Here Be Dragons

Prefer to listen to this post?

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

So begins the Middle English General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales where Geoffrey Chaucer praises the sweet spring rains and the flowers they bring. Whether you consider this collection of stories to be the birth of modern English literature or the death of your will to live in fourth-period high school English 101, it is a quintessential window into the world of medieval Europe. 

What you may not know is that it is also the template for the opening of one of the darkest, I’d say even horrific, poems of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from 1922. You’ve probably heard its opening line “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land …” This is Eliot in the aftermath of World War I and the great influenza pandemic of 1918 reminding us that spring showers also stir up the ground, awakening memories — and things — that might be better left under winter’s numb blanket. It’s easier for a revenant corpse to crawl out of wet earth.

As in The Waste Land the medieval world has informed, colored, and often frightened the present. We love our tales of wizards, dragons, potions, quests, and dungeons. Poems, novels, stageplays, musicals, role-playing games (hey Dungeons & Dragons and Dark Tower!): nearly every modern art form mines the rich ore of the Middle Ages. And cinema is no different, of course. But what about horror cinema, dark cinema? Friends, like pilgrims telling tales on our way to Canterbury, we travel today to a segment called Here Be Dragons.

Medieval and darkness go hand-in-hand. We used to call it The Dark Ages (and many non-historians still do) to distinguish the period from the supposedly gleaming classical world of ancient Greece and Rome and to make ourselves feel good about our supposedly rational, industrialized modern era. This attitude largely came about during the European Renaissance with the widespread rediscovery of the texts of classical antiquity. In the best case, “dark” refers to the relative legitimate lack of historical records during long periods of the 5th through 10th centuries.  But mostly it was arrogance: it’s tough to believe you live in an age of enlightenment if you don’t characterize what came before as darkness. Looking at you, Voltaire. Glancing at you, Thomas Jefferson. 

The truth is, the medieval period in Europe was anything but dark. It saw the invention of the modern calendar, movable type and the printing press, non-load bearing monumental architecture and stained glass, the modern university, paper money, coffee houses, water and wind mills, illuminated manuscripts (the world’s first multimedia!), all manner of scientific gadgets, the Magna Carta, and Dante’s Divine Comedy — to pick only a few of its brightest spots. 

But we’re here to talk about scary things, are we not, terror pilgrims? 

Probably the first monsters in a language that would become English come from the epic poem Beowulf, written at the end of the 10th century. Grendel and his even meaner mother are descendants of the biblical Cain (the “first murderer”) and the main baddies — along with a dragon — in Beowulf. It’s a simple story, really. Grendel just doesn’t like fun and merriment. If you’re a Germanic warrior laughing it up with your buddies in the mead hall after a long day on the moors, Grendel is coming to devour you. Beowulf of course has other ideas, killing Grendel with his bare hands, Grendel’s mama with a sword, and the dragon with the help of his buddy. Then Beowulf dies and is immortalized in a poem that would terrorize even more high school students than The Canterbury Tales — and inspire at least eight mediocre films, none of them true horror.

Monsters — especially dragons — figure prominently in the medieval world. As does magic. Both in some ways are methods of dealing with the unknown or the unknowable. Can’t understand the reason all your crops died? A magical curse might explain it. Afraid of the dark reaches of that forest over there? Probably ogres. Have an unexplored area of the vast sea and no real knowledge of what’s there? Just label it hic sunt dracones (“Here be dragons”) because, let’s face it, there are probably dragons there. This preoccupation with the supernatural is the very basis of fantasy, the bedfellow genre of science fiction and horror. But with the scientific method several centuries away — and the notion of fiction itself somewhat foreign to the medieval mind (history and myth were tough to disentangle) — what we mostly take from the Middle Ages is this sense of the fantastic and hoo boy it is often very dark.

