on his coworker's breath from across the floor; and, much more pertinent to his work, he can speed through manuscripts without the pharmacy rack spectacles he's relied on for years. Randall is not a particularly brilliant man, but he knows intervention when he sees it and consults an Indian mystic (the late Om Puri) on the nature of his ailment – if that's really the right word. The mystic weaves him a tale around the curse of that old fiend, the canis lupis, one of the most feared and misunderstood of the earth's predators. "One doesn't need to be bitten by a wolf to turn into a wolf," avers the mystic, "some people can become wolves because of their souls," or something to that effect. But Randall has already stopped listening: he was, in fact, bitten by a wolf (one evening after slamming into the animal on a snowy deserted road at the film's very beginning) although the fur trade made them extinct in upstate New York centuries ago. The mystic concludes his briefing with a strange request with which Randall probably does not comply, and the plot devolves in very entertaining fashion into a love triangle with Swinton, Randall, and Alden's stunning and rebellious daughter (Michelle Pfeiffer). First-rate acting (especially from Spader, who is stupendous) and a wealth of amusing detail separate this story from many others with similar themes, structure, and violent revelations. And the ending, apparently refilmed many times, will remind you of an old phrase: homo homini lupus – man is wolf to man, or in this case a whole pack of beasts.

Count Magnus

Discussing any type of ghost story with the modern mind is usually a pointless endeavor since so many enlightened thinkers want nothing to do with the spiritual aspect of life or are convinced – at least until their ratiocination leads them into a rather dark corner – that we have evolved past such daydreaming. If the thought of an abstract benevolent force sounds like gobbledygook, think of the snickering directed at the possibility in our clear and simple world of not-so-benevolent forces. Our nightmares, products of a bad conscience or neurotic fears, have also progressed from describing some kind of indescribable evil to exposing a humiliating tidbit of personal history long denied. Now I am all for getting to the crux of an obsessive idea (art has much to do with this trope), and I accept with much head-nodding theories on eternal explicanda such as "practically every human culture has evinced an antipathy to snakes because, being tree animals, snakes and monkeys are natural enemies." Yet there remain questions about those creatures who do terrify us, usually those most biologically dissonant from humans, such as birds and reptiles (who are, as it were, closely related to one another), and these questions extend past the biological like the unsheathing of a long and wicked claw. There is something inherently unpleasant about their beady, soulless stare, their plumed or scaly sleekness, and, perhaps most of all, their laughter. Which brings us to one of the most sleep-sapping tales ever written.              

 

We follow, somewhat timidly, a certain Mr. Wraxall, a British traveler and scholar who journeys to Sweden "in the early summer of 1863." Research and a bit of luck steer him to an ancient manor house in Vestergothland, where he will be able to examine at length "an important collection of family papers," even if these papers will steer his fate more than that of its inheritors. The scholar declines an offer to be put up at the manor proper, and chooses instead, for reasons of both privacy and any good scholar’s preference for walking above all other forms of transportation, to stay at a nearby inn. The commute to and from his center of research is less than a mile and careers through a dark wood featuring a church of unorthodox design:

It was a curious building to English eyes. The nave and aisles were low, and filled with pews and galleries. In the western gallery stood the handsome old organ, gaily painted, and with silver pipes. The ceiling was flat, and had been adorned by a seventeenth-century artist with a strange and hideous ‘Last Judgement,’ full of lurid flames, falling cities, burning ships, crying souls, and brown and smiling demons.

A seventeenth-century artist, indeed. This odd bit of architecture also includes astride the north aisle another building, officially categorized as a mausoleum, with a black roof and white walls (the latter resembling those of the church). But there is no access to this mausoleum from the church, a fact that plagues our poor Mr. Wraxall for a while, although he will be plagued by far worse.

Soon thereafter it is announced that he would like to know more about the ways and reputation of the "almost phenomenally ugly man" and ancestor who built this manor house, Count Magnus. History has not looked kindly upon this overlord, who had unruly peasants flogged and particularly recalcitrant ones burned alive in the middle of the night by chance fires. Magnus is also known to have made a Black Pilgrimage, whose purpose is outlined in a text called Liber nigrae perigrinationis:

‘If any man desires to obtain a long life, if he would obtain a faithful messenger and see the blood of his enemies, it is necessary that he should first go into the city of Chorazin, and there salute the prince ...’ Here there was an erasure of one word, not very thoroughly done, so that Mr. Wraxhall felt pretty sure that he was right in reading it as aëris ("of the air").’ 

