Red Spirit Lake. Charles Pinion, 1993.
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Edition screened: Saturn’s Core Blu-ray, released 2022. English language. Runtime approximately 69 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals. 02.5/5❤
The Saturn’s Core BD also includes Pinion’s We Await (1996).
Towers of Silence. Jamil Dehlavi, 1975.
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Edition screened: Included in Severin Blu-ray box set All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Volume 2, released 2024. Urdu language. Runtime approximately 54 minutes.
Summary: Shooting of a dog.
Details:
1) We watch a sea turtle crawl to the beach and lay her eggs. A boy digs up her eggs and crushes one in his hand at 29:30.
2) The boy has various containers of small insects including a large fly in a cage with cork top and bottom. He puts the cage in a sink of water at 29:30; the cage floats as the fly scrambles. No resolution.
3) A small white dog (allegedly rabid) is shot. We see the dog roll and squeal 32:00-32:15, and return for a close up of its panting face while dying, 32:35-32:41.
4) The boy carries the dead dog to an area filled with animal carcasses and vultures, 34:27-36:23.
5) Quick shot of a large black dog dead on the beach, 39:04.
Towers of Silence accompanies Dehlavi’s Born of Fire in the Sevrin set.
Qâf: The Sacred Mountain. Jamil Dehlavi, 1985.
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Edition screened: Included in Severin Blu-ray box set All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Volume 2, released 2024. Scored. Runtime approximately 27 minutes.
Summary: No animals or references to animals in the film.
Made during the shooting of Born of Fire, Qâf is twenty-seven beautiful minutes of lava flowing from an erupting volcano, set to music by Tangerine Dream.
Who Fears the Devil (The Legend of Hillbilly John). John Newland, 1973.
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Edition screened: Included in Severin Blu-ray box set All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Volume 2, released 2024. English language. Runtime approximately 98 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.
Who Fears the Devil is a distillation of three stories by American author Manly Wade Wellman. Folk singer Hedge Capers portrays the unifying character, Hillbilly John, who uses a guitar with pure silver strings to battle various incarnations of evil in the Appalachian mountains.
The Severin release includes several commentaries to the film and an especially good discussion with occult historian Mitch Horowitz who contextualizes Wellman’s stories within the hoodoo belief system and introduces the abundance of books and novelty items available in the 19th and early 20th centuries for practitioners of hoodoo.
Demon Pond (Yashagaike). Masahiro Shinoda, 1979.
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Edition screened: Criterion Blu-ray #1237, released 2024. Japanese language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 124 minutes.
Summary: Early in the film a large carp gasps and struggles in shallow mud. The fish is picked up and handled for a minute, then escapes back into the pond with no apparent injury or harm.
An excellent and recommended film.
Total Pixel Space. Jacob Adler, 2024.
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Edition screened: Watched online. English language. Runtime approximately 9 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.
A short film that reminded me how simple a wonderful thing can be and what the word wonderful means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpAeygE4d1A&t=1s
The Enchanted. Carter Lord, 1984.
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Edition screened: Included in Severin Blu-ray box set All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Volume 2, released 2024. English language. Runtime approximately 90 minutes.
Summary:
The film includes several quick scenes of calves and dogs depicted as dying just after being attacked by a predator. Despite these realistic depictions the director conveys a prevailing care for animals, not just in these scenes but also in the film’s enveloping world view.
Each just-attacked animal is shown lying on its side with the appearance of a bloody wound at its throat. The animals clearly are breathing and panting, presumably tranquilized and cosmetically treated with theatrical effects. Tranquilizing animals for film production is not to be applauded, but the decision and effort to do so in an era when it was common simply to kill the animals is laudable.
The chicken and quails probably were killed, evidence of our lingering stratification of animals perceived as food or not.
The film is set in the Florida everglades and features portentous closeups of woodland animals. Owls, snakes, and squirrels watch the story unfold in montages that make them omniscient audience, jury, and innocents to all they survey. A kitten appears late in the film. She provides an excellent performance in her important role and is not threatened or harmed.
Details:
1) Several quail are shot by a hunter and fall into the brush, 2:05-2:11. The scene is in the style of stock footage and includes no closeups or details.
2) A dead fish is pulled from the river and the hook disengaged, 4:49-5:10.
3) Depiction of a dead calf with a bloody neck wound, as described above, 32:46-32:58.
4) A calf is attacked and killed, 53:18-53:25.
5) A man presents the body of a chicken just decapitated off-screen, 1:04:53, and we see the chicken’s body lying on the floor at 1:05:14.
6) Another dead calf with bloody neck wound, 1:05:54-1:05:57.
7) Dead hunting dogs, depicted in the same way as the calves, 1:11:35-1:11:55.
8) Men shoot at a black wolf, 1:18:19, and we see the dying wolf (also visibly panting) 1:18:44-1:19:00.
