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2006 HoleHead - SIMON KING OF THE WITCHES |
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Contributed by Sara Schieron
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Sunday, 11 June 2006 |
SIMON KING OF THE WITCHES is a super fun, sorcery themed suspense story
from 1971. Filled with clearly researched mystic esoterica and peppered
with sometimes silly, sometimes ponderous special effects, the film
reads like a cross between a Corman psychedelic flick and an exposition
on practical occultism. Having no fear about alternative faiths, the
pairing of Theremin sounds with nudity and pentagrams doesn't creep me
out, and maybe that's why the film was so easy to enjoy - and so hard
to call horrifying. SIMON uses the tactics drilled into the ground by
those Time Life "Unsolved Mystery" book ads, and one can assume it used
these techniques before they'd been drilled into the ground on daytime
television. What is most enjoyable, and possibly most threatening,
about the film is the way it requests the audience's belief in Simon's
witchery. In fact, without our belief in his capacities, there's no
possibility this film could be frightening at all. To an effect, the
film needs our permission to be fearful and an engagement so explicit
is...well, really fun. It needs our permission to be effective and that's
all there is to that. |
Simon is a magician (also referred to as a warlock) who lives underground and is discovered by some local glitterati. This group of counter-culture socialites involve themselves in all aspects of "lower society": they "loiter", "push", and entertain all matter of sexual and religious preferences. We're educated about their lifestyles through euphemism, again asked to deduce what these characters do for money: what cause could yield them their living. Imagination is pretty central to understanding the causality of SIMON. As a sorcerer, Simon doesn't do tricks in the more concrete, or childlike sense. He manages energies and compels chains of events that result in the most mundane sorts of drama (death is mundane, as far as drama goes). True, Simon makes sticks glow in the dark, and in the ‘70's a glowing stick looks a little silly, but such hoodoo needn't go far to compel an audience's belief in Simon's powers.
One of the more impressive tests of our skill as a viewing audience is the prophetic dream sequence Simon suffers as a result of looking into his empowered mirror. He sees a slow dialectic of his begging girlfriend, lightning (think He-Man/She-Ra), water pooling, and his athame on fire. When he arises from his under aggrandized vision, he's thrown dead center into a cadre of political intrigue that the film hadn't touched up to that point. What is most impressive about the series of governmental actions is that they are communicated to us using much of the same logic we saw in Simon's vision. It's a mess of images, some of which we see by way of a black and white television, but we've spent the last 2 hours or so deciphering the film thus far, this one hurdle isn't' so hard to jump. It's also worth noting that the temporary inclusion of TV news offers us something of a literal or informal touchstone upon which to refer - the television is but another place we go to find facts we must convert to stories and details we must define with causality.
Fortunately (and surprisingly) not a moralistic story of animal and human sacrifice, SIMON could be read as a cautionary tale, but only if you choose to read it that way. SIMON requires a good deal of it's audience and in requiring so much it implicates us in the witchery of the film, thus resulting in what one assumes was the greatest fear all along: the fear we could be involved with the magick without our willing consent. Then again, to say we didn't consent might be a tad untrue.
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