COMMENTARY CLUB VALENTINES SPECIAL 2024 - The Trip

For our traditional wildly inappropriate movie for Valentine's Day this year, we picked a romantic comedy... from Tommy Wirkola, director of the Dead Snow films! The Trip (2021) has Noomi Rapace and Aksel Hennie as a couple off for a romantic break where they plan to kill each other! 

DIRECT DOWNLOAD - VALENTINES SPECIAL 2024 - The Trip

Find all the podcasts in the HYPNOGORIA family here plus more articles on the weird and wonderful here-

HYPNOGORIA HOME DOMAIN 

COMMENTARY CLUB ST. SKELETOR'S DAY SPECIAL - Sightseers (2012)

In a special bonus episode Teresa and Jim celebrate  St. Skeletor's Day with a suitably anti-romantic movie - Sightseers (2012). Starring Alice Lowe and Steve Oram and directed by Ben Wheatley, this British comedy horror tells the moving tale of young couple Chris and Tina who set off with a caravan to explore the scenic sights of the British countryside with several murders along the way! 

DIRECT DOWNLOAD - ST. SKELETOR'S  DAY SPECIAL - Sightseers

To subscribe to Commentary Club go here -

COMMENTARY CLUB HOME DOMAIN 
COMMENTARY CLUB on iTUNES
COMMENTARY CLUB on STITCHER
COMMENTARY CLUB on GOOGLE PLAY PODCASTS

If you enjoyed the show, we have a little campaign to raise money for Alzheimer's Disease research! Any donations gratefully received!

COMMENTARY CLUB JUST GIVING PAGE

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Valentine's Lore

Well it's that time of year when the shops are filled with hearts and flowers, love is in the air, and there is much rejoicing among card manufacturers! And thus it ever was, all the way back to Roman times, or at least so the received wisdom would have you believe. However as ever in the shifting world of folklore, things are not always what they seem. Now according to a slew of articles and puff pieces that surface every February, St. Valentine's Day is a Christianization of an ancient festival held back in the days of Classical paganism.

In Graeco-Roman times, according to some, young folks had marriages set up by drawing lots: names were placed in an urn and picked out at random, pairing up the lads and lasses. And according to others, as well as this romantic lottery, this was part of a wild festival celebrating werewolves. Now as appealing as both these sound, sadly both of these claims are what we historians call - confusing technical terms alert! - "poppycock", "claptrap" and "flapdoddle". For both these claims are at best wildly inaccurate and their connection to the origins of Valentine's day suspect at best.

Now there was a Roman festival, held from the 13th to the 15th of February, called Lupercalia. However it must be noted that this was very much a local custom, a festival held pretty much exclusively in Rome as there are only scant references to Lupercalia being held anywhere else. Therefore it wasn't a custom that spread throughout the Roman Empire, so it couldn't possibly be the seeding a proto-Valentine's day across Europe.

Lupercalia's purpose was thought to be to cleanse the city of evil spirits and usher in the spring, however there is a good deal of mystery about it. Often it is said that its name was from derived from a Lycaean god Lupercus, a god originally worshipped by shepherds and identified with the better known Roman deity Faunus and the Greek Pan. However as this was a set of customs peculiar to the city of Rome, it has also been claimed that it was a celebration of Lupa, the she-wolf who according to legend suckled that ancient city's  founders, Romulus and Remus. Furthermore many other gods have been referenced as part of the celebrations such as Juno, queen of the Roman gods, and the afore-mentioned Pan and Faunus. Also often invoked in Lupercalia was Februus, a god of purification from whom we get the name February.

Indeed it is thought that Lupercalia grew out of imported Greek practices fusing with different aspects of local cult worship around the core of an earlier festival honouring Februus, called Februa. Hence these celebrations held on the Ides of February were not dedicated to the worship of any one god or spring solely from one religious tradition but were actually a folk amalgam of many different rites. Interestingly this festival was so old that even Classical writers of the time were not sure of its history - much like our own folk festivals that survive today, its origins and exact meaning had long been forgotten by the Romans although the practice still continued.

The main event of Lupercalia was the sacrifice of two goats and a dog. Young men of the city were annointed with the blood of the animal, and then led by the priests and dressed in goatskins and/or going naked, ran round the walls of the old city, presumably to scare off the afore-mentioned evil spirits. They carried freshly cut strips of hide from the sacrifices and playfully whipping the ground and the spectators with the newly cut thongs to purify them. It was considered good fortune to be whipped, and for ladies it would ensure fertility and easier births, for it was a common belief in the ancient world that if one was purified, one would be healthy, happy, fortunate and fertile. 

