Category Archives: horror

Introducing Jules Michelet (1798 – 1874)

This is an updated version of a 2007 post. Hardly anything remains of the original post.

I first came across Jules Michelet by way of Georges Bataille’s Literature and Evil (1957), where Michelet is one of the subjects. This was in the early 2000s, the early days of the internet, when there were still interesting sites and blogs.

In my original post on Michelet, I gave one of the illustrations by Martin van Maële, some of which can be found here[1]. Van Maele, I wrote, is a student from Felicien Rops.

In that post, I also mentioned Jack Stevenson’s book on Häxan which confirms that the director Christensen was influenced by Jules Michelet’s book.

In that post, I mentioned Georges Bataille who said about Michelet was “one of those who spoke most humanely about evil”, a citation that comes from Literature and Evil.

But did I really?

Is it not equally possible that I discovered Michelet via Häxan (1922), said to be the first exploitation film and both based on Malleus Maleficarum (1487) and La sorcière (1862) by Jules Michelet.

Upon researching this in 2021, 14 years after my original post, it has come to my attention that Jules Michelet’s La sorcière, known in English as Satanism and Witchcraft, a Study in Medieval Superstition, is a work of proto-feminism and anti-clericalism.

A terrifying, fabricated documentary

The War Game (1965) – Peter Watkins [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

“A terrifying, fabricated documentary records the horrors of a future atomic war in the most painstaking, sickening detail. Photographed in London, it shows the flash bums and firestorms, the impossibility of defence, the destruction of all life. Produced by the BBC, the film was promptly banned and became world-famous and rarely seen.” —Amos Vogel, 1974

Phinn has just published a post on this film with links to the film on Youtube. I like the category pseudo-documentary –also called mockumentaries or quasi-documentaries — to which also belong such diverse genres as white coaters and cinéma vérité. Girish recently did a post on them, but this category was not included in it.

From Phinn:

The War Game Part 1 (of 5)

The most haunting image of the Holocaust

Having found Five explanations for the jump cuts in Godard’s Breathless made me research other work by the author Richard Raskin and I ended up with finding one of his books on the photograph shown above. The extended essay/book is called A Child at Gunpoint [Amazon] and it documents one of the iconic pictures of the twentieth century. For a long time it was unknown who the boy in the picture was. It has been recently suggested that it was Tsvi Nussbaum. For an online analysis of the identity of the people in the photograph, see here.

In the introduction to the book the publisher writes:

Widely regarded as the most haunting image we have of the Holocaust, the photo of a young boy with his hands up being driven from the Warsaw ghetto has served as a touchstone for everyone from the Nuremberg prosecutors to Elie Wiesel, and from Susan Sontag to revisionist ranters on the web.

What makes this picture so ‘haunting‘ is that it involves children. The most famous picture of the Holocaust is probably this one. Searching for Child+Holocaust at Google brings up this.

How much death and terror

The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006) – Timothy J. Clark [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

How much death and terror can nature contain and still be posited as a value — as a world that human beings reach for, steadying themselves. (p. 174)

Via a review of Bart Verschaffel in De Witte Raaf 125, see also this post at This Space. More on the art critic — and former member of the British SI — here, more on horror in the visual arts here.

Schwarze Romantik

“I found the article above on Schwarze Romantik (Eng: black or dark romanticism) at Wikipedia. I was working on my giallo fiction page and thinking about the roots of European exploitation culture. In English, these can easily be traced to the gothic novel (although it is still unclear to me when the term gothic novel was coined). My thesis is that the gothic sensibility can be traced in most European literatures. Every European country also had its own terminology to denote the sensibility of the gothic novel. In France it was called the roman noir (“black novel”, now primarily used to denote the hardboiled detective genre) and in Germany it was called the Schauerroman (“shudder novel”). Italy and Spain must have had their own, but I am unaware of their names as of yet. In nineteenth century France there also flourished a literature of horror on a par with the English Gothic novel or the German Schauerroman. It was christened ‘le roman frénétique‘.

