Ken Russel Archives - Bone and Sickle

#24 Possessed Nuns and Holy Demoniacs

By boneandsickle | April 18, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:10 — 37.7MB)

This episode finds the Devil where you’d least expect him: stories of possessed nuns and demonic attacks on the rigorously devout.. It’s a bit of a follow-up to our last episode on Ghastly Saint Stories.

We open with a clip from the 1999 film Stigmata, in which we hear it asserted that those marked by God with the stigmata are also more likely than others to be subject to attacks by Satan. Not a great film, but these types of characters straddling the line between the holy and damned, are our subject of our episode.

Our first case is that of 19th-century South Tyrolean stigmatic Maria Theresia von Mörl. Her reputation for holiness drew tens of thousands of devout visitors, but this holy figure was also beset by by beastly manifestations, which Wilkinson details for us.

Stigmatic Maria von Mörl, subject to demonic attacks.

A more famous 16^th-century personage bearing diabolical stigmata would be Magdalena de la Cruz, abbess of the Franciscan Convent of Santa Isabel de los Angeles outside Cordoba, Spain. We hear of her childhood, characterized by saintly (and gruesome) emulation of the Savior, her alleged miracles, and her early years as abbess, during which she instituted a particularly harsh program of mortification. She seems to have gone a bit far with a particularly presumptious miracle that lost her followers, eventually admitting to bit of a demonic involvement.

We’re getting to the famous possessed nuns of Loudun, France, but first I provide a little background on earlier demonic outbreaks in convents of 17th-century France, which seem to have set the pattern fr Loudun. Along the way, some documents recording curiously animalistic behavior of possessed nuns are briefly explored.

Our Loudun segment opens with a clip from a trailer for Ken Russel’s controversial 1971 film The Devils, which we learn was based on a 1960 play based on a 1952 nonfiction book on the subject by Aldous Huxley. We also hear a snippet from the lovely 1961 Polish film by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Mother Joan of the Angels, which loosely adapts the Loudun story, picking up where Russel and Huxley’s narrative ends. Another Pole who interpreted the story was Christoph Penderecki, who in 1961 wrote the opera The Devils of Loudun. We hear a bit of Penderecki’s music under our account of the Loudun phenomena.

Still from Russel's "The Devils" — Still from Russel’s “The Devils”

The Loudun story primarily revolves around two characters: Jeanne des Anges, Mother Superior of the convent, who becomes obsessed with Father Grandier, a parish priest with a reputation for sexual indiscretions. Des Anges, interprets erotic dreams about the priest as diabolic visitations, a fear that quickly infests the entire convent. Wilkinson reads for us an account of the extraordinary symptoms exhibited by the nuns who believed they’d been possessed. The story does not end well for Grandier, though des Anges, as we learn, goes on reporting more fantastic details of her struggle against Satan, eventually producing a strange but much coveted holy relic.

After our Loudun segment, you’ll hear a clip from the film The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and a bit later, the German film Requiem. Both are based (the former more freely) on the case of Anneliese Michel, a young Bavarian woman, who died in 1976 shortly after a series of exorcisms. We hear a bit about her psychiatric issues, which proved untreatable by conventional means, and the process of minor and later full rites of exorcism the family turned to. I’ve included Michel’s story alongside possessed nuns as Michel’s followed a similarly rigorous spiritual discipline, one which oddly became more aggressive in tandem with the growth of her “demonic” destructive and self-destructive behavior. We learn of Michel’s belief that her suffering under demonic forces served a redemptive role as penance for others and of a small, but devoted following she has drawn among Catholics who believe she was chosen by God as a “victim soul,” a concept we discussed in the last show. We also hear a snippet of disturbing tape recordings made during the exorcism. The show ends with a news story about the house in which these events took place and the strange rumors it engendered.

#20 The Undead Come Courting

By boneandsickle | February 13, 2019

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:36 — 39.0MB)

Vampire mythology first appears in the West in works as early Romantic authors meld themes from folk ballads of resurrected lovers with Balkan folklore of the undead.

Valentine’s Day seemed a fitting occasion for this show’s look at the vampire’s tragically romantic tendency to prey upon those they love.

We begin with a (very seasonal) snippet of one of Ophelia’s “mad songs” from Hamlet, “Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day.” The song speaks of a lover’s clandestine nocturnal visit to a partner’s bedchamber. It represents a class of folk song called “night visit ballads.” A more ghoulish subset of these deals with lovers who happen to be dead, or undead actually.

We hear two sample songs of revenant lovers from the 16th-17th century: “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” (referencing “cold corpsey lips”) and “The Suffolk Miracle,” which bears comparison to the German poem “Lenore,” much beloved by the Romantics and Gothics, and mentioned in Dracula as discussed in Episode One.

Next we discuss the “Vampire Panic” that took place in Serbia in the 1720s-30s. We hear of Petar Blagojević, who was said to have been exhumed and found incorrupt with fresh blood at his mouth and flowing from his heart once properly staked. We hear of a similar case involving the foot soldier Arnold Paole, whose staking produced more disturbing results and whose alleged vampiric deeds led to two distinct waves of panic.

Illustration (colorized) from 18th century vampire panics in Balkans.

We learn how these reports were assimilated by the literary world, with an early example being German poet Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s 1734 poem “Der Vampir.” Then we look at a more nuanced suggestion of vampirism in Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth,” a poem based on a classical account of revenant lovemaking, the story of Machates and the undead Philinnion.

Next we have a look at two other important early uses of the vampire motif in literature — two Orientalist poems — Thalaba by Robert Southey and Lord Byron’s The Giaour. Both reference Balkan folklore and superstition, and footnotes to Southey’s work include a lengthy narrative of an absurd and gruesome vampire panic on the Greek island of Mykonos in 1701. Wilkinson reads prettily from this account. Along the way, we have a look at Greek vampires in Val Lewton’s moody 1945 film Isle of the Dead starring Boris Karloff.

Byron’s contribution to Gothic literature (as host to Mary Shelley during her early writing of Frankenstein) is illustrated with another snippet from Ken Russel’s cinematic work, his 1986 film Gothic. More central to our theme, however, is The Vamyre by John Polidori, Byron’s personal physician who also shared in the evenings of ghost stories that inspired Shelley.

We learn how The Vampyre grew out of Byron’s The Giaour, of the influence its vampiric character exerted on Stoker’s Dracula, and of the unlikely spin-offs the story generated.

Polidori's "Vampyre" misattributed to Byron in first printing. — Polidori’s “Vampyre” misattributed to Byron in first printing.

Then we have a look at Tolstoy’s lesset known 1839 vampire novella The Family of the Vourdalak and its treatment in Mario Bava’s 1963 horror anthology Black Sabbath, also featuring Boris Karloff.

Tolstoy’s story also happens to be set in Serbia, bringing us back to the country’s long history of vampirism, the famous Serbian Vampire Sava Savanović, and the bizaare 1973 Yugoslavian film featuring Savanović, Leptirica.

We close with a strange story of the the Serbian undead from the year 2012. A musical setting is provided.