However by 1 AD the festival was largely a somewhat rowdy drunken affair, with Lupercalia appearing to have more in common with the kind of beery, bawdy mischief that football teams get up to than a serious religious festival. Indeed for this reason, it was outlawed at the end of the 5th century as it was felt the festival was something of a public disgrace. So then, while undoubtedly there was a link to fertility and the spring in the festival, Lupercalia had little or nothing to do with Roman marriage customs, and in its later centuries appears to have been about as romantic as a fraternity kegger. More damningly however, no Classical source mentions any custom of drawing of lots for romance or marriage or just for fun. Furthermore there are no archaeological discoveries of artifacts used in such practices, and no frescos, statuary or artworks depicting the custom either. So while it is a quaint story, without any historical evidence that is all it is.

Now then as for the werewolf festival claims, I'm afraid that as fun as this sounds, this too is without historical basis. Or rather its alleged historical basis is actually the result of sloppy research. This lycanthropic origin for Valentine's Day appears to have surfaced only relatively recently in the last few years but has taken root on the internet. So now it gets gets bandied about every February, with all sundry being too busy making "Happy Horny Werewolf Day!" cracks to bother to check any sources.

The first alleged link is a misunderstanding of the nature of the god Lupercus. While his name is linked with wolves, he wasn't a lupine god at all. He was portrayed as a satyr i.e. a figure half man, half goat, hence his identification withe the Greek Geek and the Roman Faunus.  Now you can go a long way in history and folklore by analyzing the etymology of words and names, however simply equating two words or names as the same as they sound similar is doing a half a job at best. So simply equating "Lupercus" with the word for wolf "lupus" does not suddenly make him a wolf god or werewolf deity without a shred of any other supporting evidence. The consensus among historians is that his name actually means "he who protects from wolves" - which makes more sense for a pastoral goat god originally worshipped by shepherds.

Lupercus/Faunus - clearly not a werewolf

Similarly some writers peddling the werewolf festival line have pointed out that Lupercus was identified with Pan, who was sometimes referred to as Pan Lycaeus. Now "lycaeus" is derived from the Greek word for wolf and hence these unwise fellows have assumed that this meant that Pan, another goat god, had a wolf form In fact several Greek gods sported the tag 'Lycaeus' such as Zeus and Apollo, but it actually refers to Mount Lykaion. While its name in Greek means literally 'wolf mountain', this location in Greece is very important in Classical myth, and hence these gods all had their own mythological links to it and shrines to them built on it. Therefore "Lycaeus" is usually interpreted as a geographical honorific, with a secondary school of thought taking the alternative view that it means "Protector against wolves". Either way, Classical scholars are very sure it does not denote a wolf form of these gods, and certainly is not a sign of divine werewolvry! Other dubious claims of wolvish links are made with the detail of a sacrifice of a dog, alleging it was a substitute for a wolf. However according to Classical scholarship, dogs were a standard animal to sacrifice in many Roman rites, and if there was any symbolic significance for the choice of sacrifices in the festival of Lupercalia, it is thought that the sacrifice of two goats and a dog are thought to represent a flock and its protector.

The final misunderstanding and the one central to the werewolf festival flapdoodle, is the erroneous idea that the dressing in the skins of the sacrifices was some specious ritual transformation into wolves. Now this would be a reasonable assumption... if they were wolf pelts, in a wolf ritual, to honour a wolf god. But as it was goatskins donned, it was clearly to emulate the satyr gods of Lupercus, Faunus and Pan. Furthermore in a festival linked to shepherding and farming, the idea of celebrating wolves, never mind werewolves, is nonsensical at best. Again there is no mention of wolves, let alone werewolves in contemporary Classical sources, and the iconography for the festival found in surviving Roman statuary and the like, clearly shows a strong ovine theme, with rams and ewe heads and not a wolf insight. All of which rather definitively slays the werewolf festival myth.

Roman representation of Lupercali from of the end of the reign of Trajan

So then having debunked these two modern myths, where did these oft repeated Graeco-Roman origin claims come from? Well, they actually appear relatively late in the day, in an 18th century work Lifes of the Principal Saints. The author Alban Butler writes -

To abolish the heathen, lewd, superstitious custom of boys drawing the names of girls, in honour of their goddess Februata Juno, on the 15th of February, several zealous Pastors substituted the names of Saints in billets given on that day. 

