Stuff: But you can still write off that eye of newt.

In 2010, possibly fearing occult reprisals, the Senate of Romania rejected a proposal to impose a tax on professional witches. But it would seem that, just like us more mundane folks, witches can't avoid those inevitable taxes forever. The New Republic reports that Romania's new legal definition of self employment will require that withes fork over 16% of their income to the state. That's right, Brumhilde, the tax man cometh.

As goofy as this sounds, there's two strange and noteworthy undercurrents here. First, there's the unsettling degree to which the Romanian government seems happy to concede to widely held superstitions. If this were just a case of widespread magical thinking, it would be unfortunate enough; but the larger danger is the conspiracy-minded thought this kind of logic leads to. In 2010, after receiving a surprisingly thorough beating at the polls, then presidential candidate Mircea Geoana blame his defeat not on policy positions or the will of the people, but on an attack by occult forces:

Not only did Geoana snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, however, but he proceeded to invite ridicule upon himself and his party by claiming that he had lost the ballot after being attacked with “negative energy” by a parapsychologist employed by the wily [incumbent, Traian] Basescu.

This occult assault wrecked his concentration during a televised debate, he complained, and was part of a strategy by his rival’s election team to harness the mystical “power of the purple flame” by wearing purple ties, socks and other accoutrements on certain important days.

Second, there's the unfortunate specter of ethnic unrest. TNR reports:

It's no surprise that the Romanian government has been eager to tap into this sometimes ostentatious stream of wealth for years. But could its new tax on witchcraft be motivated by more than money? Witches' main activity is fortune-telling, an occupation that has long been associated with the Roma population (often called "Gypsies"), toward whom prejudices run deep. A 1991 poll revealed that 41 percent of Romanians believe that the Roma should be "poorly treated," and a 1994 study found that Romanian newspapers might have directly incited hatred toward the Roma. And this negative attitude toward the group has shifted little since then. As far as I am aware, the Romanian government has not drawn any connection between the new tax legislation and anti-Roma politicking—and the Romanian embassy did not respond to my phone calls or e-mails—but some Romanians still think that the new taxation is an attempt to satisfy latent prejudice by drawing attention to and taking money from a marginalized population. As writer and poet Andrei Codrescu sees it, the new law represents "a cheap populist, nationalist move" that "plays well to the yo-yo's."

True Crime: "I still have 83 more women to kill."

The francophone Afrik News has a story on the proliferation of serial killers across Africa and the unique problems they pose to nations that often lack the investigative and communication infrastructures to identify, track, and capture such criminals. Drawing extensively from the work of Stéphane Bourgoin, an expert on African serial killers, the article paints a nightmarish portrait of these predators. Along with the police organization and data sharing issues that would hound detectives and researchers in any country, the article points out the way in which local cultural traditions can, for lack of a better word, normalize serial killing in some African communities. From the article:

And while these rampant murders are are sometimes not linked to tradition, most of them are. In southern Africa, sangomas [midwives, healers and soothsayers] call on hired killers who, for the pleasure of killing end up as serial killers, provide them with some of their tools of work. The sangomas sometimes prepare concoctions containing human body parts. A beverage brewed from a child’s sexual organ, for example, is believed to cure impotence.

"Muti killings", murders committed by puncturing the organs of a living person, is the cause of hundreds of deaths per year. "Africa registers more crimes related to cannibalism and vampirism than anywhere else in the world". Eating someone means capturing the soul and spirit of that person. And the victims’ blood are believed to contain life. It is no secret that fetish priests and some traditional worshipers believe that by drinking human blood they either become immortal or are reborn. "This kind of belief explains the acts committed by the two Kenyan serial killers: Philip Onyancha, who drank the blood of his victims and George Otieno Okoth, who collected human hair.

Besides the "muti killings", it can be noted that across Sub-Sahara Africa, many of those often labeled as witches or wizards, mostly by fetish priests, are poisoned, drowned, hacked to death with machetes or buried alive at will in an attempt to deliver their souls from the snare of the ‘devil’. Here again, a killer could evoke witchcraft in order to be given the leeway to kill to satisfy his whim. Only last year, a Zimbabwean judge, Justice Ndou, ruled that 32 year old Vusumuzi Ndlovu’s unshakable belief in witchcraft was an extenuating factor to spare him from the southern African country’s legally imposed punishment, after he killed his neighbor whom he accused of witchcraft.

The title of this post comes from Philip Onyancha, shown under arrest above.

