THE CHRISTMAS HORROR ADVENT CALENDAR - Door 4: Christmas with the Cat People

Now then behind our last door we mentioned how in the 1930s Universal Studios has been the kings of the horror film, a crown they firmly held onto once they unleashed the first sequels to their classic horrors establishing franchises for the likes of Dracula and Frankenstein. And into the 1940s, Universal continued to rule the roost by adding successful horror franchises for the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and newly created horror icon, the Wolf Man. 

However, also in the 1940s, they were to gain a significant rival at last in the shape of a B movie unit set up at RKO. Seeing the huge success of the second wave of Universal horror, RKO tasked Ukrainian American writer and producer Val Lewton to come up with a horror picture to rival The Wolf Man. Now Lewton was a highly erudite man and a gifted writer, and knew he could come up with something far better than merely ripping off The Wolf Man. And so with director Jacques Tourneur he created the classic chiller Cat People, a masterpiece of atmosphere and shadows telling the tale of Irena, played by Simone Simon, a woman who believes she bears an ancient curse which will transform her into a big cat at certain times. 

This highly influential movie was a smash hit on its release in 1942, and soon Lewton was making more horrors for RKO, following up Cat People with voodoo chiller I Walked With a Zombie, shapeshifting serial killer flick The Leopard Man, satanic noir The Seventh Victim and sea-going psychological horror Ghost Ship. However as Universal had successfully resurrected poor old Larry Talbot in 1943 for the hugely successful Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, the bosses at RKO wanted a sequel for their own home-grown horrors, and hence demanded that Lewton’s next picture be The Curse of the Cat People. 

Now doing the same old thing time and time again was very much not in Lewton’s style, and hence he decided to take the movie in a very different direction, and in doing so created one of the most fascinating movies in the canon of RKO chillers. 

The plot runs as follows, after the events of the first movie, Irena’s beau Oliver (played by Kent Smith) is now happily married to fellow survivor of Cat People, Alice (played by Jane Randolph) and they now have a young daughter Amy, played by Ann Carter. Now Amy is a somewhat dreamy child, often lost in her own world and has had trouble making friends after the family have settled in a quaint little house in Tarrytown, New York. She wishes for a friend, and seemingly like magic, a mystery lady appears to her, a lady who is the very image of the dead Irena… 

Now Curse of the Cat People is not quite the sequel RKO wanted, and indeed not the movie they tried to sell it as. For, instead of another taut chiller involving shapeshifting, here we have a beautifully eerie and magical ghost story, and very much a tale of the power of imagination and the mysteries of childhood. And while it perplexed audiences at the time who had been sold a killer cat flick, it has been recognised as a much under-rated classic. 

It has been said it is Lewton’s most personal film, very much drawing on his own childhood where he escaped into stories and dreams. However it is also a movie about stories, and very much a celebration of spooky tales. And Lewton knew very well that the ideal times for a ghost story. Hence Curse of the Cat People begins in the autumn, with early scenes explicitly referencing Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow - and indeed note that the town where the Headless Horseman terrorised Ichabod Crane was said to be just outside Tarrytown, New York.  But Hallowe’en isn't the only time for ghost stories, as Lewton well knew, and so as the tale of Amy and her increasingly influential spectral friend unfolds the film moves from autumn into winter, with the story reaching full pace as Christmas comes, bringing some marvellous spooky scenes frosted with snow and icicles. 

Curse of the Cat People is a wonderful little movie, and is perhaps nowhere near as well-known as it should be because it is a sequel to a recognised classic chiller. And indeed if it wasn’t saddled with the baggage of being a sequel, this is a movie that perhaps would have become a Christmas favourite, for it is both wonderfully eerie and magical. And as the movie’s narrative leads us into the festive period, and into a Yuletide wonderland full of snow and childhood  magic, both light and dark. And while it doesn’t deliver the tense dread of its parent Cat People, there are lots of wonderfully eerie moments in this movie, and all in all, it’s a perfect blend of festive fare and ghost stories. 

However there would be darker festive frights coming the very next year… 

DIRECT DOWNLOAD - Door 4: Christmas with the Cat People

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FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Curse of the Tiddy Mun

Lincolnshire is a large rural county in the east of England, and while it's landscape may be extremely flat and lacking in scenic features such as towering crags or rolling hills, its folklore is as rich and diverse as any other part of the British Isles. Today it is an area boasting huge fields and farmlands, but things weren't always this way. Many of its fields are recent additions to the landscape, land from the waters by dykes and drainage; and once it was a very different place, a land of  mists and streams, of  mires and marshes. Folklore is often intimately connected with the local geography, and naturally Lincolnshire's transformation from fens and wetlands to large flat farmlands is reflected in the local legends. 

Just like other areas of this green and sometime pleasant land, Lincolnshire has its own local species of faeries and associated lore. Old tales from the fens speak of a peculiar breed of pixie-like folk known variously as the Greencoaties, the Yarthin or the Strangers, but most commonly called the Tiddy People. Their name is thought to come from an old local dialect in which 'tiddy means simply 'small'. However it has also been suggested that 'tiddy' actually derives from an Old English word 'tydd' meaning 'tide', for as we shall see they had a close association with the fens and the water levels. Folklorist EH Rudkin in a 1955 article reports them as being described thus - 

They be tiddy critturs, no more than a span high, wi' arms an' legs as thin as thread, but great big feet an' hands, an' heads rollin' aboot on their shoulders

from Folklore of Lincolnshire: Especially the Low-Lying Areas of Lindsey

 Like most faeries the Tiddy People were strictly speaking neither good nor evil, and demonstrated the usual capriciousness of elvenkind; sometimes kind, sometimes mischievous, occasionally cruel. It was said they helps crops grow, pinched open the buds in spring and it was a great honour if they came into your home and warmed themselves by your fire. Rudkin records that large flat stones in the county were often called 'stranger stones' as it was believed that the little folk danced upon them. Furthermore, in keeping with general faerie lore, folks would leave offerings on these stones, traditionally the first fruits of a harvest, to keep in the good offices of the Tiddy people.