Now while Februata Juno is thought to be a confused reference to Lupercalia and the earlier festival of Febra, as we have established, there is no mention in Classical sources of this custom of drawing lots. However being a respected source, Butler's claims have been repeated without question for many years and it is only relatively recently that scholars began to question his claims. Now as we have established there is not historical evidence for this alleged Roman custom, but as generations of historians, scholars and folklorists accepted Butler's account  thus the modern erroneous myth of a Graeco-Roman origin for Valentine's Day was born. 

However it is some truth in what Butler says. And that is that as far back as the 15th century, romantic matches were being made by lottery in mid February in Europe. Given the prominence of Classical origins in many of our old customs, Butler perhaps can be forgiven for attributing Roman roots to what was a common medieval custom.

From sources that document this tradition, it would appear that this wasn't necessarily a serious practice - back in those times marriages were carefully arranged affairs to consolidate land, titles and power. Rather it seems to have been a playful game popular in the courts of kings and nobles. It was so popular and widespread that later the custom spread down through society and down through the ages, to the extent it was still being played in 19th century - with Scottish poet Robert Burns mentioning choosing a valentine by drawing lots in the song Tam Glen. Indeed rather than betrothal by lottery, it appears to have been more cross between a party game and a sort of loose form of divination. 

But having debunked the Roman origins, where does this curious custom of romance by chance come from, and why the association between romance and mid February? Well it would appear we can blame Chaucer for this. Actually that is possibly a little unfair - rather it is in a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer that we have the first recorded instance of an odd medieval belief that was to set this romantic ball rolling. In Parlement of Foules, thought to have been penned around 1382, Chaucer writes -

For this was on seynt Volantynys day

Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

And for those of you who don't speak Middle English that means -

For this was on St. Valentine's Day, 

When every bird cometh there to choose his mate.

 

Yes, in medieval lore there was said to be an exact day when our feathered friends paired up for the year, a date for the annual marriage of the birds. And this is the seed of both the drawing of lots custom, and later of Valentine's Day itself.

Now some scholars have questioned whether Chaucer's "seynt Volantynys day" actually refers to February 14th. They claim that later an astronomical process called the precession of the equinoxes would have changing the date of the start of spring, and therefore when Chaucer was writing it would be too early in the year for birds to be mating. So then, it has been suggested that perhaps he was referring to the later celebration of another Valentine, the feast of Valentine of Genoa which falls on May 3rd in the liturgical calendar.

However the idea he might not have been referencing February 14th is based on the underlying assumption that Chaucer is referring to an actual belief concerning the nature of birds. But examining scholarly interpretations of the poem, this marriage of the birds is often considered to be a poetic invention for his narrative. Partly this is due to there being no other written precedent for this belief, it is only every mentioned in other poems by John Gower, Otton de Grandson and Pardo of Valencia. And difficulties in dating all these worthy gentlemen's verses make it impossible to say whether they were written before or after Chaucer put quill to vellum. Either way it would appear to be a poetic conceit rather than authentic folklore, for the mythic tone and themes of Parlement of Foules, rather suggest it is a legend invented specially for the narrative of the verse.

But if we are to entertain the possibility that  Chaucer was documenting actual contemporary lore, which have have lost other sources for, it would still be most unwise to assume that folks of his time believed in an actual marriage of birds occurring on a set day. Firstly bear in mind that the people of Chaucer's day lived in an agrarian society and were far more aware of the habits and life cycles of local wildlife than us modern townies, and hence they were very unlikely to believe such a whimsical idea. Furthermore medieval people, very much at the mercy of the whims of the British climate, would know very well that despite the vernal equinox marking the start of spring in astronomical and calendar terms, in reality spring coming was a variable event, dependent on the local weather. Some years it would come early and birds indeed may start nesting in February, but in other years February might be lost in swathes of snow, still in the depths of winter. Therefore there could have been no real expectation that spring would actually have to start on any arbitrary date. 

A modern analogy would be having a white Christmas - that is what is depicted in our seasonal imagery, and what we hope for, but we know that it is not guaranteed, or timetabled to snow at the end of December. The medieval world view was one that was rich in symbol, allegory and metaphor, and hence if February 14th was popularly held to be the date of the marriage of the birds, it would be understood as a symbolic event marking the coming of spring, and not as biology or natural history. Therefore we can safe assume that Chaucer meant the usual date, and as further evidence will confirm.  