The BD also includes Lord’s 1973 short film Swimmer.
We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea. Sean Hogan, 2017.
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Edition screened: Included in Severin Blu-ray box set All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Volume 2, released 2024. English language. Runtime approximately 22 minutes.
Summary: No animals in the film.
A very good tale of holiday haunting in the tradition of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas.
Anchoress. Chris Newby, 1993.
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Edition screened: Included with A Field in England (Disc 11) in Severin Blu-ray box set All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror, released 2021. English language. Runtime approximately 108 minutes.
Summary: A woman cleans a chicken carcass during dialogue 1:14:07 - 1:14:19, and again 1:15:12 - 1:15:30. The camera’s focus is not on this action but we do see her reach inside the chicken and remove entrails.
Despite that, Anchoress is a visually rewarding and philosophically affirming viewing experience, reminiscent of November and Marketa Lazarová.
Eno. Gary Hustwit, 2024.
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English language. Runtime approximately 85 minutes.
Summary: Eno considers killing a fly.
A friend provides these comments at Letterboxd. Check their other content also!
A wonderful anti-auteur, non-linear music journal (the word “bio” is false here because it implies someone else is telling the story. Rather, here, the software is randomly selecting files from a database, which can be added to at anytime—even after the film has been aired). This is the first ever generative film with millions of possible variations making it different every time you see it.
But the generative mode of the film is but a complement to Eno themself who embodies the philosophy the film speaks to. Their emphasis on integration and surrender; the way they incorporate and are inspired by nature; their reframing of genius to scenius; and how they approach art as a fluid movement across a spectrum rather than remaining in fixed points; and even their equalising idea of suggesting that beyond all individual artistic conceptions, at the basis, all art is merely trying to convey emotion (similar to Deleuze’s affect theory); all this serves to show Brian Eno as one of the greatest living artistic minds and surely the first ever posthuman musician. Such an enjoyable experience. Every artist should see this!
(The one flaw was Eno wanting to kill a fly and so their symbiotic ideas of co-existence apparently falls short of including other animals. Eco, but still speciesist. Thus, eco Eno still has ego.)
The Boxer’s Omen (Mo). Kuei Chih-hung, 1983.
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Edition screened: Included in the Arrow Blu-ray box set Shawscope: Volume Two, released 2022. Mandarin language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 105 minutes.
Summary: Ritualistic killing and torture of two chickens.
Details: Two psychic battles between a boxer-turned-monk and practitioners of Black Magic consume over half of this film’s runtime. In the first battle, the evil sorcerer performs outrageous rituals in his (lab?, game room?) decorated like the waiting area for the scary show at an amusement park. The monk sits calmly in a temple and counters his attacks. The second battle is rooted in arcane Thai magic, alluringly psychedelic rather than spooky in the traditional Chinese or Japanese taste. Both sequences rely on the mystical power of stop-action claymation.
Although the evil magicians’ spells hinge primarily on the persecution of rubber animals, two live chickens also are cruelly victimized. The killing of these chickens compromise what otherwise would be a uniquely entertaining film.
1) From 16:32 through 18:25, a silly rubber bat is repeatedly killed and resurrected. The final minute of that sequence includes a real black rat which the sorcerer repeatedly pretends to bite into and spits simulated rodent blood on various Halloween decorations from aisle #2 in Home Depot.
2) This scene of ritual conjuring continues to include real vipers having their venom ‘milked’ (ick) into a glass container, through 24:22. The snakes do not appear to be particularly annoyed or even interested in the fact that rubber spiders are then supercharged with their venom.
3) A live rooster is decapitated and his blood thrown around to generate more evil rubber bats, 43:17-44:10.
4) A real crocodile is provoked with a weapon, then a rubber prop is used for the ensuing scene in which the fake crocodile is eviscerated and used as a resurrection coffin for a female demon, 58:10-59:27.
5) A live chicken’s protruding anus is sliced off and eaten family-style as part of the demon resurrection ritual, 1:03:41-1:04:15.
Clearcut. Ryszard Bugajski, 1991.
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Edition screened: Included in Severin Blu-ray box set All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror, released 2021. English language. Runtime approximately 98 minutes.
Summary: Ritual and hunting violence.
Details:
1) A Native American calmly bites the head off of a small living snake and spits it out, 30:04-30:11.
2) A fish in a stream is speared with a pointed branch and pulled from the water, 48:28-48:43.
3) Lunk-head hunters can’t find the poor moose they’ve shot through the neck, but we see the animal lying in agony, 54:04-54:12.
4) A small spider is eaten alive, 54:45-54:50.
The Clearcut BD in the Severin box set also includes:
The Ballad of Crowfoot (1968 Willie Dunn)
You Are On Indian Land (1969 Michael Mitchell)
Consume (2017 Brunello Baino)