Tentacles Longer Than Night by Eugene Thacker

Author:Eugene Thacker [Thacker, Eugene]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781782798880
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2015-04-24T03:00:00+00:00

What I find most evocative about hair’s almost mythical status is its ambivalent relation to death. Horror films excel at highlighting this ambivalence. For instance, take Antonio Margheriti’s 1964 film The Long Hair of Death (I lunghi capelli della morte). Exemplary of Italian horror films during the 1960s, the film shows the influence of gothic horror classics such as Mario Bava’s Black Sunday.88 Apart from the requisite gothic sets (complete with tombs, castles, and thunderstorms), the film is also notable for its nearly incomprehensible plot, which involves the burning of a witch, a curse, a plague, and a string of female characters (the two main characters played by the inimitable Barbara Steele), all of whom are unwittingly carrying out a witch’s curse.

In the opening scenes of the film, a woman in a feudal village is accused of witchcraft and sentenced to be burned at the stake. As she is taken to the site of her death, the woman becomes frenzied and panicky – her clothes are torn, her face is pallid, with dark eyes deeply set in her face, and her hair becomes wild and untamed, almost mimicking the flames surrounding her.

Following this, we are introduced to the woman’s two daughters and a stranger named Mary, but they are all merely vehicles for the original curse. At the end of the film, the vengeful ghost appears to her accusers, back from the dead to perform an execution of her own. In the final moments of her revenge, she encases one of her accusers inside an effigy to be burned in commemoration of her death, an effigy that is now a sarcophagus, complete with brutish mask and long, black, straw hair. Though she plays several characters in the film, Barbara Steele’s long, thick, jet-black hair becomes a leitmotif in the story. We as viewers cease to care about the intricacies of the plot and focus more on how the curse will inevitably be brought about, passing from one character to the next, through the woman’s two daughters, through the character of Mary, and finally back to the witch herself, with the long black hair as the thread between them. The long hair of death stretches, like a curse, across generations and courses through different bodies.

Masaki Kobayashi’s landmark 1964 film Kwaidan opens with the story “The Black Hair.” The plot is simple – in ancient Kyoto, there was once a samurai who lived with his beloved wife. While the samurai would go out looking for work, his wife would weave at home. Tired of living in poverty, the samurai leaves his wife and marries into a wealthy family. His career rises, but he is unhappy. Eventually he decides to return to his wife. Upon returning, he finds the old house decrepit and overgrown, tall, lingering weeds sprouting everywhere. But there is a light on in one of the rooms. To his amazement, he finds that she is still there, sitting by the weaving wheel. Their reconciliation is tender and heartfelt. When he wakes the next morning, however, things are not as they seem.

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