Minor Horror #8: The Testament of Caleb Meeke

This is the eighth 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.

The Testament of Caleb Meeke (Roy Spence, 1969)

He has inherited his uncle’s estate, but it’s not a place anyone would live. The old stone walls are slowly crumbling. The floors are strewn with leaves and loose debris. It must have been a great mansion once, but now it’s a ruin, a malign and glowering husk. Still, though, a portrait hangs on one of the walls, very high, out of reach, a gaunt, disheveled face, deeply lined, wearing an unreadable expression. Why is it still hanging here, in this long-abandoned place? Already, he has been forced to flee the surrounding wood, pursued by weird heavings rising from the soft earth, something trying to break the surface. On the front steps, he finds a Necronomicon. He sees a figure standing on a distant ridge. The figure is looking at him, then it turns and walks away. Later, he embraces a large boulder, resembling a standing stone. He crawls into a cave hidden in a rock face and finds a diary belonging to his uncle. He opens it, and begins to read. He believes he is learning, and he is, but not enough, not what he needs to know, nothing that will tell him to leave, to turn and run away.

Roy Spence is an “amateur filmmaker” from a time when it still made sense to draw such distinctions, and identify as such indicated a degree of hobbyist commitment on par with that of, say, a model train enthusiast. Like most of his peers, he was inspired by the B-movies he saw in theaters as a child, and, with his twin brother’s help, distributed them via enthusiast magazines and other embryonic nerd-subculture venues (to the extent they were “distributed” at all). Unlike pretty much everyone else, Spence had the advantage of being born in Ulster, giving him ready access to its wealth of windswept hills, silent ponds, old, dark woods, and, of course, crumbling estates. A film of the Wyrd such as The Testament of Caleb Meeke, thus, is more or less inevitably convincing, no matter how visibly “amateur” it may be on a technical level, for the simple reason that it is shot in the right kinds of places for Wyrd things to be happening, and by someone with the right kind of relationship to these places – not the fake “authenticity” of self-conscious location scouting, but the real authenticity of shooting a spooky movie in what is essentially your backyard.

It helps, of course, that Caleb Meeke is simply a good movie to begin with, awkward and ramshackle and uneven, certainly, but riven through with strange, stark images and escalating dread, not quite coherent in the manner of a half-reconstructed dream. There are creatures in the wood with a creeping posture and wrong faces. We can see lines on their backs. Are these engorged veins? Cracks in their skin, like in a dry lake bed? It isn’t clear, and the movie sees no reason to tell us. Like any decent horror film, it understands the value of mystery, of the power of an evocative image, of the limits of language’s value – possibly a lesson learned from Lovecraft, obsessive describer of the indescribable, whose mythos figures heavily in Spence’s earlier The Coming of the Black Dawn, from 1965, or possibly a lesson learned from nowhere in particular, something self-evident from standing in these places, looking towards the earth, the trees, the shadows, imagining what could lurk there. Many of Lovecraft’s stories, of course, take the form, in whole or part, of documents written by some other party, a diegetically internal narrator whose story, sometimes, draws our unassuming narrator towards their doom. Much the same occurs here. It’s all very brief, rather melancholy. Spence never made a film over half an hour long. Caleb Meeke is twenty five minutes. Before the young Meeke knows it, he’s in the woods, night has fallen, he finds himself before the fire, before the flickering faces. He never had a chance. The portrait still hangs on the wall.