Geoffrey Chaucer - it's all his fault 

But no matter where it originates, whether as poetic fancy or a genuine lost piece of medieval lore, the link between St.Valentine's Day and romantic love had been made. And thanks to its appearances in poetry, the idea soon gained popularity. This was after all the age when 'courtly love' was all the rage, and poets like Chaucer were its standard bearers in literature. Therefore it is perhaps unsurprising that Valentine's Day was to become the focus for romantic activities. Now as to which St. Valentine's Day Chaucer is referring, confirmation that it was the usual date comes around two decades later. For King Charles V of France held an event named 'The Court of Love' on the 14th of February in the year 1400, which featured feasting, jousting and competitions in writing amorous verse. This is widely accepted to be the very first St. Valentine's Day party. 

Further into the 15th century, we have the earliest valentine love poems appearing, and into the sixteenth century we have Chaucer's bird tradition and the love customs now fused together, with poets Michael Drayton and Robert Herrick referring to the avian lore in their love poems To His Valentine and To His Valentine On St. Valentine's Day. And so Valentine's Day has been a tradition since the 15th century, and rather than emerging from a Christian whitewash of surviving Graeco-Roman pagan activities as Butler suggested, it would seem that our Valentine's customs are more the product of the culture and literature of courtly love that flourished in the Middle Ages. Indeed even the legends attached to St. Valentine that link him to the practice of sending cards are an addition to his mythology that appear well after the courtly love culture had invented and popularized Valentine's Day. And so despite having a saint's name and feast day, our Valentine's customs have their roots in literature and court entertainments rather than religious rites, pagan or Christian. Essentially it is a product of medieval pop culture! 

The first printed Valentine card from 1797

However the traditions have shifted and changed over the centuries. Most recently, in the latter years of the 20th century, Valentine's Day has became increasingly a couples' carnival - indeed to the extent it is regularly joked that old St. Val is now the patron saint of making single people feel like shit. But in centuries past it was more a day for finding love than celebrating an established relationship. And while love tokens were sent out to win hearts, it was also a day for a spot of romantic divination. So then let's round off with a look at some of the various charms and rites you could use to find yourself a valentine. 

Some were not dissimilar to the Valentine lotteries detailed above, allowing the forces of random chance to reveal your romantic destiny. For example, there was this common custom - you could write the names of possible beaus on strips of paper, wrap them up in clay, and then drop the clay pellets into a bowl of water - which ever roses to the surface first would reveal the name of your true love. 

In the poem The Shepherd's Week (1714) in the section Thursday, or The Spell, John Gay mentions another Valentine's folk belief (alongside many more similar charms and rites)  - 

Last Valentine, the day when birds of kind,

Their paramours with mutual chirpings find,

I early rose, just at the break of day,

Before the sun had chas'd the stars away;

A-field I went, amid the morning dew,

To milk my kine (for so should house-wives do).

Thee first I spied, and the first swain we see,

In spite of Fortune, shall our true love be.

Yes, from the 17th century right up to the 1920s, there was the superstition that the first person of the opposite sex you see on Valentine's Day morning was to be your valentine for that year. Regardless of who they were - the only stricture was that they were single. Unsurprisingly there are reports of an attendant tradition of young folks going about blindfolded or staying in indoors on Valentine's Day!

In a similar vein, and in a thankfully less arbitrary fashion, there also was folklore regarding the meaning of the first thing you saw on Valentine's Day morning. In Derbyshire, it was the custom to peep through the keyhole of the front door and divine your romantic prospects from what you saw - if you saw a single object or person, then you would be single for the rest of the year. If you saw two things or people together, you would be destined to meet some one special in the next twelve months. And if you spotted a cock and hen together, you would be married before the next Valentine's Day came around.

Keeping on the avian theme, and tying in nicely the old Chaucerian ideas of the bird "marriages", it was also said that the first bird a young lady saw on Valentine's Day morning was an omen of her future marriage prospects. There are several variations as to which bird means what but common ones are as follows - if it was a robin, she would marry a sailor, a blackbird signified a clergyman. A sparrow promised wedding a poor man but a happy married life, while a goldfinch presaged a wealthy husband to come. But a woodpecker meant you would forever stay single and never marry.

