Yuletide Rides and Fresh Exhumations

Despite the trials and tribulations of the pandemic, folk horror-and-spooky-folklore periodical Hellebore continues to put out issues following up the first three issues with a Yuletide special and an Unearthing-themed issue. Let’s see what treats are in store.

Yuletide first. Katy Soar offers The Lord of Misrule, a roving musing on offbeat traditions which bounces from the titular late medieval tradition to Saturnalia (and some odd ideas that James Frazer of The Golden Bough ended up persuading himself of on a shaky reading of rather spurious evidence) to whether Father Christmas is a sacrificial king. Similarly tenuous is John Reppion’s discussion of the pre-Christian celebration of Modranicht and the three mother goddesses apparently venerated during it – an article which boils down to “eh, we can’t know very much about them because not many sources have survived”.

Somewhat more structured is John Callow’s From Ghoul To Godhead, which develops the development of Herne the Hunter from a legend mentioned in passing in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor to a deity venerated by some neopagans, an ethos reflected in the character’s depiction in Robin of Sherwood. Clearly, it’s possible – though Callow doesn’t consider this possibility – that Shakespeare actually invented Herne, devising him as a broad parody of the sort of folk legend played in the context of the play rather than basing him on an existing ghost story – but it’s still interesting to see how a cultural figure can gone from being all but overlooked outside of that sort of passing reference into being a legend that people believe has much greater antiquity than it actually has (especially in its present form).

Verity Holloway’s The Hauntings of Cold Christmas recount not just the ghostly folklore around Cold Christmas Church (so called because of a probably spurious legend about a harsh winter slaying most of the parish’s children in some nebulous bygone year), but also the more tangible hauntings: the dark tourists, folk horror enthusiasts, rowdy youths, and YouTubers making their very own zero-budget ghost-hunting videos who are attracted to the site by its reputation and whose disrespect for it have left it in a horrible state. Here Holloway is able to examine not just the dark side of British rural legends, but the dark side of the folk horror fad itself.

Hauntings of All Phases

Though David Tibet will likely be primarily known forever as the mind behind Current 93, which as previously chronicled started out as part of an esoteric circle of influential industrial musicians before mutating into a poetic Gnostic weird folk project (after steering uncomfortably in the direction of fascistic neofolk before Tibet wised up, righted the ship, and changed up his collaborators), this is not the only string to his bow.

As well as a sideline as a visual artist, Tibet has also maintained a long career as a collector of vintage horror fiction and weird tales, and has also turned his hand to publishing, editing, and facilitating the reprinting of rare material from time to time; for instance, he played a key role in rediscovering and making available again the eccentric work of Count Stenbock, and it was his suggestion which led to Wordsworth releasing The Drug and Other Stories, the most substantial collection of the short stories of Aleister Crowley ever put between two covers.

Tibet has also, more recently, tried his hand at being an anthologist. The Moons At Your Door, published in 2015 via Strange Attractor and released in conjunction with the Current 93 album which shares its title, is a collection of fiction which has over his years of reading and collecting continued to resonate with him. Inevitably, a lot of this has seeped its way into Current 93’s musical output, because Tibet is the sort of creator who isn’t shy of acknowledging his influences, and so the selection is in some respects idiosyncratic and reflective of Tibet’s expansive range of interests and obsessions. But is it any good to read for anyone who isn’t David Tibet?

Antiquarian Abominations

The ghost stories of M.R. James have a grand reputation for good reason; at their absolute best, they find James leveraging his knowledge as a medievalist to an impressive extent, as well as depicting a more original range of ghosts than is typical for the genre. Indeed, Jamesian ghosts are not necessarily the spirits of dead humans – and whilst some ghost narratives end up falling into the cardinal error of having the ghosts not really being able to interact with people very well, offering no harm greater than a jump scare, James’ ghosts are outright nasty and often can have decidedly physical manifestations.

Ghost stories were always a bit of a sideline for James; his output of fiction (both the horror stories he’s known for and The Five Jars, a whimsical fantasy for children) is dwarfed by his non-fiction publications. This means you can get the essential James very easily and conveniently. Anything published in his lifetime is now in the public domain, though copyright on posthumously-published works may still subsist. If you want absolutely everything, there’s a two-volume collection of all his ghost fiction edited by S.T. Joshi, or if you want to read unfinished rough drafts of stories he never finished to his satisfaction on top of those he was actually satisfied enough to release there’s A Pleasing Terror.

For many readers, however, this will be overkill. James was, like most authors, not 100% consistent, and so while the above volumes will please completists, I think anyone who wants a hard copy for the bookshelf (rather than just reading the public domain stories from online sources) will find that they are entirely satisfied with his Collected Ghost Stories. This volume came out in 1931, has been widely available ever since, and thanks to the lapse of its copyright can be had fairly cheaply; Wordsworth do a nice enough edition in their Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural line. This will get you all of James’ best stories, plus enough lower-tier ones to satisfy you that you’ve had the best of James here and there’s no truly essential classics left to chase up elsewhere.

Specifically, Collected Ghost Stories compiles the four story collections James would release in his lifetime: 1904’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1911’s More Ghost Stories, 1919’s A Thin Ghost and Others, and 1925’s A Warning To the Curious and Other Ghost Stories. It also tacks on four stories that had been published in various periodicals since A Warning To the Curious. It is missing some minor stories that James published late in life – The Experiment, A Vignette, and The Malice of Inanimate Objects – but those are a) freely available online, being public domain, and b) aren’t that good; like I said, if you have Collected Ghost Stories, you’ve got the best of his output already.

“It’s In the Trees… It’s Coming…”

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon – not to be confused with James Wasson’s ludicrously gory Bigfoot-themed film of the same name from 1980 – opens with paranormal debunker Professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham) arriving at Lufford Hall, stately home of cult leader Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) – a man of Satanic reputation, at least one of whose followers has gone murderously insane. Harrington is there to beg for forgiveness for his attempts to expose Karswell’s claims of occult powers as fraudulent – and to get Karswell to call off the occult forces he has called up against Harrington using potent runic symbols. Karswell claims he’ll do all he can; apparently that doesn’t include stopping the manifestation of a giant, flaming beast from the depths of hell which ambushes Harrington outside his home. When his colleague, American psychologist John Holden (Dana Andrews), arrives in the country to attend a parapsychology convention he decides to take up Harrington’s investigation of Karswell, in tandem with Harrington’s niece Joanna (Peggy Cummins) and with the assistance of the other convention attendees. It’s not long before John’s scepticism is rattled by numerous strange phenomena – and when John receives his very own runic curse from Karswell, he finds that time is against him.

Appropriately for an adaptation of a story by M.R. James (Casting the Runes, adapted loosely by Charles Bennett and Hal E. Chester), Night of the Demon relies heavily on implication and is light on explicit shocks. The most glaring exception is the demon itself, seen at the beginning and end of the film, and allegedly added at producer Hal Chester’s insistence despite Tourneur’s reluctance to show it. As far as special effects go, it’s probably the movie’s most dated aspect; it’s a pretty good monster by 1950s standards, but only by 1950s standards. As far as Tourneur’s insistence that showing the demon turns Night of the Demon into a whole other film, I can see his point – its appearances are rather unsubtle considering the tone of the rest of the movie – but I don’t think the piece is hopelessly vandalised as a result of its inclusion. Helpfully, there is no indications that anyone aside from its assigned victims ever actually sees the demon, so it can still fit within the central ambiguity that Tourneur plays with over the course of the entire story – whether the demon is a real entity, or a figment of the imagination evoked by the power of suggestion.