Stuff: How David Bowie defended his sperm from sinister occult misappropriation.

A new bio of the Thin White Duke is going to include discussion of the occult's role in Bowie's post-Young American meltdown. From Starpulse:

In the book, Spitz writes, "While planning the follow-up to "Young Americans" (album), Bowie would sit in the house with a pile of high-quality cocaine atop the glass coffee table, a sketch pad and a stack of books. Psychic Self Defense was his favorite. Its author describes the book as a 'safeguard for protecting yourself against paranormal malevolence.' Using this and more arcane books on witchcraft, white magic and its malevolent counterpart, black magic, as rough guides to his own rapidly fragmenting psyche, Bowie began drawing protective pentagrams on every surface."

Bowie told the author, "I'd stay up for weeks. Even people like Keith Richards were floored by it. And there were pieces of me all over the floor. I paid with the worst manic depression of my life. My psyche went through the roof, it just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating 24 hours a day."

Spitz adds, "Increasingly Bowie was convinced there were witches after his semen. They were intent on using it to make a child to sacrifice to the devil, essentially the plot to Roman Polanski's 1968 supernatural classic Rosemary's Baby."

A friend hooked Bowie up with New York-based white witch Walli Elmlark.

The author adds, "Elmlark quickly and successfully exorcised the pool. Angie (Bowie), who was living there at the time, noted that it started to bubble and smoke, and that it only rained outside David's window while the rest of the L.A. sky was clear. Elmlark wrote a series of spells and incantations out for Bowie as he continued to wrestle with the forces of darkness."

I haven't read the book, so I do not know if Bowie did defeat the forces of evil. The fact that the world didn't end at the hands of a half-demon/half-plastic android Bowie-Satan hybrid implies he won. But, then again, a possession by demonoidic entities bent on harming mankind could explain his musical output from "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" on. We'll have to wait for somebody to read the bio and tell us.

News: Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang walla walla, bing bang.

I don't even know how to introduce this, so let's just cut straight to the article from the BBC about what appears to be a giant, possibly government-backed witch hunt in Gambia.

Up to 1,000 Gambian villagers have been abducted by "witch doctors" to secret detention centres and forced to drink potions, a human rights group says.

Amnesty International said some forced to drink the concoctions developed kidney problems, and two had died.

Officials in the police, army and the president's personal protection guard had accompanied the "witch doctors" in the bizarre roundup, said witnesses.

Gambia's government was unavailable to comment on the claims.

The human rights group asserted that many of those abducted were elderly.

The London-based rights group said the witch hunters, said to be from neighbouring Guinea, were invited into Gambia after the death of the president's aunt earlier this year was blamed on witchcraft.

To put this in scientific context, in 2007 the president of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, announced that he had developed a cure for AIDS. MSNBC describes Jammeh's treatment:

From the pockets of his billowing white robe, Gambia’s president pulls out a plastic container, closes his eyes in prayer and rubs a green herbal paste onto the rib cage of the patient — a concoction he claims is a cure for AIDS.

He then orders the thin man to swallow a bitter yellow drink, followed by two bananas.

“Whatever you do, there are bound to be skeptics, but I can tell you my method is foolproof,” President Yahya Jammeh told an Associated Press reporter, surrounded by bodyguards in his presidential compound. “Mine is not an argument, mine is a proof. It’s a declaration. I can cure AIDS and I will.”

To properly work, the cure must be taken on a Thursday and, more troubling, the patient must stop taking any anti-retroviral medicine.

Though it is not clear exactly what he thinks he is doing, critics have suggested that Jammeh's faith in his herbal "cure" stems from his mistaken notion that AIDS is caused by some sort of intestinal parasite. He also claims to be able to cure asthma and high blood pressure.

To put this in a human rights context, Jammeh – who is, curiously enough, the Vice President of the International Parliament for Safety and Peace – has been linked to the deaths of 12 student protestors, at least 2 journalists critical of his administration, 44 Ghanaian immigrants, and 10 foreign nationals denounced variously as criminals and spies. In 2008, he announced that his government would begin a policy of beheading homosexuals. Several years ago, folks started an online petition to get the International Criminal Court to indict him for crimes against humanity.

Jammeh is actually serving his third term as president, winning the 2006 election with nearly 70% of the popular vote.

Stuff: Voodoo economics.

Are you worried that some black magician has stolen your genitals?