Back to Schwarze Romantik. The term can probably be traced to the 1963 German translation of Mario Praz‘s La carne, la morte, e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. The German title of this translation is Liebe, Tod und Teufel. Die schwarze Romantik.

While I would like to believe that the roots of the gothic novel are rooted in the darker strains of German Romanticism, this cannot be substantiated as of yet. Granted, the term gothic in the 17th and 18th centuries refers to Germany, and writers such as Schiller, Hoffmann and Klingemann seem to predate much of the gothic fiction of the UK, but there is of course a whole range of gothic novels that predate these three German authors, most notably: The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) – Horace Walpole, Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1786) by William Beckford, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) – Ann Radcliffe and The Monk (1796) – Matthew Lewis. Most probably there was a substantial cross-fertilization between German, French, English and other continental strains of dark romanticism that is dealt with as fantastic literature.

P. S. In France, the Romantic Agony was published in 1966 as La Chair, la mort et le diable, le Romantisme noir.

Derrida on Youtube

Padraig points us in the direction of some wonderful Youtube footage of/on Derrida. I especially enjoyed this clip about a visit Derrida paid to Prague, and was framed by the police on account of drug charges. He felt as if the spirit of Kafka had come back to haunt him. Padraig’s post is appropriately tagged hauntology, this moment’s buzzword. In French a ghost is called a revenant, someone who comes back.

A revenant in the Middle Ages was an animate corpse which rose from the grave to haunt the living. Many stories were documented by English historians in the Middle Ages, as examplified by William of Newburgh who wrote in the 1190s “one would not easily believe that corpses come out of their graves and wander around, animated by I don’t know what spirit, to terrorize or harm the living, unless there were many cases in our times, supported by ample testimony”. Stories of revenants were very personal, always about a specific individual who had recently died (unlike the anonymous zombie depicted in modern popular culture such as Night of the Living Dead), and had a number of common features.

Greencine and grindhouse cinema

Over the next six weeks Greencine will be serializing Eddie Muller’s 1996 non-fiction book Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema.

Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema (1996) – Eddie Muller
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

From the beginning of the book:

Grindhouses have always churned away in a seamy corner of the American psyche. They glowed through the fog on the bad stretch of Market Street in San Francisco. They used dizzying neon to bewitch New Yorkers, even in the bustling depravity of Times Square. From First Avenue in Seattle to Canal Street in New Orleans, if you wanted to see all the sexy stuff that the Purity Patrol kept from the mainstream, a grindhouse always beckoned.

The best online definition of the grindhouse genre is by Brian Camp:

Grindhouse was a term coined and perpetuated by the trade paper, Variety, to describe theaters on big-city downtown movie strips, like New York’s 42nd Street or San Francisco’s Market Street, which ran double (and sometimes triple) features of films continuously, practically around the clock, with little or no time between films (i.e., the films ‘grinded’ up against each other). Such theaters don’t exist anymore. When we talk about ‘grindhouse movies,’ we refer to the types of action and exploitation movies that played at these theaters (blaxploitation, Italian westerns, kung fu, slasher, etc.).” –Brian Camp , 09/28/2003, 08:56:54 via http://www.mhvf.net/forum/general/posts/124245630.html

The Man Who Laughs (1869) – Victor Hugo

The Man Who Laughs (1869) – Victor Hugo
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs is a horror story of a young aristocrat kidnapped and disfigured by his captors to display a permanent grin.

In the novel, Hugo gives his own account of the work of the Comprachicos:

“In China, since time immemorial, they have achieved refinement in a special art and industry: the molding of a living man. One takes a child two or three years old, one puts him into a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque in shape, without cover or bottom, so that the head and feet protrude. In the daytime, one keeps this vase standing upright; at night, one lays it down, so that the child can sleep. Thus the child expands without growing, slowly filling the contours of the vase with his compressed flesh and twisted bones. This bottled development continues for several years. At a certain point, it becomes irreparable. When one judges that this has occurred and that the monster is made, one breaks the vase, the child comes out, and one has a man in the shape of a pot.”

