The Development of the Weird Tale

by S. T. Joshi

  In one of the most gripping scenes in the film, Casares shows the young boy Carlos, who has been abandoned at the orphanage by his parents, a series of bottles with mutant fetuses soaked in alcohol. One fetus in particular has a pronounced backbone—the “Devil’s backbone” of the title. This image is derived from several episodes in del Toro’s childhood. As Daniel Zalewski reports in his New Yorker article on the filmmaker, “As a young child, del Toro had read a book featuring laparoscopic photographs of babies in utero.” Some years later, visiting a mental hospital, del Toro saw “a pile of fetuses, new arrivals [in the morgue]. . . . Del Toro had been raised Catholic, but this sight, he said, upended his faith. Humans could not possibly have souls; even the most blameless lives ended as rotting garbage.”[158]

  In a sense, we are to admire Doctor Casares as a brave holdout against the brutal Franco regime; but in another sense, he is a contemptible figure, selling the fetus-laced alcohol to soldiers and (less culpably) seeming to use poetry and music as a replacement for the religion he has clearly abandoned. In a sense he embodies del Toro’s view of humanity in general, a species that in his view is an inextricable mix of good and evil: “I believe in mankind . . . as the worst and the best that has happened in this world.”[159] Casares’s denial of the very existence of the ghost of Santi is the immemorial response of the rationalist and materialist faced with the reality of the supernatural.

  Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) continues the fusion of politics and the supernatural. Here again the setting is the Spanish Civil War, and both the political and the religious dichotomy of the two sides is etched more clearly than in The Devil’s Backbone. A communist leaflet seen toward the opening of the film clearly states: “No God, no country, no Master.” In contrast, a priest who has sided with the Loyalists states with unctuous viciousness of the rebels: “God has already saved their souls. What happens to their bodies hardly matters to Him.” Meanwhile, the ruthless Captain Vidal, facing the severe illness of his pregnant wife, blandly instructs the doctor to save the baby’s life (he assumes it will be a boy, and therefore his heir) over that of the mother. Sure enough, the mother delivers the baby early; it lives, but she dies.

  The equation of Catholicism and fascism was something that, as del Toro admitted later, emerged when he was working on The Devil’s Backbone. It was then, he states, that “I found the absolutely horrifying—not only complicity—but participation of the Church in the entire fascist movement of Spain.” He goes on to say that the words of the priest quoted above are a verbatim transcript of what a priest actually told a group of Republican prisoners in a fascist concentration camp.[160]

  The film presents a kind of alternative religion or cosmology in the existence of fairy creatures who attempt to lure the young girl Ofelia, Captain Vidal’s daughter, into their clutches. Magic pervades the film—the form of the mandrake root that, soaked in milk, helps to cure Ofelia’s mother when she suffers a serious illness; in the form of a huge grasshopper-like creature that leads Ofelia to an encounter with a faun, who takes her to be the Princess Moanna, daughter of the king of the underworld; and especially in the form of Pan’s labyrinth itself, a structure not far from the Loyalist encampment where Vidal’s forces are battling the rebels.

  Del Toro is well aware of the symbolic import of these magical entities. Like Lovecraft, who certainly did not believe in the literal existence of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and other “gods” of his invented mythology, del Toro is proposing in Pan’s Labyrinth a contrast to the orthodox Christianity that, to his mind, can only lead to intolerance and fascism. And although he himself stated in an interview that “For me, what she [Ofelia] sees is a fully blown reality, spiritual reality. I believe her tale not to be just a reflection from the world around her, but, to me, she actually turns into the princess.”[161] He does not necessarily intend us, as viewers, to interpret the magical elements of the film as literal reality. This emerges at the very end, when Captain Vidal, hunting down his own daughter (who has taken her baby brother and brought him to Pan’s labyrinth as instructed by the faun), fails to see the faun when Ofelia sees him and talks with him. This can either mean that Vidal, as a man blinded by his own dogmatic faith and his cruelty, cannot see the magic that really exists in the world, or that Ofelia herself is deluded as to the existence of the magical creatures she thinks she has encountered.

  In the end, Vidal does indeed kill his own daughter, after she refuses to sacrifice her brother to Pan; but, as the concluding voice-over narration informs us, she has indeed returned to her father’s kingdom and lived there for many years. It is amusing that the concluding image of the king of the underworld is pointedly similar to standard conception of the Christian God as a long, bearded figure in a robe seated on a throne; but this god, del Toro is saying, is a very different entity altogether.

  The Gods of Chaos

  Our analysis of the religious elements in Hellboy (2004) must be tempered by awareness of what elements are found in the original comic by Mike Mignola. The film is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the comic, but with apparent touches—specifically some religious undercurrents—added by del Toro himself. (The screenplay was written by del Toro based on a story by del Toro and Peter Briggs.) The basic premise of the film follows that of the comic: Hellboy, a demon summoned from another dimension by the Nazis in 1944, decides to follow a nobler path and battle occult forces of evil; but there is always a chance that he might let in the Ogdru Jahad (the gods of chaos) to overwhelm the earth.