I understand the concern, but breath easy. Nobody has stolen your genitals. What you're actually feeling is the psychological effects of currency devaluation.

Andrian Kreye, editor for the "Arts and Ideas" section of the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, explains the connection:

The larger the number of people who cause an error on a vast if not global scale, the more difficult it is to find conclusive explanatory models. The larger the error, the more surreal the attempted explanation will be. In West Africa, for example, at the beginning of the nineties, a regional recession triggered a wave of superstition. In countries like the Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Senegal, the myth of the "voleurs du sexe" made the rounds. Black magicians, according to popular belief, robbed innocent men of their genitals, by chanting magic spells while shaking the hands of their victims. None of these cases of course were ever proven. However, the deadly side effect of the superstition were massive witch-hunts with angry mobs chasing alleged genital thieves across town, finally stoning them to death.

Some psychiatrists in Senegal found a perfectly sound explanation for this phenomenon. The reason for the recession had been a devaluation of the West African Francs, the regional currency strongly dependent on the French Francs and the goodwill of the Banque de France.

Most people of West Africa might have encountered hardship at one point or the other. But in most cases the underlying causes had been clear–drought, floods, or wars. An economic austerity measure such as the government mandated devaluation of a currency caused widespread confusion. The superstition engendered by this economic confusion could be explained in very simple psychological terms: Because the breadwinners had been de-empowered, i.e. emasculated, their angst turned into fears of castration that were taken out on alleged genital thieves who in turn were punished by lynching.

Music: Witches (and werewolves) of the Stone Age.

Built out of the stitched together remains of Kyuss, the Queens of the Stone Age have gone through two names and nearly annual staff changes since their formation in 1997. Trying to pin down just who is further complicated by the fact that the Queens love nothing quiet so much as jamming with a guest, which means well known, but temporary faces keep popping up. These guests have include the Strokes' Julian Casablancas and Nirvana/Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl (who not only did duty as drummer on the group's 2002 Songs for the Deaf, but toured in support of the album). As of this year, I think only one member from the original line-up remains on the permanent roster: singer/guitarist Josh Homme. Given all that swapping and whatnot, let's say that counts for our normal intro and leap straight into the music.

Screamers and Sreamettes, I bring you two – count 'em: TWO – big songs for the Queens of the Stone Age. Here's the Queens "Burn the Witch."



Still ready for some rumbling, hook-heavy rockage? Good. 'Cause I've got a second platter ready for you. Here's Queens of the Stone Age's "Someone's in the Wolf."

Movies: Got woods?

That the ironically named Lucky McKee continues to be widely ignored and relegated to cult status says more about the fundamental state of contemporary horror than any amount of critical fuss about the supposedly negative impact of torture porn or the hopeful box office numbers for flicks like The Strangers. McKee's films are smart, effective, stylish, wonderfully-built works that neither pander to low audience expectations nor wallow in self-indulgent genre hipsterism. McKee's films emerge from a rich background of horror allusions, but they never fail to be original and always bear the unique signature of his dead-pan magical realism. The Woods, McKee's 2006 feature about a witch possessed 1960s girl's school, shows the director at the top of his form.

Superficially, the plot of The Woods sounds like a rip-off of Argento's classic Susperia. In the late 1960s, a young girl, the rebellious Heather, is deposited at an elite girl's school by her egomaniacal, overbearing mother and milquetoast father (played by horror icon Bruce Campbell). Once there, Heather immediately runs afoul of the Mean Girls grade alpha-female click. But these socially-predatory teens are the least of Heather's problems. The headmistress, Ms. Traverse (played Oscar-nominated and multi-Emmy winner Patricia Clarkson), and the school's staff are hiding a dark secret. As students disappear and inexplicable incidents pile-up, Heather uncovers a sinister coven of witches whose evil plans threaten the lives of all the students at the academy.

It would be easy to dismiss The Woods as little more than "an American Susperia." And, in a way, that's exactly what it is. In his previous film, 2002's May, McKee revealed his love of Italian horror by not only name dropping Argento's Opera and Trauma, but also by working in some of said directors more dreamy stylistic ticks into the later sequences dramatizing the title-character's violent descent into madness. It is, I think, unlikely that McKee wasn't fully aware of Argento's legendary flick. However, The Woods is no remake or exercise in slavish stylistic imitation. If you're going to think of this as the American Susperia, then you need to imagine that McKee tore the film down to its most basic core and rebuilt it with distinctly American elements. Stylistically, McKee looks to the sun-drenched retro look of the nostalgia industry: colors are crisp, all cars have a factory-fresh shine to them, the period details are exacting but comfortable. Think Stand By Me or The Wonder Years. The elements of fantasy are shot with surrealistic stagy, crispness – the fake-real of Hollywood sets when make-up, costume, and art design were your chief special effects. Even the one CGI effect of note, the movement of Ruins-like vines and branches, has a solid, carefully-studied quality.