This example clearly displays all of the most common elements of the legend: first, association with outsiders (the Chinese); second, the victim being a young child; and third, assertions of the methodology that stretch the limits of credibility but seem to remain within the domain of the possible. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprachicos [Dec 2006]

Les Mémoires du diable (1838) – Frédéric Soulié

Les Mémoires du diable (1838) – Frédéric Soulié
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Frédéric Soulié is another writer of the roman frénétique. In his time he was as well known as Balzac or Eugène Sue. His Les Mémoires du diable (1838) is mentioned in Colin Wilson’s Misfits and the Romantic Agony.

Who knows who did the painting on the Robert Laffont edition shown above? It looks like something done by Daumier.

The French frenetic school of the 1820s/1830s

Cover to Janin’s Dead Donkey

Inspired by The Romantic Agony, I bring you some 19th century cult fiction by the likes of Jules Janin and Charles Nodier of the “frenetic school”.

“The Dead Donkey” & “The Guillotined Woman” by Jules Janin, Honore de Balzac, Terry Hale (Editor), Tony Johannot (Illustrator)
Paperback – 168 pages

This story features probably the most nauseating narrator in the entire history of literature.

In nineteenth century France there flourished a literature of horror on a par with the English Gothic novel or the German Schauerroman. It was christened ‘the frenetique school’.

The frenetique was at its peak in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Of this short-lived literary movement Jules Janin’s The Dead Donkey and he Guillotined Woman is one of the finest and certainly one of the most unpleasant examples. Jules Janin is supposed to have begun the tale as a spoof of the fashionable frenetique style. However, with its wealth of horrible incident and its sinister and claustrophobic atmosphere, it seems likely that the author actually fell in love with his subject. The bizarre duality of the novel is one of its most striking qualities.

This edition comes with Balzac’s extraordinary spoof sequel, Chapter XXX, published in an all-English edition for the first time. Masterly in-depth commentary by Terry Hale, and the celebrated illustrations by Tony Johannot. —http://www.theadamsresidence.co.uk/gothsoc/gothsoc.html [Nov 2006

Notes:

‘The frenetique school’: frenetic means fast, frantic, harried, or frenzied

In the category of “la littérature frénétique”, most frequently cited are Jules Janin, Charles Lassailly, Charles Nodier (Smarra, or the Demons of the Night (1821)) and Pétrus Borel. Its peak was the late 1820s and early 1830s.

La France frénétique de 1830: Choix de textes (1978) – Jean-Luc Steinmetz
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Some French language notes:

A côté du romantisme officiel qui occupe le devant de la scène existe un autre courant, encore marginal mais porteur d’avenir. Influencée par le roman gothique et ses images de caveaux humides, fantômes blafards et cul-de-basse-fosse ensanglantés, une certaine tendance friande d’horreur et de frissons s’épanouit en France, la littérature “frénétique”. Elle se teinte d’ailleurs assez vite d’aspects parodiques (Jules Janin, Charles Lassailly), ou alors accentue son côté sombre et pervers accompagné d’un humour très noir (Pétrus Borel “le lycanthrope”, 1809-1859). —http://gallica.bnf.fr/themes/LitXVIIIIk.htm

Every European country had its own terminology to denote the sensibility of the gothic novel. In France it was called the roman noir (“black novel”, now primarily used to denote the hardboiled detective genre) and in Germany it was called the Schauerroman (“shudder novel”). Italy and Spain must have had their own, but I am unaware of their names as of yet.

Dedalus European Classics, who’ve also lovingly published works by Rachilde has Smarra by Nodier in print in what I think is a lovely painting by Gustave Moreau:

Smarra & Trilby (1821, 1822) – Charles Nodier
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad