Tonight is the night before Halloween, the holiday known most for candy and scary movies. The derivation of its name stems from Hallowe’en, and was shortened from the original All Hallows' Even – and in poet speak that means what we call Halloween has been a constant shortening and combining of words to really mean on the eve(ening) before All Saint’s Day. The original naming comes from the Ye Olde English "Eallra Hālgena ǣfen."
In honor of this, tonight's post and accompanying images are a mixture of two of my favorites: Shakespeare and Hitchcock. I do not like scary movies and tend to jump inappropriately when something out of the blue in a comedy strikes me as shocking, but I grew up watching Hitchcock movies. When slumber parties at other kid’s houses included watching the likes of Dirty Dancing, at our house, my friends and I crawled into our sleeping bags and watched black and white Hitchcock movies that scared the crap out of us. And I’m positive we had the better time.
The Birds was hands down my favorite but I sometimes vacillate between it and Psycho. What gets me about The Birds is its quietness, it’s sense of serenity and calm before all hell breaks loose and our usually docile feathered friends start plucking out famers eyes and forcing children to run for their lives as if their A-frame schoolhouse is afire.
While Hitchcock was an imagery genius, Shakespeare, or the guy attributed that name, knew how to write a script to fright. I love this nasty mixture of witches’ stew. The language is rich in everything retched. Whilst I cannot say I endorse the baboon's blood at the end, it does everything to boil and trouble.
Happy Halloween one and all!
The Witches’ Spell
Macbeth : Act IV, Scene 1
by William Shakespeare (1606)
A dark Cave. In the middle, a Caldron boiling. Thunder.
Enter the three Witches.
WITCH 1: Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.
WITCH 2: Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin’d.
WITCH 3: Harpier cries:—’tis time! ’tis time!
WITCH1: Round about the caldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.—Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
WITCH2: Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL: Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
WITCH3: Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf;
Witches’ mummy; maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg’d i the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,—
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingrediants of our caldron.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
WITCH2: Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
1 comment:
I love Hitchcock movies as well - but it's hard to pick a favorite. Perhaps it would be Shadow of a Doubt - another movie where all appears normal in a very typical American family home, until the beloved Uncle Charlie comes home. And then it's only the 16 year old daughter who begins to suspect that something is not quite right.
It stars the great Teresa Wright, the only actress to ever be nominated for Oscars in each of her first three films. Shadow of a Doubt was her fourth.
The Birds is a movie I somehow associate with Oregon, perhaps because the one time I visited Bodega Bay was on a drive up the Pacific Coast highway that led me up the Oregon coast as well and much unexpected (by me at least) beauty.
One thing I like about Psycho is that Hitchcock plays with our expectations. The convention is that the lead character you're introduced to at the beginning is the movie will be the lead character throughout. She may die at the end, but the movie will be to some extent her story. This, is why the shower scene is so scary - the movie is told from Janet Leigh's perspective, so we're identifying with her - but she and we die well before the end of the movie. And then a different but related story starts up.
Scary like real life, where we're all the protagonists of our own movies, but have no real guarantee that we'll survive into the third reel. Instead, we may prematurely shuffle off this mortal coil to find what dreams may come.
Tom Stoppard played with this idea too, in Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead. Stoppard gives life to two characters who appear briefly in Hamlet and die offstage in Shakespeare's play.
Before it was All Hallow's Eve, this holiday was Samhain, a Celtic festival - the source of much of the spooky stuff, like costumes and bonfires and probably jack o'lanterns. The ghosts roam tonight.
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