The plotting and characterization also stand in contrast to the dream-logic minimalism of Argento's work. The story feels like a Nancy Drew mystery as imagined by Ray Bradbury. The mystery is genuinely unfolded, rather than simply distilled by the director and screenwriter. The supernatural elements are sinister and magical, but not nonsensical and deployed willy-nilly whenever a scare is needed. The actors all turn in effective work, partially because McKee gives them space to tweak what could be otherwise stock roles. In fact, McKee might be one of the few horror directors who is not, if feel, in any way sadistic. This is not to say there isn't violence and gore (though The Woods has much less than May and May had much less than your standard slasher fare), but that McKee isn't simply interested in them as fuel for whatever cruel scheme he's cooked up. They suffer because horror demands danger, but McKee is more interested in what they'll do than what he can do to them.

There's something about The Woods that harkens back to an age when the horror film was not yet a cinematic ghetto. It reminds me of Robert Wise's The Haunting or the stylish thrillers Val Lewton produced. The resemblance is not in visual style or content elements, but in a common approach to high-quality genre filmmaking. There's a professional storyteller's care in how Wise, Tourneur, and McKee approach their stories. They follow through on their plots; they use violence as a dramatic tool rather than an emotional smoke screen; they create characters they care about in hopes that you will too; though they respect mystery, they don't leave things hopelessly obscure knowing that forgiving fans will conspire to confuse sloppy work for stylish intelligence; they appeal to lovers of good stories, not to genre otaku who demand fanservice. This isn't to say that McKee is a throwback or some postmodern recycling specialist who is lucky to have inadvertently picked up some good habits by virtue of stealing from his betters. Technically and thematically McKee's skills, style, and concerns are thoroughly up-to-date. What McKee is an example of is even rarer than that: he's a guy committed to good filmmaking. It is his unfortunate luck to arrive on the scene when the worship of trash cinema, pursuit of vacuous visual extremism, elevation of obscurantism, and genre fundamentalism appear to rule the day.

Movies: The reason for the season.

Martin and Season of the Witch are two of the most interesting films legendary horror director George Romero ever made. Of course, Romero will go down in fright flick history for his "Of the Dead" series, the In Search of Lost Time of zombie cinema. Romero's soon to be five pic cycle (six films if you count the remake he made of his own Night of the Living Dead) pretty much defined the modern zombie flick by replacing the tropical voodoo trappings with the massed mindless flesh eating hordes that have dominated horror cinema for the past six or so years. And this fame is justly deserved. Though Romero's latest outings have bogged down under increasingly obvious semi-subversive political content, taken as a whole the films are perhaps the most sustained, relentless, and insightful critique of late capitalist Americanism yet produced in the genre. Still, Romero's strangest, most inventive writing and visuals appear not in his monumental zombie epic, but in these two one-gems.

The first, Martin, is a radical revision of the vampire film. Tossing the Romantic Gothic trappings, Romero centered his tale around a disturbed young man who obtains blood by drugging victims and extracting it through small slits made with a razor blade. He can't turn into a bat or compel the actions of nubile victims with his captivating gaze. Is he just some sick nut case? Or does he suffer from an ancient curse? Your humble horror host reviewed said flick earlier.

The second, Season of the Witch, is similarly open-ended. Originally entitled Hungry Wives by a distributor who hoped confused skin-flick fans would attend mistaking it for a porno, Season was filmed after Night of the Living Dead and before Dawn of the Dead. The film is a character study of Joan Mitchell, a stifled housewife who begins exploring witchcraft in the hopes of discovering the passionate self her dead-end domesticity has all but completely buried.

In my review of Martin I mentioned how weirdly non-stylish Romero's style was. In his zombie flicks and in Martin Romero seems confident to simply set up the camera and meticulously capture the details of life passing before his lens. Season of the Witch shows a remarkably different visual aesthetic at work. The film begins with a blatantly allegorical dream sequence, a surreal combo of dead-pan Monty Pythonism and the overtly meaningful stuff of "art house" cinema. Jump cuts and stutter editing borrowed from French New Wave cinema make the already curious scene and even stranger exception to Romero's typical filmmaking approach. Though the film will calm down a bit as the narrative starts to spool out, Romero never fully packs away the tricks he has on full display in these first few minutes. Visually, Season is his most daring film.