A round trip to Hades would be bad enough if Magnus had returned in possession of preternatural  properties and an itch to try them out on the local folk. That was not, however, all he brought back. So when Wraxhall finally does ingress the mausoleum, he is only half-surprised to find an effigy on Magnus’s tomb, "round the edge [of which] were several bands of similar ornament representing various scenes." And in one of those scenes

Was a man running at full speed, with flying hair and outstretched hands. After him followed a strange form; and it would be hard to say whether the artist had intended it for a man and was unable to give the same similitude, or whether it was intentionally made as monstrous as it looked.

More detail is given, which is not necessarily a good thing for your peace of mind, so I will leave matters as they are.  

 

The creator of these texts is this remarkable scholar, with whom I humbly admit to sharing a passion for languages and all things Scandinavian. His prose, very influential on the development of the modern horror of many bestselling writers (including this American whose greatest fame would come posthumously) exhibits his thorough academic learning without dipping into pedantry. In fact, his cold and articulate manner makes the odd subjects that more plausible, although plausibility is probably not the reason you’ll pick up his work. For both his learning and style, James is a favorite of horror connoisseurs but ought to be republished and read more often by the rest of us. Unless, of course, you value your sleep.      

Dracula

Let us forget for a moment all associations with the name of this novel, the subject of hundreds of books and films and owner of permanent territory in the landscape of our nightmares. While such an exercise is almost impossible, we might imagine a world in which the vampire had not yet been accorded the title of legend and to a certain segment of Europe was still very real. What then would be the response to a Western work that tried with solemn research and Victorian restraint to capture the essence of fear? Fear of an aristocratic and evil genius, practically immortal and unstoppable, capable of feats of superhuman strength and diabolical skill? Do not think that I subscribe to the ridiculous theories about the sexuality and foreignness of Dracula as indicative of Victorian England’s threatened moral structure and pending hoards of migrants who will suck the British Crown dry. Nor is the repetition of the Mongol invasion to blame; instead, it is the fear of esoteric truths that conflicts the minds of the steady, righteous Victorian citizen, and of lust, greed, and cruelty as the new traits of the new century. England is not afraid for England; rather, it is humans who are afraid for humanity.   

As it were, these predictions were hideously accurate. The book itself, a masterpiece of the epistolary genre, is composed in the lush style of the Gothic romances such as these earlier novels, with a scrupulous eye for detail and no frail moral backbone. Stoker was never quite able to replicate the magic of Dracula in any other of his many works, perhaps because the subject matter was not as compelling. Consider this novel or this one and their forays into, respectively, the pagan worship of a giant snake and the revivification of an Egyptian mummy, and we see that these are generally subjects for horror buffs, even if the books themselves are fantastically beautiful. But a vampire has an added element that urges us to read on and wonder about the damnation that may ensue, however silly the whole premise must seem to a logical mind, if certain criteria are not met. The legend was born because death itself remains a mystery.

Dracula’s beginning has no parallel in modern literature: it is simply the best opening to a modern novel of suspense or horror ever written. Until Jonathan Harker is abandoned in Castle Dracula to the whims of a triptych of female bloodsuckers, the book is hypnotic and impeccable. An excerpt does small justice to the precision with which Stoker describes the indescribable: 

Suddenly, away on our left I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The driver saw it at the same moment. He at once checked the horses, and, jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer. But while I wondered, the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated endlessly, and now looking back, it is like a sort of awful nightmare. Once the flame appeared so near the road, that even in the darkness around us I could watch the driver’s motions. He went rapidly to where the blue flame arose, it must have been very faint, for it did not seem to illumine the place around it at all, and gathering a few stones, formed them into some device. Once there appeared a strange optical effect. When he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same. This startled me, but as the effect was only momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me straining through the darkness. Then for a time there were no blue flames, and we sped onwards through the gloom, with the howling of the wolves around us, as though they were following in a moving circle.  

