Curt Purcell 5 November 2009 Things We Like 578 views 2 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

October has essentially become Halloween Month, with Halloweeny-horror-related merchandising and programming running the full length of it. The effect of this is to make Halloween, the very last night of October, into a grand culmination. Non-horror fans have their yearly opportunity to get a celebration of the macabre out of their system, and horror fans pull out all the stops and leave themselves exhausted.

But Halloween is really only a beginning.  Samhain, as it’s otherwise known, marks summer’s end — a day which ushers in the “dark half” of the year. We must recall that Western horror is rooted mainly in the culture (however bastardized by modern pop-culture through the years) of northern and eastern Europe, where winter falls especially hard. The days are short, chill, and gloomy. The nights are longer, darker, colder. And mysterious footprints appear in enchanting blankets of snow.

Ah, snow. The figure of the werewolf seems to generate spontaneously right out of the stuff. It only makes sense. Food is scarce for everything in winter, and starving creatures with toothy maws and eyes that glow by torchlight might come to the doorsteps of human habitation in desperate search of something to devour. Thus we have wintry werewolf tales like Frederick Marryat’s “White Wolf of the Harz Mountains” and Clemence Housman’s “Were-wolf.” One of my favorite single issues of a horror comic book is “Werewolf by Night” #31’s snowbound story, “Death in White” (currently in print in the second volume of Marvel’s Essential “Werewolf by Night” collection). Contemporary horror author David Wellington’s latest novel at the time of this writing is a werewolf tale called “Frostbite,” with exactly the frosty sort of setting that implies.

One of my favorite cinematic werewolves is “Underworld: Evolution’s” William Corvinus, a white wolfish monster first introduced in a snow-laden prologue. “Underworld: Evolution” also features vampires, of course, and vampire heroine Selene cuts a fine figure against a snowy backdrop on one of the film’s posters. Vampires, it turns out, seem just as suited to the snow as werewolves in our imaginations. Even the odious “Van Helsing” got one thing right — the snowy “Transylvanian” village where much of the vampire and werewolf action takes place.

Whatever one might think of Roman Polanski, his “Fearless Vampire Killers” will probably never be matched as an eye-popping cinematic fable of vampires in a winter wonderland. As with werewolves, we find vampires and snow not only in movies. The Marvel comic “Tomb of Dracula” #19 (collected in the first Essential “Tomb of Dracula” volume) tells the story “Snowbound in Hell!”, while the black-and-white comics magazine “Vampire Tales” #4 adapts the August Derleth vampire story “Drifting Snow.” Marcus Sedgwick’s fine Young Adult novel “My Swordhand Is Singing” is a chilling vampire yarn set in, as he puts it, “winter–with a capital W.” Sedgwick piles the snow just as high in his “Book of Dead Days,” a young adult dark fantasy whose title refers to the period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

And that brings us to the last point I’d like to make. Traditionally, the Christmas season has been the time when, as Jacob Grimm puts it in his Teutonic Mythology (available online and chock full of examples), “the supernatural has sway.” It is during this period that the Wild Hunt rides, that various forms of divination become especially effective, and that restless spirits roam. It’s no accident that many of the most notable ghost stories and weird tales are set at Christmastime, from Charles Dickens’s classic “Christmas Carol” to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s uncanny “Nutcracker and the King of Mice” to M.R. James’s startlingly frightful “Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance.” The HorrorMasters online library has a whole section devoted to classic Christmas horror stories.

So Halloween may be behind us, but the season for horror is only just begun…

- Curt Purcell

author of the NSFW blog Groovy Age of Horror.

See more winter terrors in this Flickr set.