Swamp Horror

Onibaba

Swamp Thing

Greeting my queens, kings, and things, it’s officially October and I couldn’t be happier. Well, that’s a lie—I’d be happier if the weather wasn’t so hot and the country I lived in wasn’t so scary. Butwhatareyagonnado. October is a satisfying and stressful month for yours truly, because it is filled with many of my friends’ and loved ones’ events, birthdays, anniversaries, deathaversaries, and all of the haunted Halloween happenings that I can squeeze into 31 days. Yes, my birthday is in October, and Halloween always comes a week after, but October is also for some reason reserved for ACL, Austin Film Festival, Formula 1, college football, baseball and hockey and basketball I think, breast cancer awareness month, and bitchass Columbus Day (may he rest in piss.) There’s hardly enough time to go to pumpkin patches, step on crunchy leaves, and worship Hekate before the autumnal auspiciousness is replaced with holly jolly winter woes. So excuse me if I soak up every scary second of this month, and act a little witchier than normal, especially as we dive into a round of films set in one of the most chilling settings I can imagine: the swamp. Though I am but a meek, indoorsy creature who thrives on creature comforts, I am fascinated by the mossy, mushy swamplands of the world. Perhaps it is because both sides of my family come from the South, where the swamp surrounds the highway and the homes and the stores, but this environmental experience seems very uniquely creepy and cool to me. Whenever we’d take a road trip to visit my family in Mississippi and Louisiana, I was simultaneously afraid of and attracted to the Louisiana State rest stop, where multiple signs warned of frequent gator activity. I often think of my favorite Scooby Doo film, Scooby Doo Zombie Island, where a swamp houses ghosts, undead pirates, and (spoiler alert) evil cat-people, and I still shudder at the thought of what might dwell in the mucky, murky waters of any swamp. Shrek may live in a bright, colorful, fairytale swamp, and Lana Del Rey may have just married a middle-aged gator-tour guide—crowning her the unofficial queen of the swamp—but there’s no version of this terrain that is romantic to me. The water could be three feet deep or it could be hundred, there could be snakes and alligators and bacteria slithering around—and the mosquitos alone frighten me. This hot, humid, hellish setting is ripe with opportunities for horror, as evidenced by The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Skeleton Key, Anaconda, The Beyond, The Haunted Mansion, and Frogs, so I thought I’d visit the swamp in the safest way possible, and watch a couple of swamp-set horror films.

Up first is a classic of Japanese cinema, a masterclass in atmospheric horror and folk myth storytelling—this is Kaneto Shindo’s 1964 film Onibaba. Onibaba was inspired by the Shin Buddhist parable of yome-odoshi-no men (嫁おどしの面; or bride-scaring mask—a translation which sort of gives away the end of the story.) The film opens with text that reads: “The Hole, deep and dark, its darkness has lasted since ancient times... Onibaba (Demon Woman)” before intense, 1960s jazz music starts blaring and we become fully steeped into a mysterious and muggy swamp somewhere outside Kyoto, in the mid-14th century. We are shown tall, slender, unending fields of susuki grass—reaching high above the head of a soldier, who carries another wounded man. They settle down between blades of grass, resting for only a brief moment before a spear gleams out of nowhere, and stabs both of them. This is the brutal reality of war, and there is no safety, even in the farthest, most desolate swamplands. But this spear does not belong to a fellow samurai, it is held by an older woman, whose daughter-in-law assists her in the collection of the soldiers’ gear and the dumping of their bodies into the infamous, deep, dark hole referenced at the beginning. Neither woman is given a name, but they both anguish as they await for their son / husband, Kishi, to return home from war. In the desolation and desperation of war, the old woman’s farm has welcomed no crops, and they have very little to eat. So, the two women have begun killing the samurai who wander into their swamp, so that they can barter their expensive armor and weaponry for food. In a darkly funny montage, we hear the beating of rapturously rhythmic drums, punctuated by the screams of men, all cast against this vivid black and white place that is somehow both serene and unsettling. One night, their neighbor, Hachi, returns from war, alone, approaches our protagonists’ hut, and simply says, “I’m hungry, gimme some food!!” The younger woman asks Hachi where her husband is, and as he stuffs his face with unearned food in an anime-ish fashion, he explains that after brutal battles where they couldn’t tell friend from foe, they were chased into a field and beat up by farmers—and Kishi didn’t survive. Hachi wonders how they’ve survived this long, and the older woman explains their dead crops and their subsequent deadly scheme. Hachi responds that strange things have been happening in Kyoto too: a horse gave birth to a calf and the sun rose black one day. Hachi, with all of the tact and charm of a gentleman, doesn’t even wait 24hrs after announcing Kishi’s death before he makes a move on his girl, who is surprisingly into his slimy sensibilities. She begins to visit Hachi’s hut every night, and when the older woman learns of this, she tries to drop subtle hints to her widowed-daughter-in-law that purgatory and hell really exist—but this doesn’t deter her. One night, when the younger woman has once again snuck out to visit her swampy lover, the older woman is disturbed from her restless state by a spear that randomly stabs through the hut. This spear belongs to a samurai who claims to have escaped battle and only wishes to be shown to the road to Kyoto, but he is wearing a terrifying Hannya mask, that positively paralyzes the older woman. The expression on the mask is somehow both playful and menacing: with its sharp horns, its twisted, under-biting smile, its downturned eyes and piercing pupils. She keeps asking him why he’s wearing the mask, but he gives unsatisfying answers like “it is the most handsome face in Kyoto, you wouldn’t be able to bear it.” The two are at a standstill, as the man refuses to take off the mask and the woman refuses to help him. In an instant he is chasing the older woman through the eerily still blades grass, and she leads him to the large, vast hole in the ground, where she gracefully leaps and he smoothly plummets down. After a great bit of effort, the older woman removes the mask from his fresh corpse, revealing a hideously ugly face, and she triumphantly takes the mask for herself. With this mask, the old woman crafts a new scheme, one that will hopefully finally deter her daughter-in-law from abandoning her. Every night, when the young woman traipses through the tall grass to her lover, the older woman disguises herself as a cock-blocking demon, and pops out of the marsh to startle the young woman. Even though we as an audience know the mother-in-law is behind this, her performance as a demon is effectively disturbing. There’s just something about this mask that makes ones skin crawl, especially when, one day, the older woman cannot get it off. Onibaba is not the most terrifying Japanese horror movie I’ve ever seen, but its striking cinematography, dedicated performances, and specifically swampy setting made for an overall chilling experience. The aesthetic of this film is to die for—the distinctly dark yet luminous cinematography, the chic grey streak in the older woman’s hair, the stillness of the sharp and slender susuki grass on a breezeless night, and the downright demonic mask—all of it was casually unnerving and visually stunning.