Once the plot gets underway, we follow Joan through the tedium of her loveless family life. Her husband is mentally abusive in a sort of low-grade, dismissive way. Her daughter, a "switched on" fully realized product of the early '70s, is similarly dismissive of her square mom. Eventually, in search for some kicks to help yet another pointless night pass as quickly as possible, Joan and a friend visit a tarot card reader that professes to be a real life witch. Joan becomes obsessed. Plagued by nightmarish visions, Joan begins to dabble in witchcraft, following the steps in a sore-bought primer called To Be a Witch. It I in these scenes, a Joan begins to dabble in witchcraft, that Romero's usual attention to the minute details of mundane existence best meshes with the experimental style of the flick. Joan, like any other housewife-turned-witch, must gather materials at antique shops and specialty gourmet stores in order to collect the tools of witchcraft. Where does one get eye of snake in suburban Pittsburg? Eventually Joan uses her newfound powers to seduce the sometime boyfriend of her daughter. Convinced that she has frivolously tapped into dark forces or trivia purposes and that she'll be punished, Joan starts to spiral into a more and more pit of dangerous paranoia . . . Dum da dum!

Like Martin, Joan's not your typical cinematic witch. She stumbles through her conjuring as she sits on the floor of her extremely '70s living room, a sacrificial blade in one hand and her copy of Witchcraft for Dummies in the other. At turns sexy and tired, dangerous and wounded, sympathetic and frustratingly dense, Joan is possibly Romero's most realistic character. And Romero goes even further in Season in leaving the question of whether Joan's going nuts or whether her witchcraft is genuine than he did in leaving Martin's vampirism unresolved. Unlike Martin, however, which is Romero's least political film, Season is Romero's The Feminine Mystique, a film essay in unfulfilling domestication.

As an aside, the film benefits from the wonderful job Jan White does playing the unhappy, haunted Joan. I've read somewhere that folks are planning a remake of the film. I can't imagine who could be a better Joan. This isn't because White is such a magnificent actress. She does a great job, sure; but this isn’t Oscar grade stuff. What she has that I can't imagine the remake producers looking for is authenticity. She looked like the kinda hot housewife next door. The kind of uptight, quiet woman who, under the right light, sudden looks like a passionate, hungry woman. Some box office drawl would be simply too obvious, too movie-ish to be the convincing witch next door.

Season of the Witch isn't for everybody. There's almost no gore and it is paced like a drama and not a horror flick. Still, for fans of Romero, this is an essential display of a range you wouldn't guess he has based solely on the zombie flicks.

Movies: It's my party and I'll cry if I want to.

After watching and loving CasaNegra's fabulous edition of the Mexican horror classic The Witch's Mirror (El espejo de las bruja), I went off in search of some of the other South of the Boarder horror gems presented by the company. I quickly found CasaNegra's first release, a 1961 Mexican horror flick called The Curse of the Crying Woman (La maldición de la llorona).

First, a bit about the legend of the La Llorona . . .

The ghostly La Llorona, "The Crying Woman," is to many children of Spanish-speaking North and America what the spectral Bloody Mary is to English-speaking Anglo youngsters. Just as Bloody Mary's backstory changes from region to region (I heard it had something to do with the Titanic), the tale of La Llorona varies depending on where you hear it. The key elements, however, remain fairly stable: a mother, dead children, and a restless spirit. In Mexico and New Mexico, the story of La Llorona centers around a young woman, seduced and abandoned by a local man who left her with several children. La Llorona then killed her offspring, either to spare them a life of poverty or to free herself to marry another man or to wound the man who left her. In some sections of Texas, the legend specifies that La Llorona was a Native American woman and that her fate was God's punishment for killing her children. In some variants, La Llorona doesn't kill her children but rather dies in a failed attempt to stop her brutal husband or father from killing the children. In at least on variant, La Llorona's children are the victims of a natural disaster. Regardless of how La Llorona's children end up dead, the result is always the same: La Llorona's ghost ends up roaming the Earth, wailing and calling out for her dead children. In the cities of Southern California, the banshee-like specter travels the flood control channels. In Las Cruces and El Paso, La Llorona haunts the banks of the Rio Grande.

