Burying the dead

On 30 October 2011 I went to a workshop in Yiddish song. Apart from one young man in a yarmulke (his pregnant wife was also there, and their young child), I was the only man. The teacher was Hilda Bronstein: we were upstairs in the usual Sunday-morning-dingy pub. We sang: ‘A Malekh Veynt’, ‘Lomir Ale Zingen’, ‘Shoyn Avek der Nekhtn’, ‘Dona Dona’, and ‘Zol Shoyn Kumen Di Geule’: this song is about longing for ‘geule’, or redemption, and even to sing it will hasten the coming of Meshiakh. Afterwards, cycling home, I felt that something had been done. Later that day I heard Mahler’s Seventh, cond. Bernstein: my favourite among his symphonies. I saw Trick ’R Treat (2007): the horror – or rather, the moral frisson – comes from the switching between innocence and guilt, and between the uncertainty as to whether the action is a play (the Halloween festivities, in which everyone dresses up) or a reality. The hoax played against the nerdy girl Rhonda backfires when the children from the ‘school bus massacre’ turn out to be still ‘alive’. (The theme here is: playing dead.) Someone can be attacked and her blood-spattered body left propped against a wall in full public view because everyone is in similar gruesome disguises, there are other (drunk and drowsy) bodies propped up against the same wall, and so on.

On Monday 31 October: The Evil Dead (1981). Roots grasp: bodies erupt from below. Most vulnerable are legs and feet: you are essentially dragged down. The horror itself is a little corny: you jump in all the right places, but the spine does not tingle. However, the beginning and end of the film – something (the camera) moving with deadly intent, very fast, along the ground, darting hither and there, seeking its prey – is very effective: you are the horror, or are being swept along with it.

On the previous night, a little apathetic about All Saints, I had watched The House on Haunted Hill (1959). The exterior shots of the house are in fact of Ennis House in L.A., designed by Frank Lloyd Wright: textile blocks, with relief ornamentation, in the Mayan Revival style, based on similar features on the temple at Uxmal, in the Yucatán. (The house has also been used in other films, for example Blade Runner, as well as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

Although human sacrifice was less common among the Maya than among the Incas, it was nonetheless practised - for example at the inauguration of a temple. Ennis House is already sinister: it looks like a place in which strange rituals are performed. The fact that its architectural style is an anachronistic transposition is less relevant than the way it revives an ancient civilization associated with human sacrifice.

The horror of the film is based on the interplay between the pool of acid on the one hand, which dissolves all flesh but still leaves the skeleton, and the angularity of doors, windows, and corridors, which are often muffled or covered by soft drapes. The uncanny is figured by floating – figures float across the scene, or hover outside a window, or (in the case of Annabelle, who has apparently committed suicide) are left hanging.

I also went to see V.T. in the House of Healing: frail but bright. Her daughter D. was there: we chatted about the Lea Valley, my radiotherapy, 'Just A Minute'. In the library at Respublica Regalis I read some of Yeats's 'The Tower' poems. Curious: I read all his poetry when I was 18: it has been a long hiatus. I especially read - a yearly ritual - 'All Souls' Night', understanding it more than usual, in the quiet, overheated library with its thick shabby carpets, its odd busts (Napoleon), its air of cramped desuetude. Then, in Maria Minore, for the requiem: there was a black cloth behind the altar (itself draped in purple), and the small choir sang, uncertainly, from the Victoria 'Missa pro defunctis'. But the priest, coming from London, was late, and we sat in silence, waiting. (I was probably the youngest person in the sparse congregation.) When he arrived he hurried up the aisle clutching a briefcase, like a businessman hurrying for a train. He eventually emerged in fine robes of black and gold: but his address was banal and half-hearted, warmed-up platitudes delivered with an apologetic smile. I left shortly after the Peace, thinking it was better to leave the dead to bury the dead.