Related but separate from these local pixies were tales of the Tiddy Mun. Said to be about two or three feet high, this being appeared as a little old man with white hair and a long beard, who dressed in grey (which made it hard to see him), and whose laughter sounded like the cry of local birds such as the peewit or lapwing. According to some, the Tiddy Mun was the king of the Tiddy People, but more generally he was acknowledged to be the guardian of the fens and wetlands, with mighty powers over their waters and wildlife. 

For example when the waters rose too high and began to creep into the houses of the folks who lived in the fens and carrs (as such wetlands used to be called), the people would go out chanting - 

Tiddy Mun wi'out a name

Tha watter's thruff

Which means "Tiddy Man without a name, the water's through!". And when they heard what sounded like the cry of a peewit, they would know the Tiddy Mun had heard their plea and the waters would begin to subside. Like many such spirits, there was a dark side to the Tiddy Mun; it was said that missing or drowned folks had been taken by the Tiddy Mun. And when appealing for his mercy, it was claimed that the wails of those he had taken could be heard.

Drainage Mills in the_Fens, Croyland, Lincolnshire by John Sell Cotman

However relations between the mortal folks and the mysterious Tiddy Mun turned very sour when in the reign of King Charles I work began to drain the fens. The king called upon Dutch engineers, who knew a thing or two about reclaiming land from the waters, to supervise transforming the carrs and wetlands in rich, flat farm fields. The locals weren't keen on "the dutchies" coming and invading their lands, but neither was the Tiddy Mun, who grew angry that his marshes and fens were being emptied and dried up. Several Dutch engineers mysteriously vanished, and folks said that the Tiddy Mun had spirited them away in revenge. 

However the drainage work continued, and the Tiddy Mun became furious and laid a curse down upon the land. Ponies became lame, cattle sickened, lambs died, pigs starved and milk curdled. Walls began to crack and houses tumble down, and worst of all, disease fell upon the people, with ague and malaria striking down many. most commonly the children. The locals recognized that all this was the wrath of the Tiddy Mun, and so began to make offerings of fresh water to him. Seemingly this did the trick, things began to settle down, and the truce was maintained with offering being made every new moon, when folks would go to the dykes and pour in water chanting - 

Tiddy Mun, wi'out a name,

 Here's watter for thee,

Tak tha spell undone!

And while the locals continued this tradition for a good while, it was generally thought that the Tiddy Mun vanished with the fens, never to be seen or heard again. 

Now at first this appears to be a fairly standard story of appeasing local spirits as the local landscape is altered. And one does not have to be terribly cynical to think that maybe it was aggrieved local lads who were really responsible for the disappearances of the unfortunate Dutch engineers, and the curse of the Tiddy Mun no more than an exaggerations of the disruption and upheavals involved in the drainage work. 

However folklorists, particularly Darwin Horn in his article Tiddy Mun's Curse and the Ecological Consequences of Land Reclamation published in the journal Folklore in 1987, have suggested that there may well be more fact in the old legend than is immediately recognized. In fact, much of the curse does relate to the likely consequences of radically altering the local geography. The livestock that had grazed on wetlands plants were now getting fed on the oats, rape and wheat which were being grown on the new fields, and the sudden change in diet could well have led to sickness. Likewise draining the land could have widespread geological consequences - the lowering of the water table would cause subsidence leading to the cracked walls and damage to the little houses of the fen folks. Similarly horses and ponies that had grown up on the soft and wet fields of the fens and carrs would indeed suffer lameness from walking on the new dry and hardened earth - and tellingly larger breeds of draft horses soon replaced the ponies on the newly created fields. 

Even the disease of the curse may be traced to the ecological changes from the drainage. Medical records from the time do actually note that there was a sudden rise in ague and swamp fever, which doctors of the time attributed to the great amounts of decaying vegetative matter that had been dredged out of the fens, being left to dry in the sun, and releasing larger amounts of toxic humours into the air. However, a more likely explanation is that the change in habitat saw an increase in the populations of mosquitoes and flies, which carried diseases such as ague, malaria and swamp fever. Of course, children were much more susceptible to illness, and at the time of the draining of the fens, child mortality was still very high even in the best of times. 

In fact, nearly all the elements of the Tiddy Mun's curse can be seen as result of the large scale ecological changes wrought by the draining of the fens. In fact it is only the reported curdling of the milk that we cannot link to the consequences of the drainage operations. However ruining your dairy products is something of a traditional piece of faery mischief, and so it is no surprise that it was appended to the other effects of the curse.

So then, much like the legends of other water dwellers like Jenny Greenteeth, the curse of the Tiddy Mun reflects something very real - recording in stories the impact a huge change in the local landscape had upon the people who lived there. It's very telling too that the Tiddy Mun vanished, not only as his habitat disappeared, but also as the old fenland way of life was replaced with a new agricultural system. The old Tiddy Mun, who may have began life as a local spook or faery, with these radical changes to the Lincolnshire countryside, certainly grew into what it was always said he was, the embodiment of the very spirit of the landscape.

Roman Canal, Lincolnshire by   Peter De Wint