In Guatemala, the ghost's wail gives the name of her dead child: Juan de la Cruz. Also, in a truly weird and unique detail, La Llorona's wail reverses the normal relationship of space and sound. If she sounds close, she's actually far away. If you can barely make out her cries, then she's right next to you. (Potentially cool sound trick – would-be makers of La Llorona films take note.)

The children of Honduras know the same ghost by the name La Ciguanaba, "The Dirty One." A more sinister variant of the traditional La Llorona tale, The Dirty One drowns other people's children (notably school children) and her cry translates to something like, "Drink from my breast because I am your mother." In Peru, she haunts the tourist-clogged beaches. In Panama, she's called "La Tulivieja" and haunts the banks of rivers.

Got all that? Good. Now forget it.

Despite the fact that "The Crying Woman" is nearly the national spook of many Central and South American countries, the The Curse of the Crying Woman seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the legend. Which is weird. It is kinda like a director making a superhero movie called Superman, only, you know, not THAT Superman.

That strange quirk aside, The Curse of the Crying Woman is an excellent "old dark house" style horror flick that CasaNegra can count as another feather in their cap. A pleasingly overstuffed tale of murder, witchcraft, and madness, the flick has a stylish and classy look that brings to mind the golden age of Universal horror.

The Curse begins with a strange "false" start in which the Crying Woman, a witch with black cavities for eyes, and her malformed henchman dispatch a carriage full of travelers that are passing near her mansion. And I do mean dispatch: a thrown knife, a pack of man-eating attack dogs, and one woman-crushing carriage wheel make quick work of these filler folks. It operates much the way the opening scenes of the Scream films did. By ripping through a trio of disposable characters right away, the movie sets the bar for the craziness to come. After that initial scene, we settle into the real story, involving a young woman who is coming home to visit her aunt after an absence of many years. During these years, many things have changed. The young woman has gotten herself a hubby – who comes along for the visit. The aunt, for her part, started worshipping the dark spirit of an evil witch whose corpse she found in a chamber underneath her mansion. She's also trapped her horribly mutilated husband up in the tower of her home and has taken up random homicide as a hobby. What, you want her to wither up and die just because the children have finally left home?

In a display of dramatic unity that would please Aristotle, the rest of the movie spools out over the course of a single evening. The aunt tries to convert our heroine to witch worship, the hunchback servant attempts to kill the husband, the mutated uncle breaks loose and goes on a rampage, at one point police officers show up and face off against the aunt's pack of killer hounds, and eventually the house begins to literally break apart. All in one night! That’s narrative efficiency for you.

The visual effects, if somewhat dated, are still enjoyable. The direction, by Rafael Baledón, is effective, but not showy (in contrast to the pull-all-the-stops approach of Urueta in The Witch's Mirror). The acting, with the exception of the husband who's a bit wooden, is suitably over-the-top and dramatic. Curse is well worth the time of any horror fan who wonders where the melodramatic aesthetic of classic horror went. Apparently, it went south.

Movies: Atacan de las brujas.

There's so much to say about The Witch's Mirror, Chano Urueta's 1962 masterpiece of Mexican horror cinema, that I can't think of any clever way to start my review. So, let's cut to the chase, right? You Screamers and Screamettes are busy folk and you ain't got time for pussyfooting around. Here's the skinny: The Witches Mirror is one of those rare films that genuinely deserves the title of "overlooked classic." It ranks up there with other classics from the decade including Robert Wise's The Haunting and Hitchcock's Psycho.

That's a bold statement, but The Witch's Mirror (neé El Espejo de la Bruja) will take the Pepsi challenge against any landmark early-'60s horror flick and more than measure up.

Let me make the case:

Exhibit 1: The director

Film buffs might recognize the director from his handful of acting roles in American flicks, most notably in his performances in Peckinpah's Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. But, as a director, Urueta's career stretched back to the silent era. His first directorial gig was on El Destino, a 1928 Mexican silent. After establishing himself as a talented director, Urueta went north of the boarder in an effort to make it in Hollywood. The project that was to have been his big American debut was plagued by bad luck and the flick was eventually scrapped. Prematurely washed up in Tinsel Town, Urueta went back to Mexico and worked behind the scenes for legendary Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, who was then in Mexico shooting documentary footage after his own rejection by Hollywood (however, unlike Urueta, Eisenstein's bum's rush from Hollywood was given extra urgency by the State Department, who deported the director because he was a commie). After his tenure with the Russian master, he settled into the Mexican film industry, cranking out more than 100 flicks before his death in 1979.

