Hagazussa: or how to mask misogyny in historical fiction
Cranky post alert.
A mother and a daughter, alone in a remote cabin in the snowy woods, sometime in the 15th century. The mother is anxious. People from a nearby village come at night, threatening to burn them as witches in their own home. Not a great scene.
The mother collapses one day in the snow; the daughter, Albrun, who’s probably about 10 years old, tries to nurse her to health. Albrun brings in a doctor and a nun, who find buboes in her armpit. Doesn’t take a medievalist to know that Mommy is probably toast. But little Albrun tends to her, washes her grotesque, swollen, purple lumps. But the mother dies, running out into the freezing winter alone, immediately after she discovers—seemingly by digitally assaulting her—that Albrun has begun menstruating. I can’t say I was sad to see her go.
So, we have two accused witches. The older of whom is sexually violent toward her young child. Both of whom are coiffed and made up to look haggard, dirty, and unappealing. You can’t tell if the two women really are witches, or if they’re just accused of witchcraft because they are peripheral to the norms of the village community. I assume it’s the latter, mostly because you really don’t see any, like, magic or craft anywhere.
In the next phase of the film, Albrun is grown up, carrying a little baby girl of her own, and chilling with some goats. If you are keeping track, we’ve got no fewer than four annoying witch stereotypes: sexual predatoriness in a woman (the mother), physical ugliness in a woman (especially the mother, but later Albrun too), having bastard children (both the mother and Albrun), and hanging out with goats, who are, after all, the beasts of Satan. Oh, and we also do see a gratuitous, mangy black cat in their dingy cottage. So, five annoying witch stereotypes.
But by this point, I’m curious: what the hell is this film doing? Is it trying to be horror about witches, or horror about societies that persecute women by calling them witches? How are we supposed to feel about Albrun—scared or sympathetic? I’m also waiting for more cheesy signs that she might actually be a witch—like a cauldron, some broomsticks, a spellbook, or whatever.
While Albrun is carrying goat milk in buckets, to sell to the local village, a couple of local village boys stop her and harass her. Nobody likes a single mom in the 15th century, I guess. They call her a witch, tell her that no one wants her milk. I figured this would be the moment of disambiguation, in which Albrun suddenly casts a pall on the boys, or inflicts sores on their faces, or makes their dicks fall off for her collection at home (remember my post on Malleus Maleficarum? Yeah, dick collections.) But instead, she is totally and completely cowed by them, until another young woman—Swinda—intervenes to help. Swinda seems pretty nice. And now I’ve decided that, for sure, Albrun can’t possibly be a witch. Because she is too helpless.
Later, Albrun masturbates while milking a goat, which tilts me back just a little bit to thinking that she might be a witch—concubines of Satan, where Satan takes the form of a goat. But her goatscapade is interrupted when Swinda comes to visit her. While at Albrun’s house, Swinda at first seems genuinely kind, but then she sees that Albrun has made a small altar around her dead mother’s skull. Something happens in Swinda. Something not too good. Something, in fact, aggressively sadistic. Swinda convinces Albrun to walk off into the woods and then tricks her into getting raped by a local man, while Swinda holds her down; it appears that Swinda has decided Albrun is a disgusting witch, and that she deserves to be punished and humiliated for that.
Returning home from the rape, Albrun discovers that people have mutilated and killed her goats in her absence. Goats, remember, are erotic objects for her as well as her primary source of both protein and income. In revenge, she puts a dead rat in the village water supply, and pisses in it. Nice one, I think, finally this movie is making some interesting moves, because in the Middle Ages, there were constant allegations of well and water poisoning, most commonly leveled against Jews, as a part of the overarching antisemitism of the period. Maybe this film is going to reveal that these persecuted “witches” are actually part of another highly persecuted group (Jews) and we’re going to go somewhere really compelling and smart with that.
So now I’m really paying attention. We’ve got this poor, innocent, abused girl who’s peripheral to the local society, and persecuted by it. She gets sexually assaulted in a way that wakes up her prior history of sexual assault, and now we’re going to have a medieval rape-revenge narrative, and one that may say something provocative and interesting about the horrific history of antisemitism as well. Phase three of this medieval horror story seems to play into that possibility: people start dying in huge numbers, presumably because of the rat in the water.
But then the film comes right the fuck off the rails. Albrun sees some maggots eating at some mushrooms in the forest.
Maggots.
On.
Mushrooms.
