Even though I know that this isn't much of an explicitly demon-haunted world (thanks, science), I like to believe that UFO's are really piloted by some mysterious visitor from outer space, that the forests of the Pacific Northwest are haunted by an ancient apeman, that mysterious creatures do stalk everywhere, from the forests and meadows around my house to the deepest parts of the sea. Not that I actually believe all that, but it just makes this crazy planet so much more interesting. I choose to believe it, because that's just the way I am.
I'm not going to lie, horror is a major blind spot in my pop culture knowledge. But what I enjoy are not so much straight-up horror as spookier, subtly scary movies. My favourite 'horror' movie is Rosemary's Baby, precisely because it takes a toned down approach and maintains a subdued feeling of dread throughout.
Thus, I won't be watching/reading solely horror in October- there will be a lot of gothic, a lot of spooky, a lot of UFO's, and a lot of movies where you never see the monster, not just the slasher/bloodfests that are pretty standard for Halloween. Though I will end up watching some horror I've never seen, and that includes...Halloween.
If I'm starting near the beginning, I might as well start with a movie about history's greatest monster: no, not Jimmy Carter, THE DEVIL. The Devil and Daniel Webster pits the greatest orator of the pre-Civil War era, Daniel Webster, in a courtroom against the Devil, for the soul of one Jabez Stone.
Yet in this movie, the Devil, or Mr. Scratch, as he is known in the movie (they dubbed the anthropomorphic Devil 'Old Scratch' in the Faustian tales of New England, tales influenced by German settlers to the New World), is hardly scary at all, at least from the watcher's point of view (though I wouldn't want to meet him on some dirt road in the middle of the night). The Mr Scratch of The Devil and Daniel Webster hardly seems like the Biblical Satan, more like a mischievous imp whose sole purpose is to make deals with local farmers for their souls. And it's not like Jabez Stone was Job- he was angry, reluctant to go to church, and continually consarn'd it around his wife and mother- he was hardly a model soul.
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| The Devil really let himself go |
But that makes sense, I suppose: legends like the one this story is based on (the movie is based on a short story of the same name, written in 1931, which is in turn based on a story by Washington Irving written in the real time of Daniel Webster) put really small regions in the center of the universe, so it makes sense that the Devil would have the time to walk around the New Hampshire countryside, waiting for some poor sap to make the decision to sell his soul for riches and a hot Devil-mistress. And [spoilers!] Daniel Webster wins it in the end, another triumph of American ideals over the forces of evil.
The movie was great, I must say- in the It's a Wonderful Life vein, but with much less sap. And their are many creepy scenes, including a ghoulish courtroom scene full of America's greatest villains straight from the bowels of hell.
In New England, circa one of their Great Awakenings, it's understandable that the Devil was the scariest of all monsters, made all the scarier if you thought you could encounter him on some forest path or in the back of your barn. This story would be something you'd tell your kids to scare them straight, and the movie's strength lies in its capturing the feel of the time period. The setting was a time when unexplained phenomena could be explained convincingly with the epitome of evil. In the book Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts, author Rupert T. Gould recalls an incident in England, 1855, around the same time of The Devil and Daniel Webster, where a long series of hoof-marks were noticed criss-crossing the countryside in freshly laid snow. In a newspaper article, "Richard Owen" recounts:
The superstitious go so far as to believe that they are the marks of Satan himself; and that great excitement has been produced among all classes may be judged from the fact that the subject has been decanted from the pulpit.
These days, even the most religious attribute Satan to far subtler activities, and you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks the Devil or his demons will take the form of a human to outright trick you out of your soul. But this was the belief of the times- not only among popular, back country folklore, but among the preachers and teachers, the ones who held the most believable opinions. And that, I guess, makes The Devil and Daniel Webster an account of some of the oldest American horror there is. A good start.
If we want true devilry, The Simpsons might make a more convincing portrait of Satan in The Devil and Homer Simpson, segment one of Treehouse of Horror IV- coming tomorrow, when I watch a bunch of Treehouse of Horror episodes and tell you how I feel about them.
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