Minor Horror #02-9: Erotic Witchcraft
This is the ninth in a series of fifteen pieces on “minor” horror films that I’m going to be publishing here throughout October. For more information, please see this post from last year, when I first did this.
Erotic Witchcraft (Mario Mercier, 1972)
His father killed his mother, and then himself, so the other boys at school all hate him, naturally. He lives with his great-aunt, who doesn’t care about him either. One day, a sorcerer finds him injured in the street, and takes him in. He’s a good man, a positive influence, showing the boy real kindness and educating him in the hermetic arts, but he’s also an old man, and before long he’s dead, in time for the boy to have grown only into a young man, and one who is temperamental, and awkward, and uncomfortable in his skin, and still shunned by the rest of the village, which is a small and superstitious place – after the funeral, the sorcerer appears to him one last time, as a head floating in the crook of a split tree trunk, and warns him not try to “make a servant” of the “Goulve,” a kind of female homunculus the boy has inherited from him. If you do, the old sorcerer warns, she will make you “a slave to her instincts.” The boy seems to take the warning seriously, but, of course, not seriously enough. He’s a troubled young man, haunted by the memory of his father with the shotgun under his chin, and he has a troubled young man’s jealousy, and a troubled young man’s desire. Very quickly, he finds objects upon which to fixate both.
I think this accounts, very approximately, for what happens in maybe the first 20 to 25 minutes of Erotic Witchcraft. Beyond that, I’m not really sure. I understood the general thrust of things well enough, but I don’t think I could explain the details. Honestly, even these opening scenes I’m not totally sure about. You see, there’s some problems with this movie, as it exists today. Mario Mercier, the director, only has two films besides this one to his name, but he’s significantly more accomplished as a painter, printmaker, and writer, with a bibliography comprising a handful of novels and a plethora of books on shamanism, magic, things like that. Those latter books only really started coming in the ‘90s, long after he made Erotic Witchcraft, but my point is he clearly took this stuff seriously (the witchcraft and the eroticism; he is French, after all), and intended to make a serious movie about it, probably without much concern for such a work’s commercial prospects. His producer, like most producers, was concerned about said prospects, though, and like many producers have before him, he took the film away from its director and edited it himself, making a big mess of things in an attempt to reshape whatever esoteric headtrip Mercier had plotted out into something resembling a conventional black magic Eurohorror picture. My understanding is Mercier was so disgusted with the result that he quit the project, and the film was never actually finished. The upshot of all this is the only form in which the film is currently publicly available is truly abysmal, a multi-generation VHS bootleg of what was almost certainly a workprint, scratched and badly cropped and so blown out at times it’s as though the characters are being consumed by some great white inferno. There have been some rumors of a restoration, and I found one site with a gallery of normal-looking stills, source unknown, but so far as I can tell what I watched is the best we’ve got at the moment. I don’t think it’s the worst copy of a feature length film I’ve ever chosen to watch (that’s probably a completely fucked VHSrip of Giichi Nishihara’s pinku murder ballad Grotesque Perverted Slaughter with often-illegible burned-in subtitles, if you’re curious), but it is certainly bottom five.
It’s a shame, of course, that there’s no way today to see this film anything like how it was supposed to be seen, in a form where you can properly appreciate everything going on, and probably pick up on many nuances of mise-en-scène that have been lost to generations of tape degradation – nuances which might even clarify what actually happens for most of the movie. But I mean, it also sort of adds to it, you know? This is a film of esoteric rituals and occult mysteries – it’s not exactly going against the spirit of things, so to speak, for it to only be watchable in a form that itself feels sort of forbidden, like an illicit document of secrets meant only for the initiates of some arcane order, smuggled at great risk from a caliginous vault, dangerous even to possess. It is sort of fun, sort of exciting, to try to peer through the shifting lines and apprehend whatever it is that lies beneath. And it helps, also, that the producer failed absolutely miserably at reediting Mercier’s work into something coherent and marketable – as I said above, after the setup is finished, things very quickly become comprehensible in only the most general sense. There’s masks and fires and ritual daggers, weird dreams, many of shots of blonde women who are naked for kind of unclear, presumably Magickal reasons. It’s a lot of trippy, witchy stuff like this for a long time, not totally formless but loosely structured enough that you can, and probably should, just kind of let it wash over you. If you do, if you’re willing to surrender yourself to it, to accept it for what it is and forgive it for not being what it cannot, you might find it one of the more weird, compelling, and evocative occult horror experiences of its era.