One wonders whether a better account could be rendered of the hellfire that will surround and plague Jonathan for the entirety of the novel. How is a modern author able to present demons on earth without evoking suffocating laughter? Perhaps as the most evil of humans, with communion with the vilest beasts (although I have a soft spot for wolves), and control over the harshest weather. This is the world into which a naive young barrister enters for the sake of career advancement and for his fiancée, Mina Murray, and which they may never leave unscathed.

What happens after this first seventh of the novel is less satisfying: Dracula comes to England aboard a ship whose crew meets with a horrific fate; he seduces Lucy, a close friend of Mina’s and tries to get to Mina herself; and he is supported (if mostly in spirit) by Renfield, a former barrister now held in a London asylum. Fraught with twists typical of any modern thriller, the end chase is decidedly humdrum in comparison with the onset of this great expedition. In the intermediate scenes we are plagued by the stratagems of scholar and physician Abraham van Helsing, destined to become almost as famous as the monstrosity he has hunted for decades. Van Helsing’s diction is curious to an English ear, and has much of his native Dutch about it although it often makes for poetic interludes. His organization of a team to destroy a centuries-old source of evil is undermined by the frenetic pace of the plot, needlessly weaving together side stories to make it seem that Dracula is fenced in on many fronts, which he certainly isn’t. In the end, he is forced to scamper back to his native Transylvania, and we still do not know why he chose to forsake his local omnipotence to brave the dangers that the distant post of London provides. No particular explanation, apart from plot furtherance, is ever given. If it is boredom or isolation that drives the Count to pick up and move, one wonders what he has really been doing all these centuries. Why not take London during the Great Fire or interregnum? Let us hope that it is indeed boredom, which would be much more plausible for a character of ambition.                

 

The origin of Dracula is notably never revealed in full. He may very well be this historical figure known for impaling his opponents in battle, but he is hardly the first despot to inflict horrific suffering on his enemies. Why then would he be chosen as king of the damned? Many modern films and books have delved in speculation ranging from the most mundane (psychological and scientific references to acute taphephobia and the concomitant madness) to the most vivid (this most famous of betrayers). If it is indeed Judas behind the slaughter of centuries, then the character is well chosen and portrayed. There can be no greater penalty on a soul than a mockery of life sustained by death after death.

Gumilyov, "Ужас"

A gothic piece ("Horror") from this Russian poet.  You can find the original here.

Long, long I walked the corridors,
A circling, wordless enemy;
Niched statues gazed at my rogue course,
And pierced my soul with enmity.

In sullen sleep all things grew dumb,
And grey obscure its strangeness kept; 
As if an evil pendulum
Were measure of my lonely step.
 
And there where deeper gloom arose,
My burning eyes went cold with fear:
A figure, hardly seen but close,
In crowding columns’ shade appeared.

To it I went, but then withdrew,
A beast in horrified escape:
A vile hyena’s head did spew
Upon a girl’s soft comely shape.

Its snout leered forth in bloody blade,
Its eyes evinced an empty cast,
'Twas then I heard base whispers fade:
"Here have you come, all mine at last!"

And fearful moments passed in dread,
And darkness swam around my bones,
And countless mirrors rose instead
In palest horror’s deadly moans.

The Wolfman

A few years ago a friend called a film we both admired, to my budding surprise, a political allegory. When asked by a third person and someone who had not seen the work to justify his statement, he proffered a couple of short sentences thankfully not smug or discomfiting. The name of the film need not be mentioned here, nor the remarkable parable he detected. What is important about such minor revelations is the thought invested in the symbols of the written or filmed word. Critics have always tended to praise works that can sustain more than one reading even if all the possible interpretations are rather thin. And what of works that really only have a single possible meaning yet internally wrestle with two or three? A question that may well be asked of this film.

