Snow | Fiction | There's Something Nasty Lurking In The Glacier

People flee into snowy places. There’s no other reason to venture there. That seems to be our main literary thesis. Frankenstein’s monster, Frankenstein himself, and Robert Walton are all running away to the wastes of the North Pole (the Creature himself, of course, finds a smaller, less well-fortified wilderness earlier in the book in the Alps) but the latter two both convince themselves falsely that they’re not fleeing so much as chasing something.

The other obvious association is that snowy places are dwelling-places for the uncanny. Frankenstein is an amusing exception to the rule, because while our first suspicion during Walton’s framing device is that something weird lurks in the fog and the ice, the Creature actually originates from a seat of learning and culture in the midst of European civilised society. For most of our uncanny literature, though, that theme is played straight. Consider the presence of ice and snow in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' as the gateway to the otherworld, the natural torment that leads to unnatural torments. In one sense, this is simply practical; the snowy landscape is, as should be made clear by the number of Stephen King novels set there and the number of B-movies and B-novels in which an alien craft crashes there, a perfectly isolated and frightening setting for horror. But consider the way the uncanny seeps into otherwise realistic thrillers as soon as they venture into the snow-filled wilds – Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, for example, or Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights (and for those of you keeping track of just how ridiculous a piece of literary genre fiction can get while still being acclaimed – SPOILERS -, that’s one count of ‘alien parasite inside a fallen meteorite’ and one count of ‘talking apes at a Soviet research facility.)


All of this intrigues me in part because of the upcoming movie version of Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness – for my money, the best story by old H.P., which is going to be made by James Cameron and Guillermo del Toro and has, therefore, both the most suitable and utterly unsuitable team behind it that anyone could hope for. Suitable because both of them know how to make damn good, memorable sets, and you think they’d be able to capture the weirdness of an ice-filled land effectively. Unsuitable because…both of them really, really like monsters, and they like to try and capture those monsters visually, which is the wrong approach for any Lovecraftian tale and especially for Mountains, which barely contains any visual monstrosities at all, especially not living. The horror has to come from the alien purity of the snow itself, the twisted reflections of the ice, the white fog that conceals the world around you, the empty flats and the bottomless crevasses. (All right, and the penguins. The horror partly comes from the penguins.)

The black pit! The carven ring...the proto-Shoggoths, the windowless solids with five dimensions!

No, if an adaptation of Mountains is going to work, it requires the spirit of my favourite cryptid – certainly the one with the best name – Am Fear Liath Mor, the Gaelic term for the sense of unease experienced by lonely climbers in harsh mountains; the belief that one is being followed by an unseen presence, or even the flitting glimpse of a humanoid figure. Fear Liath has been, very obviously, connected with the legend of the yeti, and it’s been attributed to loneliness, exhaustion, the effects of high altitude or low temperatures, or the reflection of sunlight off snow or low-lying mist.


It could, conceivably, be an explanation for the fascinating Dyatlov Pass Incident from the late 50s, when nine skiers in the Ural Mountains were discovered to have torn themselves forcibly out of their tent in the middle of the night, as if in a sudden panic, and ran out into the woods in their underclothes. They scattered into the trees, refusing for some unknown reason to return to the shelter of their tent, until eventually they died from the cold. No footprints were found other than theirs. Chilling details began to emerge later, such as that one of the women had had her tongue removed, and that several of the men were heavily bruised, as if they’d been struck by an unknown force. There were plenty of obvious explanations – small carnivores are plentiful, the men could have tripped and injured themselves – but it remains one of the 20th century’s most genuinely intriguing real-life cases of the uncanny.

The slashed tent.

This, perhaps, is snow’s appropriateness for horror – a landscape designed as if by nature to confuse and unsettle us, playing sensual tricks on us, distorting our perceptions, in much the same way that dilapidated old ‘haunted houses’ sometimes have carbon monoxide leaks. A natural world that appears very much to be unnatural, the sense that we are not alone in the loneliest of places. The horrid state of mind, in fact, that connects the Ancient Mariner with Frankenstein, encapsulated by the lines which purportedly caused Percy Shelley to faint in utter terror;


“Like one, that on a lonesome road


Doth walk in fear and dread,


And having once turned round walks on,


And turns no more his head;


Because he knows, a frightful fiend


Doth close behind him tread.”


A very happy Christmas to you all.


Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Wider Reading | Brotherhood of the Wolf

Mainstream French cinema, in my admittedly limited experience, isn’t fun. No, no – put that turkey baster away and let me explain. Truffaut isn’t fun. Godard isn’t fun. Manon de Sources isn’t fun. Au Revoir Les Enfants isn’t fun. Last Year at Marienbad isn’t fun. Amelie isn’t fun, but that’s because it’s cloying dreck. Haute Tension was neither clever nor fun. These films can be thoroughly engaging, brilliant, comedic, heart-warming, soul-destroying, even entertaining in a variety of off-kilter ways…but fun? I mean, even to start to think about ‘fun’, you’d have to go to the period stuff – Ridicule, Le Bossu, Cyrano de Bergerac…and even those have a restraining stateliness to them.