For the more adventurous, it was said that if you went to a graveyard at midnight the night before Valentine's Day, and ran round the church twelve times, then the ghostly shape of your future lover would appear before you. And finally if you had a very strong stomach you could try the following ritual to invoke a vision of your lover to be on Valentine's Eve. It starts simply enough - gather five bay leaves and pin them to your pillow, one in each corner and one in the middle. According to some versions, you must now sprinkle it with rosewater. Next take an egg, and hard boil it. Then slice it in half, remove the yolk and fill the cavity with salt. Yes, all of it! Then before going to bed you eat this specially prepared egg. And again - all of it! Yes, including the shell! Then after this highly unusual supper, before going to sleep, you recite the following charm - 

"Good valentine, be kind to me; In dreams, let me my true love see." 

And provided that a) you aren't up all night suffering with hideous indigestion, and b) can actually get a wink of sleep for bay leaves poking your face, you will then - allegedly - see the face of your one true love  in your dreams.

DISCLAIMER - The management accepts no responsibility for any ills that may befall you should you try this at home!

TWIHARD PART III - Bad Moon Rising

As a companion piece to The Black Dog Podcast Twihard marathon (episodes #62 to #64), I too took up the challenge to watch all three Twilight movies. In Twihard Part I, we examined the brouhaha surrounding this franchise, and in Part II dissected the first screen instalment of the saga of Bella and Edward. A dubious claims hangs heavily in the air like a leading man reduced to a yellow smoke cameo… Oh, do not ask “what is it?”, let us go and make our visit…

New Moon (2009)

So despite a somewhat mixed critical reaction, Twilight had managed to pull into a very healthy profit (over ten times its budget), and so the second adaption was quickly rushed into production. In fact New Moon was announced the day after the first flicks opening – one presumes that it had already made its money back in first night sales alone. However what’s more unusual than this record breaking green-lighting time, well at least for fans of the Star Trek and Friday 13th sagas, is that this time around Paramount actually increased the budget for the sequel.

The original cast were secured and Melissa Rosenberg was back too to handle the script. However Hardwicke was not to return to the director’s chair, claiming the time restrictions of the production were not to her taste, and so Chris Weitz was brought in to bring Meyer’s second novel to the screen. Whereas Hardwicke had seemed a canny choice to helm a Twilight adaptation, Weitz’s looks a bit of an odd fit; while co writing and directing About A Boy showed he had the chops to handle emotional themes and literary adaptations, his earlier foray American Pie was a very different take to American teenagers and his most recent directing job was the box office failure The Golden Compass, another translation of a book for younger readers to the screen, which looked pretty but made mincemeat of the original novel. Even considering the long and trouble production of this film, which somehow managed to annoy both religious zealots and rabid atheists at the same freaking time, it’s still surprising Paramount gave the reins to a director who had so recently failed to launch a successful franchise aimed at the same cash-in market dominated by Harry Potter that Twilight is aiming for. Often such a debacle would land you in Director’s Jail quicker than you could say ‘Alan Smithee’. Then again the detractors of Twilight may well say that getting the job of helming New Moon amounts to the same…

So then, I came to this movie literally minutes after the credits of the first had rolled. I had intended doing this marathon on a one movie per night basis, however the first Twilight had charmed enough to slap the next disc into the machine straight away. But tellingly, after watching New Moon I was in no mood to plunge into Eclipse. Now I can understand why some folk rate this entry in the series higher than the first but personally I found it to be something of an ordeal.

Partly this may be due to the source material. Firstly plot-wise the meat of this movie; the blooming and subsequent wilting of the romance between Jacob and Bella, plays far too closely like a retread of Twilight with werewolves replacing the vampires. To certain extent I can let this slide; after all, a great many sagas and franchises often are guilty of just delivering more of the same.

But what I have real trouble forgiving is the somewhat dubious about the whole plot thread which has Bella recklessly putting herself in danger just to catch a glimpse of a foggy phantom Edward. Perhaps I’m showing my age here – I’m at that stage in life when if I see scantily clad young ladies on the street I tend to think “they’ll catch their death of cold dressed like that!” rather than breaking into a Sid James leer – but I really couldn’t help fretting about what kind of role model Bella is providing here, and I pray that Meyer’s novel handles this better than Weitz does on screen, because what we actually see is reckless and extremely stupid and I dread to think that some impressionable teens may get the idea that putting themselves at risk is a great way of reconnecting with their former beaus.

But the wider implications aside, none this actually does much to endear us to Kirstin Stewart’s Bella. Now technically Stewart was somewhat less of an irritant in this flick – for much of it she is supposed to be heart broken and depressed which actually suits the ultra-moody perma-frown performance she’s reprising from the first film – but any sympathy this matching of the narrative tone and her face-like-a-smacked-arse delivery might have elicited is totally undercut by the courting death routine. In Twilight Bella generally annoyed me through Stewart’s reading of the role, and while she was better in this outing, in New Moon it’s the character herself and her scripted actions than wound me up.

However in fairness, we do get to see her actually look happy for a brief time. When she eventually succumbs to the charms of Jacob’s company, we even get to see her smile and have some fun with her childhood chum whose slowly morphing into boyfriend material. Now these are some of the best sequences in the movie; they are gently naturalistic, touchingly warm and not over played. And besides getting to witness the once a century breaking of the witch’s spell that locks Stewart’s face in glower mode, Taylor Lautner gets to step into the limelight.

Now in the first film, he had impressed me with his relaxed, likeable and subtle performance, and the promise showed in his brief appearance comes to full fruit in the courtship of Bella. However when his lycanthropic heritage come into play and we move out of the blossoming romance section and into the subsequenct saddening wilting that is the “I can’t be with you” heart break, his performance seems to go downhill. Some may say that this is a simple of case of a young actor who can excel in a supporting role but hasn’t yet the dramatic confidence to play centre stage, and there is probably an element of truth in that.

However I think the trouble is emanating from two behind the camera areas. Firstly there’s a distinct change in the lines he’s being asked to deliver once he becomes a werewolf – instead of well crafted and realistic dialogue, once the wolf is ascendant he mainly seems to get ponderous stilted speeches. However this is a minor problem, the real trouble is the way Weitz shoots the scenes. Basically he seems to stick the camera on a tripod then (presumably) fucks off for a coffee, leaving poor old Taylor just to stand there, metaphorically as well as literally shirtless, spouting exposition Rosenberg’s script has mistaken for high drama. If I hadn’t recognised Weitz’s name, I could have sworn that New Moon was made by someone with a lot of daytime TV soap on their CV, for this just propping up the camera and just calling action reeks of the kind of ‘quick get it in the can!’ direction you see on The Young & The Witless. I can only assume that Weitz thought that the sight of Jacob’s six pack was height of drama in itself.

And as a whole New Moon suffers from a tendency to concentrate on looking good rather telling the story, a failing that it shares with Weitz’s previous flick The Golden Compass. Now it’s true that one of the golden rules of cinema is show, not tell, however that’s not a license to leave your actors floundering in dull static shots in key dramatic scenes, or to expect pretty colours to distract from the fact that the pace of story telling is erratic and often flagging.

There’s a strong stench of style over substance throughout the entire film and while one may be charitable and blame the rapid production schedule for the film’s patchily substance and general lack of dramatic weight, Weitz’s directorial choices must also be held to account. For example, while the movie’s colour palette is lush and gorgeous, overflowing with opulent golds, vivid greens and striking reds. The trouble is though; this vision inspired by Italian art doesn’t make sense for the mood of the story line or its central location. Now this gold and crimson palette makes perfect sense for the final act in Volterra but not for Forks…

Whereas Catherine Hardwicke gave us a gloomy milieu for Twilight, present Forks as a town drenched in blues and almost perpetually overcast by slate coloured rainclouds. And hence you could easily suspend disbelief and buy that Carlisle and his brood of friendly bloodsuckers could blend into human society thanks to the endless rain haunted days. But in New Moon it’s dripping in honey hued tones and you wonder how on earth the vampires get by in this now sun-kissed clime. Presumably Dr Carlisle’s patients must be dying in droves during New Moon thanks to a string of sick days caused by the persistent appearances of what Gollum referred to as “evil yellow face” in Forks a la Weitz.

And I can only assume that casting Michael Sheen as Aro of the Volturi was more to do with having a credible big name that would look good on the poster than giving the story some dramatic gravitas with a highly respected actor. Now don’t get me wrong, I generally love Michael Sheen’s performances as much as the next film buff but in this outing I suspect he was extracting the urine because Weitz seems not to have noticed he was doing a Tony Blair impersonation. As cameos from high classy acts in low brow movies go, Bill Nighy fared far better with the whole vampire elder routine in Underworld than Sheen does in New Moon.

However in fairness, Weitz’s visual flair does mean that as a whole New Moon looks more like a blockbuster movie than the first film, which with Hardwicke at the wheel more resembled a low budget independent offering. And certainly Weitz seems more at home in serving up the special effects and action scenes but this seems to have come at a cost of the drama. But despite the vampire action looking far better in this outing than the previous one, I am honestly at a loss to explain why the werewolves are still on the ropey side.

Apparently the special effects crew handling the lycanthropes spent a good deal of time studying the real lupines and going on jollies to Wolf Mountain Sanctuary. All of which came as something of surprise as the first appearance of a transformed werewolf is simply ghastly. The CGI in bear in The Wolf Man remake got a great deal of flack, but in comparison to this… this abomination that digital bruin looks nearly convincing. This wolf looks like its bulging in random places and the fur is rippling and changing more than a chameleon crossing a tartan rug – honestly how this passed the grade for the final cut is beyond me.

Admittedly the rest of the wolf effects aren’t nearly as bad, but still you don’t want the audience’s first look at your lead creatures to be so shoddily done. rather than thrilling or frightening, having such a ghastly debut has the effect of destroying any belief in the beasts right from the outset. And while the rest of the movie doesn’t have any shots of werewolves looking like they’ve got the parasites from Cronenberg’s Shivers squirming under their pelts, it appeared to me that throughout the flick their size seemed to vary somewhat; sometimes as big as ponies but at other seemingly more like young rhinos. A minor quibble maybe but firstly I may not have noticed if their first appearance wasn’t so botched and secondly Weitz should really be paying attention to such details.

So then to wrap up, in some regards New Moon is superior to Twilight but only in superficial ways. While it closer to the horror heartlands than its predecessor, exploring and expanding the mythology of the novels, and plays more like a Hollywood popcorn flick than an indie teen angst movie, it still largely failing in the same areas and that is simply that it’s fumbling the dramatics of the central relationships: again it’s a case of the problem not being a watering down of horror tropes but not delivering the emotional punch the romance should have.

And while New Moon expands the sense of the fantastic and takes us further into the secret world of the supernatural; the heart of the film is lost beneath the gloss and flashy tricks. And all the emphasis on the gaudy visuals made me appreciate the first film’s low key atmospherics a whole lot more. Now I can understand why for some viewers this may make this second adaptation superior to the first, however this reviewer much preferred the gothic mood and quiet realism of the first. Ideally I’d have liked to see this move equally weight the supernatural and the emotions, because I still feel that the core story line has a lot of cinematic potential. Perhaps Eclipse can get the balance right…

Don’t forget, you can hear The Black Dog podcast marathon that inspired these articles here

TWIHARD! Part 1 – The Twilight Saga Examined

Currently, the vampire, that glamorous creature of the night, is in rude health; if you are at all interested in genre material or even just an avid consumer of pop culture, at the moment everywhere you turn, you’ll find a bloodsucker or two. Of course their present ubiquity is largely down to the series of novels by Stephenie Meyer, the Twilight Saga.

Now these hugely successful books and the subsequent movie franchise have spawned a massive and rabidly devoted fanbase, boasting numbers that go beyond a mere cult following and can legitimately be called a phenomenon. However not everyone is as enamoured by Meyer’s sparkly vampires and indeed many unaffected by the spell of the Cullens have been very dismissive of the books, films and their devoted fans.

Of course, decrying such a phenomenon, rubbishing the material and poking fun at the fans, is nothing new, particularly if it’s emanating from one of the fantasy-based genres. And much like the Harry Potter whirlwind – arguable the parent phenomenon for Twilight - there’s been no shortage of armchair critics keen to proclaim to the world that it’s a vast morass of badly written tosh and poorly made movies, and that generally getting very, very annoyed that the whole shebang is so popular.

However there’s a key difference in the reaction to the ascendency of Meyer’s creations to JK Rowling’s, and that is while the latter has been mostly defended in geek circles, in the case of the former, usually fantasy-friendly types have waded in, tooled up with critical stakes and hammers, alongside with the mainstream pundits. Indeed that usually staunch ally of the undead, the horror world, has generally sported the same nose wrinkling disdain and disgust one sees when a serious rock fan encounters Justin Bieber, or when the average man in the street steps in what my uncle used to call a ‘dog egg’.