The premise is so imbedded in literature that it requires little introduction. Upon a dark Victorian moor, someone or something has carved up three men, including Ben Talbot (Simon Merrells), son of Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins), a local landowner and widower. The town elders are less superstitious than one might have supposed and expect a scientific explanation from the gypsies stationed on a nearby meadow. The Roma settlement possesses the usual assortment of trained animals and necromancers – the former suspected as dangerous, the latter suspected as fraudulent – but we learn other details. Namely, that Sir John's late wife was also a Roma who committed suicide about twenty-five years ago – just when, it turns out, another local remembers finding a shepherd and his flock slaughtered in a most barbaric fashion. This wife is buried in a sepulcher with an adjoining shrine graced with nightly visits by Sir John. By his own estimation he is quite dead (he speaks in a hurried, breathy, almost overfamiliar tone like a busy ghost), and he might as well have been for the last twenty-five years to his elder son, Lawrence (Benicio del Toro). Sent to America after the familial tragedy, Lawrence Talbot has become a world-famous stage actor, although you would never guess so given the brief snatch of this play to which we are treated. However improbable a film’s hodge-podge of accents may be given its plot and setting, they should never detract from the overall effect – yet this is precisely what occurs. Del Toro's looks and gestures are convincing, but his cadence is distinctly Spanish and his voice, I suspect, too high-pitched to qualify him as a Shakespearean lead (his Yorick speech smacks of parody). Lawrence is summoned to the moors, specifically to Blackmoor, as the family estate is called, by Ben's fiancée Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt). Their first exchange in his dressing rooms induces the other cast members to clear out, he makes a poignant remark about the "shifting character of man," and we understand, even if we have never seen or heard of the original film, that Lawrence will go to Blackmoor and discover some horrible things. 

In the train moorward he is buttonholed by a sinister elderly gentleman (Max von Sydow) who, for reasons unknown to everyone including Lawrence, wishes to bestow upon the actor his walking stick with wolf’s-head pommel acquired "lifetimes ago" in Gévaudan.* After looking at his fellow traveler sidelong a few times (one of the film’s lovely little touches) Lawrence falls asleep as the eternal countryside glides on. When he awakes he finds the vanished old man, who was dapper and well-spoken in a very ingratiating way, to have been in all likelihood a figment of his tortured mind. If it weren’t, of course, for the cane left leaning against the opposing seat. As Lawrence finally makes it to Blackmoor a series of unfortunate incidents occurs, some of which are roundly predictable, others not. We are not, in any case, overmuch concerned with predictability as Lawrence is destined by the laws that govern dramatic convention to assume the responsibilities and ills of the title character. He views Ben’s grisly remains kept in a butcher’s shop beneath gigantic, looming pincers and then tells his father he came because of “Ms. Conliffe’s letter,” when she visited him in person (the letter is mentioned at some other point, but this may be a dramaturgical glitch). The suspected killer is described as “a fell creature,” a nice pun for those who like old words, and the villagers continue to bandy about some theories until the beast strikes again. Given the sheer numerical disadvantage, we may harbor some, ahem, grave reservations about the wisdom of the beast’s attack, which is so ostentatious as to seem forced. One wonders whether any animal would attack a lit camp of almost a hundred people – unless, of course, it thought it could kill them all – but another explanation whispers to us. 

Some fantastic chiaroscuro occurs in a cemetery that will remind you of Stonehenge with fog that assumes the shape of claws and teeth, as well as some odd looks between Ms. Conliffe and Sir John and between Sir John and his faithful manservant Singh (Art Malik). These moments serve pure atmosphere and the atmosphere is most evil at every corner and bend of The Wolfman, even when the requisite Scotland Yard investigator (a glowering Hugo Weaving) gets involved. Weaving plays Inspector Abeline, whom Lawrence rightly identifies as having been part of the investigation of this mysterious figure. Abeline smirkingly addresses Lawrence with the platitudes always directed towards screen stars even if he doubts he is talking to a sane man. “There are no natural predators left in England,” he tells the American, “who could inflict such savage injury,” but the natural has long abandoned Lawrence’s terrible daydreams. Towards the film’s middle, Abeline takes us on a very different route that some claim pads the script with an unwarranted derailing. Yet it is this very premise which lands Lawrence back in the asylum to which he was consigned for one year following his mother’s death that makes the most sense. The double-talk and psychobabble that ensue (and that are given cameos throughout the film) are eradicated in a fantastic scene resulting in a few glorious minutes of unadulterated havoc before the film succumbs to the necessities of the plot. Not that there isn’t time for a medallion and a curse or two.    

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* Note: this scene appears to have been cut from the theatrical version, but included on the DVD.