  At the very outset of the film, religious imagery enters in the form of a rosary held by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm (pronounced “Broom”). This rosary ultimately occupies a small but significant place in the overall narrative, for Hellboy—who has been raised by Bruttenholm and has come to regard him as his father—takes up the rosary when Brutteholm is killed; still later, as Hellboy is indeed tempted to let in the Ogdru Jahad, FBI agent John Myers throws him the rosary and cries, “Remember who you are!” The tactic works, and Hellboy allows the interdimensional portal to close. The message we are to derive from this series of incidents is not that Hellboy himself is acknowledging faith in the Catholic church; although Bruttenholm is himself a devout Catholic, Hellboy’s attraction to the rosary is largely a matter of devotion to his “father,” Bruttenholm. Myers’s cry is meant to recall to Hellboy that he is half-human and therefore should show some sort of devotion to his species rather than to the extradimensional monster seeking to destroy the world and all its inhabitants.

  There is a powerful influence of Lovecraft throughout the film, and it is a delicate question which of the Lovecraftian touches are derived from Mignola’s comic and which from del Toro’s elaborations upon it. Some tips of the hat are amusing but frivolous, as in a passing radio broadcast from station HPLN, or the fact that Hellboy (like Lovecraft) is enamoured of cats. One of Hellboy’s monstrous assistants, Abe Sapien, has webbed hands, exactly like the hybrid Deep Ones (described as an amalgam of human and fish) in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931).

  But other elements are much more significant. The film opens with a passage from De Vermis Mysteriis, an imaginary book of occult lore similar to the celebrated Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, invented by Lovecraft so early as 1922. De Vermis Mysteriis was created by Lovecraft’s young friend Robert Bloch, who cited it under its English title, Mysteries of the Worm, in the story “The Shambler from the Stars” (1935); Lovecraft supplied the Latin title. In the film, the passage states: “Seven Gods of Chaos . . . slumber in their crystal prison, waiting to reclaim Earth . . . and burn the Heavens.” This notion—and, in general, the idea of letting in extradimensional creatures to overwhelm the earth—is taken directly from Lovecraft’s novelette “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), where an elderly librarian, Dr. Armitage, realises that there was “some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension.”[162] Armitage’s valiant
efforts prevent Wilbur Whateley, a huge, goatlike figure from a backwoods Massachusetts town, from doing just that.

  The creature that emerges toward the end of Hellboy bears striking resemblances to Cthulhu, the octopoid “god” who, in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), came from the depths of space and became imprisoned in an underwater city called R’lyeh in the Pacific. Like Cthulhu, the entity in Hellboy is many-tentacled, and at one point it is itself referred to as a “god.” Both creatures are, in fact, alien entities, but their immense power makes them seem like gods to the fragile and minuscule human beings who encounter them.

  The ultimate “religious” significance of Hellboy is its bland acknowledgment of an alternate cosmology that has nothing to do with the Christian tradition. For all the fleeting Catholic references, the film is premised on the notion that the god of Christianity is simply an idle myth, and that the “real” gods are the “Seven Gods of Chaos” who, in their extradimensional realm, will pose a recurring threat to humanity.

  The sequel to Hellboy, Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), is an interesting fusion of the original film with some elements seemingly derived from Pan’s Labyrinth. Here Hellboy battles a variety of entities led by Balor, the king of Elfland. While an entertaining action film and special-effects extravaganza, the film does not raise any profound religious or philosophical issues beyond that contained in the original film.

  A Film Not Made

  Del Toro’s most salient—and radical—religious or anti-religious vision might have been embodied in a film that he has (so far) not yet made—his long-planned adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. This novel is indeed Lovecraft’s most pungent exposition of his own atheism, providing a kind of humiliating “origin of species” that renders us the accidental by-products of an extraterrestrial race far greater in every regard than ourselves.

  At the Mountains of Madness tells of the discovery by a small group of explorers of the existence of an immense city built in Antarctica millions of years ago by a race of alien entities whom the explorers deem the Old Ones. As the explorers continue to investigate the immense stone city, they are forced to the conclusion not only that it was not built by human hands but that:

  the builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells . . . rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life . . . They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young—the beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had never bred.[163]

  Elsewhere it is stated that the creatures were “supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake.”[164]

  It is this cosmic panorama that del Toro attempted for years—since at least the early 1990s—to adapt into a blockbuster film. He tells of his decades-long fascination with it:

  Reading this tale in my midteens was a revelation. I had never been exposed to any literature that so dwarfed our existence and hinted at the cold indifference of the cosmos. I became entirely enamored. Making a film of it became my quest.

