The visitation to the family in creepy reminds me of the Krampuslauf in Austria. Krampus is supposedly the evil twin of Santa Klaus. So tradition has it that he chases after the bad children and carries them off to Hell, while the good children receive gifts. When I was living in Vienna I attended a few of the “Krampus Runs” (as they’re called), where people in horrific masks chase after kids and scare them to death. This is not like haunted houses in the States. Sometimes, in the more rural districts, they guys dressing up as Krampus get a little too much into it. It’s a tradition that would never fly in the State. And if you ever visit Innsbruck, there is a wonderful Tyrolean folklore museum, and every year at Christmas time they do a special exhibit displaying traditional Nativity Scenes and Krampus costumes, some of which are over a hundred years old. So I felt the pain of the kids who were horrified of the visitation.
I liked that sequence because I think our traditions of things like Halloween and the Krampus are directly related to pre-Christian rituals like this.
The slaying of the bull was very Mithraic. Interestingly, that HBO series from the middle ‘90s called “Rome”, one of the characters goes to a Mithraeum in order to participate in one of those sacrifices. In the episode, she goes into a chamber beneath a stone grate and prays in a simple cloth. They drag the bull over the grate and slay it and the blood spews down on her as she’s praying. A rather gruesome imagining of such things, but I thought it was pretty believable.
The visitation to the family in creepy reminds me of the Krampuslauf in Austria. Krampus is supposedly the evil twin of Santa Klaus. So tradition has it that he chases after the bad children and carries them off to Hell, while the good children receive gifts. When I was living in Vienna I attended a few of the “Krampus Runs” (as they’re called), where people in horrific masks chase after kids and scare them to death. This is not like haunted houses in the States. Sometimes, in the more rural districts, they guys dressing up as Krampus get a little too much into it. It’s a tradition that would never fly in the State. And if you ever visit Innsbruck, there is a wonderful Tyrolean folklore museum, and every year at Christmas time they do a special exhibit displaying traditional Nativity Scenes and Krampus costumes, some of which are over a hundred years old. So I felt the pain of the kids who were horrified of the visitation.
I liked that sequence because I think our traditions of things like Halloween and the Krampus are directly related to pre-Christian rituals like this.
The slaying of the bull was very Mithraic. Interestingly, that HBO series from the middle ‘90s called “Rome”, one of the characters goes to a Mithraeum in order to participate in one of those sacrifices. In the episode, she goes into a chamber beneath a stone grate and prays in a simple cloth. They drag the bull over the grate and slay it and the blood spews down on her as she’s praying. A rather gruesome imagining of such things, but I thought it was pretty believable.