There was nothing darker than the big black ink splot that spread out in all map directions from a lake in northeast modern-day Kyrgyzstan. This was The Black Death. Between 1347 and 1351 this pandemic killed nearly 200 million people in Eurasia, leaving putrid swollen corpses stacked like cord wood as far as the eye could see, emptying out towns so completely in some cases they were only rediscovered with the advent of aerial reconnaissance during World War I. “Bring out your dead” indeed!

Let’s break down how this killer worked. First there’s the Black Rat, Rattus rattus. These suckers were virile: two black rats mating pretty much continuously for three years could produce three million offspring. They could climb nearly vertical surfaces, survive a fall of five stories, and enter openings a mere ¼” wide. And their jaws could cut through lead. OK gross, but who cares? 

Well we care because these rats had fleas, specifically the Rat Flea, Xenopsylla cheopis. This small terror could live for a month even without a host on almost any surface and could jump a 18”. OK gross, but who cares?

We care because these fleas carried the real devilry: the Yersinia pestis bacterium, the actual murderer of 200 million people. This plague bacteria would multiply so ferociously inside fleas’ guts that it would block the digestive tract, hindering a flea’s ability to ingest a meal. Which meant that the dumb flea would just keep biting its target over and over again, regurgitating more bacteria into its host. Yersinia pestis attacks the human lymphatic system, the very castle walls our bodies have built against invading pathogens. But that was just an irony. Victims of the Black Death rarely lived long enough for a secondary infection to finish them off. 

Of course, none of this was known in the medieval world. Germ theory did not exist and antibiotics were 600 years in the future.

This triple cheeseburger of death — rat, flea, and bacterium — traveled by over-land trade networks and via advancing armies in the more-than-normally bellicose 14th century. But mostly it traveled by boats plying the Mediterranean and disastrously entering ports like Marseille and Venice. Venice, interestingly, tried to get ahead of the threat by immediately torching ships suspected of carrying plague-infested passengers (not rats — remember they did not know this was the actual payload). Less drastically they would isolate ships and crew for 40 days — or quaranta giorni — which is where we get the modern English word “quarantine”.

So what would actually happen to if you were infected by the black plague? Pretty rapidly you’d develop a stigmata of purple-black swelling in your armpits and the groin (called “bubos” from which we get the term “bubonic” plague). Your lymph nodes would grow so large as to permanently disfigure you, if you somehow survived the infection. (But you’re not gonna survive.) Often the swollen nodes would explode, spewing infected fluid all over. Your last hours would be characterized by bloody vomit, high fever, delirium — an agonizing death. Even before death, infected people would often smell of internal gangrene as their organs started to decay from within. Entire families and neighborhoods would be wiped out in days. And that was the least bad of the three variants of this disease.

Trenches called plague pits were just stacked with corpses until full, then covered with a thin layer of dirt. Heavy rains would often unearth the bodies which would then be feasted upon by rats and dogs, further spreading the bacteria. April really was the cruelest month.

There was no actual way to treat this infection, but people sure tried. Often “doctors” would lance the buboes, draining them, then mixing herbs and human excrement into the wound. This ended poorly in nearly every case. Some sought clean air (believing the disease was airborne). Others went the other route, seeking very noxious air. People would just stick their heads into poop-smeared latrines and fill their lungs. Other supposed cures: drinking non-plague urine, ingesting crushed sapphires, qnd applying flame directly to the skin. This last one — not a ridiculous idea as fleas do not like fire, but there’s the whole burning your own skin thing. And about those plague doctors. The bird-beaked medieval hazmat suits were actually very clever. The thick leather did protect from the fleas and the beaks were filled with herbs and flowers to block the stench of decay. But the doctors saved no one and came to be seen merely as symbols of death. They were often the very last thing a stricken person saw.

Then there were the religious “treatments”. Those who saw the plague as divine retribution for humanity’s sins would parade through the street as flagellants, whipping themselves with ropes studded with hooks. This bloody penance for the pestilence only served as a transmission vector for the disease, of course. You could almost follow the blood-streaked roads that the flagellants marched along to trace the spread of the disease, house to house.

As a sidenote: Poland has the distinction of doing comparatively well during the plague years, mostly because of the institution of an extreme quarantine known as — here’s a great word for you — immurement, literally live entombment — basically bricking someone in, often in their own house, until they died or were clear of the disease. (But also there’s a theory that Poland’s abundance of cats did a number on the bacterium-bearing rats.)

I guess what I’m saying here is, Covid was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. At least we had horror movies to watch during our recent pandemic. 

Pilgrims, let’s stop for a moment to rest our beasts of burden, maybe dismount to hoist a flagon of ale, and let me tell you about a few medievally-inspired horror films. 

Fans of this show may remember Ken’s birthday pick a few months back, Tombs of the Blind Dead. You really can’t go wrong with this one. Featuring truly scary blind zombie Knights Templar who crawl out their crypts when the sun sets, this 1972 film by Amando de Ossorio (whose last name means alternately “container of bones” or “wolf-hunter” — how badass is that?) is an excellent introduction to the use of medieval setting and lore for a straight-up fright fest. It’s set in the present day with flashbacks to the medieval setting, but the graveyard most of this takes place in might as well be the 14th century.

Let’s go back a little further. 1964 gave us The Masque of the Red Death  and The Long Hair of Death, both castle-based costume pieces with very dark themes. The Masque of the Red Death, part of Roger Corman’s octology based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, features Vincent Price at his most effetely diabolical. Price is Prince Prospero, just a real asshole lord of a castle seemingly immune to the “red death” plague ravaging the countryside. This immunity has been won via a pact with Satan, however. It’s a theme we’ll see again in medieval horror: witchcraft as the only effective deterrent to plague. There are many highlights in this film including a shocking courtly jest that involves dressing a man up as an ape, hoisting him above the masque’d revelers, and burning him alive. WTF Roger Corman? But mainly it’s the spooky personifications of various forms of death, each with its own color, that stand out. Red of course for the immediate plague. Our flea-borne friend black is there, but so is white for Tuberculosis, yellow for Yellow Fever, orange for Scurvy and so on. As the Man in Red tells Prospero near his end, death fears neither God nor Satan. It just is. (As a sidenote, the Poe short story this movie is based on was recently the framework for an episode of Mike Flanagan’s Fall of the House of Usher. It is, in my opinion, one of the best and possibly the goriest. Red death comes to an illegal rave inside an abandoned factory.)

The Long Hair of Death, while not as philosophical as The Masque of the Red Death, makes up for it in Disneyland-esque medieval set design. It features horror icon Barbara Steele as the daughter of a witch burned at the stake; she too is killed by being dumped off a cliff and returns to exact revenge. Classic gothic horror, appropriately in black-and-white. The problem with this movie is that its pacing is as slow as combing through all that long hair of death. 100 minutes is too many minutes of mostly creeping around a castle watching others creep around a castle. Also, somehow I watched a Spanish dub of this Italian film and, while the languages are similar (and of course I had sub-titles turned on), it still was strangely off-putting.

Fast forward to 1992 and Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness. Say what you will about the weird narrative evolution of the first three Evil Dead movies, you cannot say Raimi aimed low with this one. Except maybe in tone, but then slapstick was woven throughout all the originals. As a plot refresher, the movie picks up directly at the end of Evil Dead II where Ash is somehow whisked from the haunted cabin in the woods back in time to the 14th century with his chainsaw, shotgun, and Oldsmobile. He’s immediately captured, believed to be some sort of warlock and taken inside the castle walls. Instead of the plague being kept at bay outside the castle walls we have the deadites from the first two films. (Yep it’s the ol’ zombies-as-disease metonymy. Classic!)  Ash has to retrieve the Necromicon to get back to the present and ends up accidentally summoning an entire army of … darkness. The thing about Army of Darkness is the line it rides between farce and horror, which really is the line ridden by many treatments of the Middle Ages. We laugh at the peoples of the medieval world as dirt-caked idiots or as festooned jesters loping around a court of half-drunk hangers-on. There’s a reason Monty Python and the Holy Grail was so effortlessly funny. Now add Jason and the Argonauts-style skeleton battles. Sounds like an Evil Dead film doesn’t it?