Now, exposure to directorial legends is no guarantee of directorial prowess. Keep in mind that Spanish horror hack Jess Franco spent some time working for Orson Welles. But Uruerta seems to have been a bit of a sponge when it comes to film-making techniques and approaches. His films, mostly genre flicks, have a real technical polish to them. These aren't B-grade flicks churned out to make a quick buck. Uruerta, long before it became the SOP of indie film, combined technical proficiency, an encyclopedic knowledge of film, an edgy zeal for envelope pushing, and a genuine love for genre pictures into a smart, entertaining approach to making movies.

Exhibit 2: The flick

The Witch's Mirror tells a convoluted tale of murder, black magic, mad science, ghosts, and revenge. The picture opens up on Sara (the witch of the title) looking into her mirror (the mirror of the title) and showing her goddaughter, Elena (not anywhere in the title), that her husband, the wicked doctor Eduardo, plans to do her in and marry Deborah. Elena refuses to believe her witchy godmother (why a Satanic witch is anybody's godmother is never explained). Desperate for help, Sara appeals to her master, the head honcho of Hell himself, to protect Elena. Satan says, "Sorry, she's scheduled to go" and refuses to help. Before the night is out, Elena is poisoned by her husband.

Flash-foward: Eduardo marries Deborah and brings her to the castle-like mansion he shared with Elena. There, Sara, kept on as the housekeeper, and the ghost of Elena begin to torment to couple. In an effort to resist the ghost, Eduardo breaks the titular mirror with an oil lamp. The flaming oil magically covers Deborah, who was reflected in the mirror along with the ghost of Elena. She survives, but her face and hands are roasted away.

Determined to restore his new wife to her pre-sizzle beauty, Eduardo begins rebuilding her face using skin retrieved from the stolen corpses of recently deceased young women. His quest to save his wife's looks get obsessive and, eventually, he actually commits murder to obtain a pair of hands for Deborah.

Witches are, if horror films are any indication, heroic grudge holders. Sara summons the spirit of Elena to posses the hands Eduardo intends to give to his new wife. The transplant is successful, but, while test-driving her new limbs, Deborah attempts to strangle Eduardo. It is the vengeful ghost of Elena that now controls Deborah's limbs. And she's got plans for Eddie. Stabby sort of plans.

Witch's Mirror's effective plot, a pleasantly over-packed mix of horror tropes and melodrama staples, alludes to everything from Eye's Without a Face and The Uninvited to Hitchcock's Rebecca and Welles's Kane. It's all given extra punch by Urueta's direction, a shadowy and stylish visual approach that brings to mind the best of Unviersal's classics horror flicks while, at the same time, embraces so many effects and tricks shots that one is reminded of early Hitchcock. Furthermore, Urueta spices up the flick, especially some of the later scenes in Eduardo's human chop shop, with a level of casual gore thcat, while perhaps a bit tame by modern standards, must have been truly shocking for the time. The dismembered corpses – handless and headless in several cases – and the furnace in which Eduardo and his assistant methodically dispose of the bodies distantly foreshadows such banally evil slaughter houses as the Hewitt place and the disposal area in Hostel.

Exhibit 3: The DVD

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that CasaNegra, a DVD production house dedicated to high-quality releases of classic Mexican genre flicks, did a bang up job on this disc, even down to the menu screen. Watching these older, often neglected flicks is too often a masochistic undertaking that requires you squint at a crappy print of the flick and strain to hear a murky soundtrack. Mirror looks and sounds great.

The defense rests, your honorses.

Silent Scream Series: What the Häx?

According Casper Tybjerg, the scholar who provides the DVD commentary for Criterion's excellent edition of Häxan, the film once induced something like Stendhal Syndrome in a viewer. In 1941, during the film's commercial re-release in Sweden, police found a man roaming around outside the theater, hands held out before him, dazed, and gasping for air. The police assumed he was drunk. The man was taken to the hospital where he was treated until normal breathing returned. There, the medical staff determined that the man had not been drinking. The patient indicated that the attack – his stunned shock-like state and his shortness of breath – had been induced by watching Häxan. He'd simply been overwhelmed by the film.