  For the last fifteen years or so, I have attempted repeatedly to make a film based on this story. From 2009 to 2011 I dedicated my every waking hour to sketching, sculpting, and writing about every detail in the adaptation of Lovecraft’s difficult prose. Difficult to adapt, that is, since it is a superb tonal work, peppered with brief but shocking episodes of devastating power. The adaptation took necessary liberties but remained faithful to every landmark of the novel.[165]

  In his interview with Daniel Zalewski, del Toro underscores his understanding of the core atheistic message of Lovecraft’s novel: “The book essentially says how scary it is to realize that we are a cosmic joke.”[166]

  Alas, the film has not been made, because Universal denied del Toro the $150 million he wished to spend, as the studio felt that an R-rated film of this sort would not sufficiently make back its investment. In 2012 del Toro claimed that Ridley Scott’s Prometheus “killed” his plan for At the Mountains of Madness because it seemed to duplicate the core element in the novel: the notion that an alien species created the human race.[167] In recent years, however, del Toro has backtracked somewhat, holding out faint hopes that an At the Mountains of Madness film may in fact one day be made.

  Whether it does so or not, it has become clear that several central films in Guillermo del Toro’s oeuvre address religious issues in a bold, dynamic, and at times anticlerical or actually atheistic manner. While fully recognising the significance of religion as a critical component of many people’s worldview (and, indeed, his own), del Toro challenges viewers of his films to consider alternate worldviews or cosmologies that dispense altogether with the metaphysical tenets of the Judeo-Christian religion or any other religions of the earth. We may or may not be alone in the universe, but in del Toro’s vision it is unclear whether orthodox religion can provide even a modicum of comfort to assuage the awareness of our transience and fragility in the immensity of the cosmos.

  Lovecraft and Some Lost Classics of the

  Supernatural

  Walter de la Mare, The Return (1910)

  Walter de la Mare’s The Return, first published in 1910 and issued in a revised edition in 1922, is a gripping and poignant novel of psychic pos­session, and is de la Mare’s most substantial—although by no means his only—contribution to weird fiction.

  De la Mare led an unusually placid and uneventful existence that allowed him to devote the majority of his long life to literature. Born in Charlton, Kent, in 1873, he was brought up largely by his mother after the early death of his father. When his family moved to London, de la Mare was educated at St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School, where he also founded and edited the school magazine. Ill health prevented him from attending college, and in 1890 he became a bookkeeper in the London office of the Anglo-American (Standard) Oil Company, where he worked for nearly twenty years.

  During his spare time he wrote stories and poerns. These began to appear in some of the more distinguished periodicals of the clay, including Cornhill Magazine and Pall Mall Gazette; but de la Mare was so diffident as to their quality that initially he used the pseudonym “Walter Ramal.” His first volume of poetry, Songs of Childhood (1902), appeared under this pseudonym, as did several brief horror tales later gathered by Edward Wagenknecht as Eight Tales (1971). Henry Brocken, de la Mare’s first novel, was published under his own name in 1904.

  The British government bestowed a Civil List pension of £100 a year on de la Mare in 1908, allowing him to retire from business and devote his life to writing. He had by this time married Constance Elfrida Igpen, with whom he would have two sons and two daughters. One of the first books he wrote in his newfound leisure was The Return.

  Tales of “psychic possession” have a long history in weird fiction, but it has frequently taken the form of simple possession by a devil—if not, indeed, by the Devil himself. Folklore had long since established demonic possession as a ready, perhaps the only, explanation for the changes in outward behaviour or inner character brought on by such ailments as epilepsy, schizophrenia, or syphilis, and weird writers were not slow to adopt this convenient supernatural excuse.

  But as literal belief in the Devil waned, a new, secular form of psychic possession had to be devised. The development of the science of psychol­ogy, which revealed the vast powers of the human brain and will, provided new materials and inspirations for weird fiction. Poe’s tales of madness and monomania (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Man of the Crowd”) suggested how the aberrations of the mind could themselves engender fear and horror, while Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), although not precisely a tale of psychic possession, demonstrated how drugs could transform a single personality into a twist­ed caricature of itself.

  Could the human mind,
spirit, or will be so strong as to take over the body of another human being? Could it even survive death and, in its implacable will to continue its existence, seize upon the living? These are the questions probed by Walter de la Mare in The Return.

  And yet, this novel evades easy classification. When Arthur Lawford awakes from sleeping on the tomb of an eighteenth-century pirate, Nicholas Sabathier, and comes home to find that his face has become entirely different from his own, are we dealing with actual psychic possession or something more anomalous? Indeed, is Lawford’s plight not exactly analogous (if in somewhat less extreme form) to the existential hor­ror of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), in which Gregor Samsa awakens one day and discovers that he has become a huge cockroach?

  The critical question, broached but never fully answered in The Return, is whether the physical change in Lawford’s features reflects, or is the van­guard of, a deeper psychological change. At first Lawford feels exactly him­self; but a little later he senses “that other feebly struggling personality . . . beginning to insinuate itself into his consciousness.” Of course his person­ality is affected by the change—whose would not be? Indeed, at the very moment of the transformation he seems a far more vigorous and energetic person than he was before; and he himself later wonders whether the ill­ness he had been suffering, not to mention his generally “feeble hold on life,” did not make him a prime candidate for this bizarre victimisation. But the true extent to which Sabathier’s actual personality usurps Lawford’s remains a tantalisingly unsettled question throughout the novel.