We come now to the actual Black Death … or at least a movie from 2010 called Black Death. Starring Sean Bean, this is the story of a quest to find a village supposedly immune from the plague. Bean plays a Christian soldier sent by the local bishop to bring back the necromancer who is assumed to have made a pact with the devil to secure the village’s immunity. He enlists the help of a young monk who knows the area and who joins the quest secretly looking for his lover. (Monks have needs too!) This is a surprisingly good movie, touching on themes that must have been top of mind to people surrounded by death 700 years ago: What is god in an age of plague? For that matter what is belief in anything? Though it isn’t called out as such — and wouldn’t be proposed for 300 years — what’s really at the center of this film is Pascal’s Wager, the decision theory that plots the existence of god on one axis and belief/disbelief on the other. There are only four outcomes:

1. You believe in a god who does not exist. No problem.
2. You believe in a god who does exist. Win!
3. You do not believe in a god who does not exist. No problem.
4. You do not believe in a god who does exist. Uh oh!

There’s only one scenario where you’re truly screwed and this film hinges on that. Plus, spoiler, you get to see Sean Bean drawn-and-quartered on screen. Worth it for that alone!

You know who else comes from the Middle Ages? Our favorite child abductee-turned-impaler-turned-vampire Vlad Dracula! And while most of the hundreds of treatments of Dracula are a mish-mash of semi- or non-historical fabulation, Dracula Untold from 2014 at least attempts to situate the myth in the original medieval history that nursed it. Here we have Vlad, the good-hearted ruler of the vassal state of Wallachia. But he’s up against the Ottoman empire and that’s … a lot. Luckily he’s recently met an ancient vampire in a cave and agrees to be turned and given all the powers that come with that, freeing the old demon in the process. There’s some liberty taken here with received vampire lore (if you don’t drink blood for three days after turning you will revert to your human form — huh?) and a lot of liberty taken with actual history (Vlad did not kill the sultan Mehmed II). But this was a fun flick. More action/adventure than pure horror, but good gore, spooky settings, and some clever touches involving the use of silver. Dracula Untold was intended to retroactively kick off Universal’s interconnected Dark Universe but this was all shelved when Tom Cruise’s The Mummy tanked. (Lesson: don’t put mega-celebrities in horror movies.)

In the end we return to monsters, as close to the themes of Beowulf as I have seen in film. The Head Hunter from 2018 is basically a one-man show of decapitation and alchemy. A warrior who is basically a Viking Nick Offerman lives in a cabin in the woods, mourning the death of his daughter at the hands of a hideous beast, all the while continuing his job as a bounty hunter for the local village. When the horn sounds in town that means it’s time for this guy to trot off to behead another creature. It helps that he has a goopy mixture that heals his wounds somewhat magically. This film starts slow — none of the beheading kills are on-camera, though you see his cabin slowly become a bestial museum of taxidermied heads. And then the monster who murdered his daughter returns and things get good. There’s a super dark twist that rather shocked me out of my brain. Then again, if I were actively thinking of Beowulf while watching this maybe I would not have been as shocked. The Middle Ages, man, they sure were dark.

OK, pilgrims, this is where I leave you. Keep telling your tales. Never stop that really. It’s what separates us humans from beasts. Canterbury is just a couple dozen leagues that-a-way. Give St. Thomas my best. And see you next time on the Terror Tourist!

---

A full list of the movies mentioned above can be found at Letterboxd. Find out where to watch there.

The Terror Tourist is my occasional segment on the Heavy Leather Horror Show, a weekly podcast about all things horror out of Salem, Massachusetts. These segments are also available as an email newsletter. Sign up here, if interested. Here’s the episode containing “Here Be Dragons”: