Mother's Day with Robert Bloch: "Mother of Serpents".
Hey, today's Mother's Day! While everyone else who shares my filmic interest is probably watching the 1980's slasher film of the same name, I, being the sentimental old paragon of family values that I am, thought I'd instead kick back with my favorite author today and indulge in some good 'ol fashioned 1930's fun.
And by "Fun" I mean grisly murder, incestuous overtones, horrifying racism, revenge from beyond the grave, voodoo and corpse-fat monsters.
Just can't go wrong with those elements.
One of the things I wanted to say in my Ulmer retrospective but didn't was that sometimes, artists(yes, I consider filmmaking and writing to be art) insert things into their work not because of some great artistic desire to express themselves or exorcise their personal demons, but because they just like re-using successful gimmicks. There's no reason to be ashamed of it, if something works well, milk it. Why am I talking about this? Because Robert Bloch sure as hell must have either hated his mom's guts and expressed it vehemently in his writings, or he had no problems with his mother but got some really positive feedback on a story he wrote where he used an evil mother figure. Bloch was a man interested in modern psychology, and was certainly familiar with Freud, so I guess he understood that 90% of the time it's the love-hate relationship with his mother that screws up a child, but damn does he re-use this theme a lot. It's in his first novel The Scarf, it's in the adaption of Mr. Steinway in the anthology film Torture Garden, it's in the film Straight Jacket, it's in the film The Psychopath, it's his drive to avenge his mother's death that motivates one of the characters in Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper, and do I even need to mention Psycho? This isn't even counting the ones I know that I've missed.
Clearly, this is a theme Bloch loved to revisit(he also had a thing for women with red hair, but that's a topic for another time). By all accounts, Bloch had a fairly normal childhood for someone his age, and as all his fans know he had a leavening interest in humor to balance out his interest in horror. But why did this one concept fascinate him so much? Hard to say. It's been a long time since I've read his autobiography, and I've misplaced it at the moment. The only thing I can find at the moment about his mom is this quote from his first published interview:
"Black magic has had a strange fascination for Robert since he was 10 years old and saw Lon Chaney in “The Phantom of the Opera.” It was his first visit to a movie alone and the horrible visage of the phantom made so profound an impression upon him that for a long time after he would wake at night and see the terrible skull-like face leering at him. He remembered the face of the phantom so well that he has since drawn a crayon sketch of it. The drawing hangs on one wall of the Bloch living room and on another wall is the drawing of a ghoul. On the piano are a statue of a huge ape and grinning skull, both of which he modeled.
“If I were to allow it, every inch of wall space in the room would hung with those terrible drawings,” Mrs. Bloch says. " - Milwaukee Youth Writes Horror Tales, Sells 'Em. Evening News, 1935.
Well, all moms do that. Stepmoms too.
Whatever Bloch's motivations, he sure turned out a great deal of stories with the same theme of the abusive, ever-triumphant mother. So today I'll spotlight one of his lesser-known(and not likely to become more well-known as long as the NAACP still stands, you'll see what I mean) stories. From the December 1936 issue of Weird Tales, let's dig into Mother of Serpents. Spoilers abound.
"Voodooism is a queer thing. Forty years ago it was an unknown subject, save in certain esoteric circles. Today there is a surprising amount of information about it, due to research-and an even more surprising amount of misinformation."
I know what you are thinking, is that Bloch or H.P. Lovecraft? No, it's a young Bloch trying his best to ape his mentor H.P. Lovecraft. It's written in the old master's calm, intellectual, "this-is-100% fact" sesquidapelian style and shares many of Lovecraft's beliefs, but the beauty of it is that even though Bloch was still aping Lovecraft at this point, his own distinctive style shines through. Anyway, back to the story.
For as much as our narrator seems to bemoan the lack of factual information, as well as his dismissal of those who spread it as "ignoramuses", he cannot help but feel that it is all for the best that the truth is not known, because "Knowledge can be a thousand times more terrifying than ignorance." Yup. We're in Lovecraft territory all right. And although we are not meant to voyage far in these placid seas of pulp fiction, I still can't wait to keep reading.
Consider yourself a hardcore Lovecraft fan if you got the "placid seas" joke.
So it seems that for white people in the '30's, Haiti is not a place you'd wanna be. After the uprisings against the French, the descendants of the slaves set up a "kingdom founded on cruelty more fantastic than the despotism that reigned before". This naturally leads to whole groups of people born of mixed-race, which, as all sociologists of the '30's would tell you, is simply a set-up for barbarism and the worship of pagan gods. Huh? Well in this story it is, and the prolificness of Voodoo is so strong as a result of the collapse of the slave trade that it even affects the good, civilized and educated black people(referred to as Civilized and Educated in quotation marks of course). That's right folks, the guy who shines your shoes?? He may just be an emissary of Damballah or Obeah the Snake God and you might not know it! AAAHHH!
So with the cult's fingers in every pie in Haiti, it makes sense that one of the first presidents to take power would have connections to them. This unnamed man, who was educated in France and outwardly is an "enlightened sophisticated cosmopolite" is also of course, an evil fiend "a black Machiavelli"(sounds like some unmade blaxploitation flick to me). What, you expected a positively portrayed black character in this story? "Don't misunderstand" the story tells us. "the man was no emperor Jones; he was merely a polished ebony gentleman whose natural barbarity occasionally broke through it's veneer of civilization".
However, he also happens to be the son of an elderly conjure woman, and his father, probably meant to be some kind of supernatural deity by Bloch, is unknown. The woman is grateful that her witchcraft and dealings with a protestant minister had allowed her son to become a success. However, like all old bags, she becomes furious when he comes home and ignores her for, you know, all the things she set up for him. Bad idea, as you see, she also happens to be a priestess of Obeah.
She takes this in stride however, until he decides to get married. To a mulatto woman. Oh shit. Angry that he both didn't invite her to the wedding AND married a woman who wasn't a full-blooded member of his own race(so it ISN'T just Jewish mothers who go berserk over that), she lets her anger boil up inside her. Pissed off enough as she is, the clincher comes when he refuses to invite her to his inauguration. She vows revenge by placing a curse so that when his daughter turns sixteen, she will prick her finger and go to sleep forever until a prince awakens her his bride will waste away. He laughs it off at first, even when he is plagued by nightmares involving a serpent. Sure enough, three days later, his bride dies by an apparent snake bite, "her body turned blue and bloated up to twice it's normal size." Shit.
So at this point our protagonist decides to declare war on all voodoo, and pretty much becomes the Matthew Hopkins of Haiti. He eventually has his mother located, along with her wax voodoo doll of his wife. He vows to give her a punishment connected in some way to wax. He then ties her to a rack, while she screams at him, stripped naked, with "Frantic fires in his eyes" he then gets a great big knife and spends the next few days alone with her. When he's done he emerges with the fire in his eyes gone and a look on his face described as "ecstasy". A man ties up his naked mother with a mad lustful look in his eyes after his wife dies, gets a great big phallic symbol, and spends the next few days alone with her, penetrating her with it. Emerges satisfied. Subtext? Oh, man...this may be the first time putting someone up on a rack and skinning them was preferrable to anything else.
Oh, and then he has her stomach fat made into a giant candle.
He's found days later with the candle wrapped around his neck, dead. Just like a snake, just like Obeah.....
Happy Mother's Day!