This wouldn't be the first or last time Häxan was equated with extreme mental states. The film became popular among the surrealists who dug on its heavy anti-clericalism (than, as now, there's no better way to easily secure your artistic status as groundbreaking than by spicing your work with a dash of the ol' anti-Christian themes) and special effects, which brought the dream-like confessions of those accused of witchcraft to life. Later, in the 1960s, an English-language re-release featured the drone/drawl narration of that elder statesman of altered states: William S. Burroughs.

Until you've seen Häxan, it sounds itself a bit like the subject of a horror movie: an obscure silent film that has obtained fetish-object status among the outsider class and has the power to render people temporarily insane. That's quite a reputation to live up to.

Well, Screamers and Screamettes, while I didn't go stark raving mad, nor was I convinced to shoot my wife and flee to a life of drug induced creativity, I am now convinced that Häxan is among the greatest silent films ever made.

Häxan is supposedly a documentary. It was intended to advance the theory that the witchcraft prosecutions of the Middle Ages were caused by a mass outbreak of hysteria, further fuelled by religious intolerance that convinced otherwise good people that the more abhorrent crimes are justified in the defense of Christianity from an enemy that could be anywhere, do anything, and take any form. However, it is the dramatic "re-creation" of a witchcraft trial and its fall-out that forms the core of the film. It's these scenes that one imagines the surrealists and folks like Burroughs thought was the good stuff. Here we get the phantasmagoric presentation of the visions of witchcraft hunters and the accused. There are scenes of torture (including one scene in which we break the fourth wall and one of the actresses, out of character, agrees to let the directors actually apply a thumb-screw to her), erotic fantasies, images of monks scourging themselves, and so on. Unlike, say, The Crucible, which used the a Salem witchcraft trial as a ham-fisted and ultimately unsatisfying metaphor for the Red Scare, the witchcraft trial presented in Häxan is meant to illustrate the methods and typical progress of a trail. In this, it feels less like piece of propaganda (though even the film's creator cleared intended it so) and more like some weird, nightmarish, Medieval version of Law and Order. With its mix of detailed realism and precise attention to the dreams and visions of its main characters, to get an equivalent, you'd have to imagine somebody turned Pan's Labyrinth into a police procedural.

Given the unwieldy mix of fact and fiction, and the forced marriage of dramatic and propagandistic purposes, it is no surprise that some of the sections of the film fall flat. It gets off to a slow start as the director walks us through the cosmology of the Middle Ages. The models he uses here to illustrate his point are interesting, but don't hold the attention like the trial sections do. Also, at the end, when Christensen attempts to generalize he thesis to modern times, his political aims are at their most naked and the film's artistic power suffers for it.

Still, even with those weak spots, Häxan is a unique and powerful film. Though it isn't as famous as Nosferatu or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the two bedrock works of cinema horror, it is, I think, more artistically accomplished than either of those films. If the Silent Scream Series gives you the bug to check out a silent film, make it this one.

Music: Far better than warlocks in leopard-print Speedos.

Part burlesque act, part rock outfit, part performance art happening, part goofy joke, Brooklyn's Witches in Bikinis is one of those ideas that's so packed with entertaining goodness that it defies classification.

A troupe of six singing and dancing young women in brightly colored wigs and bikinis (finally, some truth in advertising), backed by a quartet of instrumentalists, the WiB bounce, prance, and vamp their way through songs about alien surf chicks, haunted subways, horror-flick final girls, and, of course, themselves. Their mix of 60s girl group pop and junk culture imagery, delivered with conviction that can compensate for the occasional lack of finesse, is nearly camp perfection.

And, if their surf-rock-meets-cabaret music isn't your cup of tea, you still get to watch a bunch of girls dance around in bikinis. Everybody wins.

Here's the group performing their signature tune.



Here's their sci-fi surf tune "Alien Surfer Babes."

Candy: Wonderful Halloween Peep sculptures from Frankford.

Please forgive the low quality of the photo, but I was unable to find a higher quality product shot on the Web. These out of focus characters are the Halloween edition Frankford Marshmallow Pals. Basically, they're Peeps. But these cats are more like Super-Peeps, Ultra-Peeps, Peeps to the Nth Degree. Instead of being vaguely formed uni- or duo-colored marshmallow lumps, Frankford uses icing to decorate their candies, creating cartoonishly detailed figures. There are stitches on the forehead and bolts in the neck of Frankenstein's Monster. You can clearly make out the fangs on Dracula. Even the witch's hair has texture to it. I've seen toy figurines with less detail than Frankfort put into these little candies. And all this for $1.99. Even if you don't like Peeps, they're worth buying to give to some little monster on H-day.