You’re almost certainly screaming abuse at me, specifically concerning my obvious lack of in-depth knowledge and my sweeping generalisations about a field I clearly don’t understand. But, fortunately, it’s the Internet and I can’t hear you, so I’m going to talk about werewolf mythology.

Pictured: History.

It was always werewolves for me. Partly because vampires, when I was growing up, had managed a few feeble struggles towards dignity in the form of Near Dark and The Lost Boys, but were now hopelessly uncool, still years before they’d be dragged out onto the stage, Susan Boyle-like, and forced to participate in teenage romances. Whereas werewolves had never been cool. But it was also because…well…what are vampires supposed to represent, exactly? MumblemumblesomethingaboutsexSTDsmumblemumble. Werewolves, to the childish mind, were very simple; inside every man there is a beast. I could understand that.

And the Beast of Gevaudan, to fans of relatively modern werewolf myths, is a sheer delight of history. A strange, wolf-like beast (or possibly several) terrorised a stretch of rural France for three years in the 18th century, tearing out peasants’ throats. It was finally shot – as later romantics claimed, with a silver bullet – by a suspicious fellow by the name of Jean Chastel, who’s been accused ever since of having actually been the creature’s master, even by that bastion of fact against superstition, the History Channel, which concluded that the Beast may have been an Asian hyena. Right…


Le Pacte des Loups, perhaps a movie which I have more affection for than any other, takes this set-up and moulds it into an adaptation of Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Holmes is Chevalier Gregoire de Fronsac, an arse-kicking naturalist sent by the King, and Watson is Mani, a mystical Native American martial artist who can communicate with wolves. Monica Belluci also appears as a prostitute with the gift of second sight, who’s actually a deadly all-Catholic assassin and spy investigating the Beast under the Pope’s orders.

More History!

It’s very peculiar, and not just because of the mush of characters I’ve described to you above; it’s an obvious blockbuster that moves in all the wrong directions for a blockbuster. The pacing is all off, beginning slow and ponderous, with plenty of court intrigue and detective work only enlivened by the occasional gratuitous ninja fight. There’s also far too much time and care devoted to its love-triangle subplot for an action movie, including a marvellous, semi-obligatory brothel bit in which Miss Belluci’s breasts fade out into snow-covered mountains. There are nudges towards a larger theme about the rise of the Enlightenment, the oncoming Revolution and the last death throes of the religious and aristocratic rule over the common man. All of this is carried out against a lush, misty backdrop and with occasionally wonderful, over-exuberant use of slow-motion.


Then Fronsac and Mani leave. Then they’re called back. Then the film goes insane. The pace just about doubles. We’re treated to a rapid succession of fight scene after fight scene, becoming ever more acrobatic, exciting and bloody daft, equally daft plot twists are pulled out of the hat every five minutes…


…and then up pops a rather sad, offbeat framework ending, followed by one of those ‘repeating the title at the end of the film which suggests that the director thought it would take on a new significance for his/her audience.’ It really doesn’t.


Leonard Maltlin, who disliked Pacte, ended his review by admitting that it was “a very strange movie.” John Walker of Halliwell’s seemed to get a better handle on its unique quirkiness, describing it as “a delirious mix of kung-fu fighting, aristocratic shenanigans, Hammer horror and religious and political conspiracies; it is a stylish, enjoyable diversion.” That’s a mini-review I remember well, because it’s how I first heard about Pacte. And my reaction to that summary was, of course,

“Bloody hell, that sounds like fun!”

More History still!

And it is. My God, it is. Christophe Gans, its director, went on to adapt another piece of highly atmospheric, derivative yet individual, stylish nonsense, Silent Hill (sorry, Silent Hill), which didn’t do quite as well. And I must confess that as, like Cain, I’ve wandered the earth trying to find people to show this movie too, a great number of them have confessed that they find it baffling and a little cheesy. They’ve also done really irritating things like pointing out the obvious plot holes. I don’t mind. That’s the entire point of cult classics (even if they are international successes, as Pacte was).


But it’s Christmas. It’s a time for family, friends and lovers. But above all, it’s a time for a movie which contains high-kicking, sword-fights, death by wolf pack, monsters, eroticism, penis jokes, religious hypocrisy, guillotines, and a bit with a killer fan. (That’s…like, a lady’s fan. It’s spiky. It’s awesome and deeply silly, much like another weapon which I won’t spoil here, and much like the film itself.) It's time for a guilty pleasure that leaves you feeling delighted and amused and not as if you've just spent two-and-a-half hours wading through pigswill.

Right. Enough teasing; I’m sticking the DVD in.