Perhaps less unnerving but still visually interesting was tonight’s next film, a comic book character-turned-movie-monster-legend, brought to us by one of the legends of horror cinema: this is Wes Craven’s 1982 film Swamp Thing. Following the slasher-exploitation films where he cut his teeth, and before his instant-blockbuster Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven wrote and directed this little big eco-horror movie that has just as much heart as it does accidental hilarity. The film opens on a swamp, scored by an orchestra of cicadas and snakes and frogs, and text that reads: “Not long ago, in the unexplored reaches of an unmapped swamp, the creative genius of one man collided with another’s evil dream, and a monster was born.” We then cut to a woman named Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau), who gets a bird’s eye view of this massive swamp as she is helicoptered in and says, “Jesus, where’s the nearest good restaurant?” Alice is a government worker of zero specification, who has been brought to this extremely top-secret government lab to replace a scientist who was mysteriously killed. “They sent a woman out here?” a man asks in disbelief, right in front of Alice, after she lands. After a man mansplains the technology at this facility to Alice, she meets Dr. Alec Holland (Ray Wise), the scientist who is spearheading this operation. Alec is working with plants and recombinant DNA, in an attempt to make plants and vegetables that can grow in impossible climates—even in the year 2001, when Alec suspects the whole world will be starving. This experiment manifests into a formula of neon-green-glowing goo—because of course it does—and not only does it make plants grow, it makes things explode, too. While Alice is getting acquainted with the dashing Alec, an elite-yet-rag-tag crew of armed men descends upon the swamp facility, killing anyone who stands in their way. They work for the nefarious and greedy scientist Anton Arcane (Louis Jourdan), who seeks to steal this powerful slime for himself, and they do not plan to leave witnesses. Chaos erupts in the swamp, as scientists and field workers are snuffed out, and in the midst of the madness, Alec leaps into the dark swamp waters with his neon solution—causing a seemingly-deadly explosion. Alice, who somehow escaped the initial destruction, watches in horror, before she, too, is eventually apprehended. They attempt to drown her in the swamp water, but before these glorified soldiers can kill Alice, a slimy, veiny, green arm reaches out of the water and grabs the head of one of the soldiers, capsizing their canoe. Alice is at first afraid of this unknown beast, given his gargantuan stature and green-tinted skin, but eventually she realizes that this swamp thing is Dr. Alec Holland—the sensitive scientist whom she was beginning to like. Their tender reunion is cut short by more of Arcane’s brute soldiers, but Swamp Thing is excellent at killing them, and protecting Alice—though Alice kicks plenty of ass on her own. The rest of the film is mad scientist vs. mad scientist, in a game of wits and strength and weird science galore. Apart from the completely corny and out-of-place editing style (I’m talking side wipes, star wipes, the goofiest transitions from scene to scene) I was shockingly compelled by Swamp Thing, and its silly yet serious story of how greed can pollute and prevent progress, ingenuity, and life-saving science. My favorite parts of this movie involved Adrienne Barbeau beating the shit out of these misogynistic soldier boys, and saying things like, “I don’t mind the swamp, it’s the slimy things that crawl out from under the rocks that makes my skin crawl” while doing it. I’m surprised by how little people talk about Swamp Thing, given the many sequels, comics, TV shows, and even potential new remakes that it has inspired. Swamp Thing scared me even less than Onibaba, but it was still a funny, thrilling, and surprisingly romantic film. This film’s production seemed to be more of a horror movie than the movie itself, as one member of the crew stated, “It was during a ferociously hot summer with very, very high humidity, and there was a black caterpillar plague, so they were in the trees in big clumps and would drop down on your head and sting you.” I think I would rather drink swamp water than experience even a single caterpillar sting, thank you very mulch. Well, that’s enough swamp serenading for one post, but I thank you for reading along for another week. Until next week’s scary cinema spectacle, get out me swamp!!!!