Defying all logic, she eats some of the mushrooms. Predictably, these mushrooms are poisonous, and they cause her to hallucinate. Very quickly, under the spell of her hallucination, she commits infanticide by walking into a lake with her baby daughter and just dropping her in there. Just lets her go under. There’s a very long scene of murky underwater shots where we see the baby struggling, some tiny limbs floating around, and a bunch of blood. I have a very strong stomach for horror, but, like the earlier scene where the mother sexually molests her daughter, this scene is gross and stupid and pretentious and narratively underpowered. And it makes it real hard to empathize with Albrun anymore.
But the film plods fecklessly on. Albrun finds her daughter’s corpse, and, stricken with grief and horror, she cooks it and eats it, her hands trembling all the while. There’s no real reason that she eats it. Maybe aftereffects from the magic mushrooms? Gross. Stupid. Pretentious. Underpowered.
Here, I thought the film was going to line up the history of the persecution of women by allegations of witchcraft with the history of the persecution of Jews by allegations of well-poisoning. Nope.
Ok, so, I get it, these filmmakers saw The Witch (2015) and were like, “Oooh, feminist witchy horror movie set in the Renaissance, where an isolated family with weird goat adjacencies and murderous tendencies triggered by botanical (in that case, ergot) poisoning! Great idea, let’s do a reboot.” And I mean, in principle, that’s fine. Many of my favorite horror films are, in part, remakes of other horror movies. Look at Midsommar: it is a remake of Wicker Man. And it’s fine, because the remake is great on its own terms. It riffs, it reinvents. One of my very favorite twenty-first century horror films, Get Out! pays homage both to Rosemary’s Baby and the original Stepford Wives, while going on to do something totally extraordinary on its own terms.
But Hagazussa? Oof. It just wants to take every trope of witchy horror and turn the volume up to 11.
But even more troubling than that, Hagazussa leaves its own central epistemological question totally unanswered: is Albrun (and was her mother) a witch, or not? If Albrun is not a witch, then all the persecution she endures feels all the more unwarranted, all the more historically realistic, and all the more horrific. I’m all for that reading of the film. If Albrun is a witch, then she is the shittiest witch in history. The mushroom eating? The inability to stick up to herself even to the village boys who tease her? Come on. She’s not scary enough to be the anchor for the film’s horror, not by a mile.
So, while I was watching this movie, and finding the whole thing gross and stupid, I assumed Albrun was not a real witch. I assumed she was being persecuted because her mother was a single mother, as was she. But in the end, Albrun’s body catches fire in the morning sunlit. I’m going to say that again. She literally catches on fire on a hilltop and burns up. I guess because she is actually a witch? Or maybe a vampire, and that’s why she ate her baby? She’s a Lilith proxy of some kind?
But the thing is, there’s zero narrative warrant for any of this. She’s too feckless, too chaotic, too incompetent. If she’s burning because she’s a witch, she’s a no-talent witch, and yet all of nature and/or God has decided to punish her for being witchy. If she’s burning because she’s a vampire, then just about every prior aspect of the film hasn’t made sense, particularly the huge number of prior scenes in which she’s in sunlight. If she’s some kind of Lilith proxy, then she’s an embarrassment to the order of lilin.
But let’s stick with it. She is a witch, and that’s why she burns. Spontaneously, and in the middle of nature. In the logic of this film, a witch is a person who is rejected by the natural world itself, after being repeatedly tortured and abused, and then after committing a drug-induced act of infanticide. No need for a stake to burn her on; the hillside is just fine, and she won’t fight back, but will simply submit. And somehow, the film seems fine with that: our final shot just has us linger, painfully, for a long time, on Albrun’s combusting corpse.
And that’s when I realized. This film isn’t just scattered and illogical. It’s conservative and misogynist. We’re made to watch a woman suffer sexual abuse—twice—and then have her livelihood taken from her (the goats), while she’s trying to raise a baby on her own. Because the movie wants to torch her at the end, and it knows that, it then has to undermine any possibility of true empathy with her, so it has her do a bunch of shrooms and kill her baby, before poisoning a bunch of innocent people (though not that innocent, given how they bully her and slaughter her goats) with a rat. This film is historical pulp fiction about how bad girls who get themselves off (with goats) and do drugs (which they share with woodland maggots) get punished.
I don’t think of myself as a horror critic, but as a scholar of feminism and horror. But I will give this puppy a rating. One star, for acting and production values, which are both quite strong. But whoever had the fever dream that produced the story needs to do some personal work on his/her feelings toward women.