Is this hostility justified? Is the Twilight Saga really something to scrapped off the soles of the sneakers of pop culture? Or is a case of artistic snobbery, that old story that goes if a certain work proves to be insanely popular with the young and/or wins a legion of female fans, then it’s automatically empty, vacuous and fully deserving of the torrents of contempt vomited upon it by the ‘serious’ devotees of the art?

As so often is the case in such critical spats, there’s been a deluge of venom from folk who have never even read the books or seen the films. But to readdress the balance and uphold the honourable maxim of “if you ain’t seen it, you can’t slag it”, the Boys from The Black Dog Podcast, Lee and Darren, those brave explorers of le cinéma merde, decided to chart a course into the shadowed realm of the Twilight movies. Having not seen any of these myself and being a loyal Black Dogger, I couldn’t let our heroes journey into the night alone…

And having watched all three movies produced so far, I discovered I had far more to say than could be encapsulated in the usual piece of audio feedback. So as a companion piece to the Black Dog marathon, here are my results of my own vampire autopsy in full...

The Anatomy of A Vampire

Vampires have been with us for a long time, indeed tales of predatory supernatural beings that drain life or suck blood abound in nearly every culture and stretch back to our earliest legends. And indeed Twilight is not the first time a craze for all things undead has swept the Western world. While many regions have their own tales of vampiric entities, many are somewhat different to the vampire we are familiar with, as you may see here. And it wasn’t until the 18th century, that the vampire as we now know him, became a cross-cultural figure. In the 1720s, many newspapers carried reports of vampire epidemics in Eastern Europe (for example this case) and soon the salons of Europe were a-buzz with discussions of these strange reports. Intellectuals of the day debated the possibility of beings rising from their graves to menace the living; with volumes and treatises with titles such as De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis Liber (‘The Book of The Chewing of the Dead in Their Tombs) appearing, and the likes of Rousseau and Voltaire weighing in on the debate.

But while the titans of the Age of Enlightenment found little in the accounts of vampires to detain them for long, the popular imagination thrilled to the tales of these nocturnal predators and soon the diverse folkloric beings such as the English Revenant, the Teutonic Alp and Irish Dearg-Due were being shuffled into the shade of the vampire umbrella. And it wasn’t too long before the vampire was beginning to appear in art and fiction.

And though it would take another century or so before the fictional vampire would begin to take on all the characteristics we know today – for the undead of folklore are markedly different from their print and screen cousins – the forebears of the Count and his undead brood are clearly recognisable is the first media they appeared in, poetry. And in the context of Twilight it’s worth noting that these vampiric verses, from the early The Vampire by Heinrich August Ossenfelder to the later Bride of Corinth by Goethe, featured a strong romantic angle rather than being poetic tales of terror.

The Vampire's Kiss by Max Ernst

Similarly when the vampire began to appear in dramas and in prose, they were often rising from the grave not just to drain life but to seduce their victims. And it’s not until the 19th century, do these fictional undead start blood sucking, breaking into bedrooms and generally becoming more Satanic than erotic. Indeed the turning point at which the vampire has fully metamorphosed from a fantastic romantic figure into a blood soaked horror is Stoker’s Dracula.

Now the point of this little (un)natural history of the vampire is to demonstrated that far from being a corruption or watering down of an iconic creature of the night, the treatment of vampires in Twilight is actually a return to their earliest fictional appearances. And let’s be frank here, a large proportion of the bile spewed in the direction of Meyer’s creations is down to the fact that many see her romantic focus as being just plain wrong for vampires.

But romance and eroticism has always had a place in vampire fiction, and lest we forget Twilight is next logic step on from two of the more popular recent entries in the undead genre; Edward Cullen is clearly the bastard son of the decadents found in Anne Rice and his tangled relationship with Bella has an obvious precedent in the romance of Buffy and Angel.

Indeed considering how long and strong this vein of romance runs in vampire fiction, I’m frankly amazed something like Twilight that places a relationship with a vampire in the milieu of teenagers, and emphasises love over horror, did not come along decades earlier.

So we can stake this major objection to Meyer’s franchise right here and now and leave it to die screaming in the light of dawn. There’s nothing wrong, heretical or blasphemous about the so called paranormal romance of Twilight - tenderness is as part of the vampire’s fictional make-up as is the Satanic evil of Count Dracula, or the inhuman brutality of Brian Lumley’s Wamphyri.

And with that stumbling block well and truly demolished we can proceed to the film with unprejudiced eyes…

NEXT TIME – Three films, one man, no hope!