Sukkubus (1989)

Around the early 19th Century, in the Swiss Alps. Three herdsmen, never named by anything but their job description, and therefore called Senn (something like the foreman in the alpine dairyman business, played by Peter Simionischek), Hirt (herdsman, Giovanni Früh) and Bub (boy, Andy Voss), are going about their cow-minding business, regularly moving their herd from one alpine hut to the next. It’s not all happy cow times, though. Senn is rather too much on the self-righteous side, so when he is fighting what he clearly interprets as his and others sinful urges he does it with a bit too much enthusiasm. Still, the version of Christianity of his time and place Senn follows is paired with quite a few little superstitious rites that can’t quite hide their pagan roots. Hirt, on the other hand, has never met any impulse he’s trying to repress. So he’s perpetually horny, dabbling in the darker kind of ritual magic, and not averse to attempting to rape the boy. The Bub, when not being accosted by the Hirt, is about as innocent as they come. Well, apart from his obsession with getting his hand licked by one particular cow.

After about forty minutes or so of watching these men, Senn and Hirt get raucously drunk on the medicinal stuff and start building a Sennentuntschi, the image of a woman made out of wood, clothes and hay while blaspheming merrily. Of course, the thing comes to life (as a perpetually naked Pamela Prati), and begins hounding the trio in various lethal ways that can’t be stopped by the grown-up men trying to brutalize her to death or ban her with folk magic.

Sukkubus is a curious film, a bit of psychological but staunchly supernatural folk horror made by a German company on a decent budget – so nothing German cinema has any love for – directed by Georg Tressler who mostly worked in sex comedies and the painfully harmless Heimatfilm genre before, and in just as bland TV afterwards. How and why this combination resulted in a German, Swiss-set folk horror movie with long swathes of calm character observation and a bit of sleaze in its second half is anybody’s guess, but I’m pretty happy this thing exists.

It is a rather slow film, but the slowness is caused by its focus on first showing us the psychological brokenness of these lonely men in a world without women, civilisation or even proper distraction. There’s also great care taken with simply showing us the world they populate, and the reality of the work they do, as well as the way they position the supernatural - the protective power of the saints in Senn’s case, something older and more honestly dark in Hirt’s – as part of their daily work and life. Really, the folk magic and folkloric interpretations of Christianity seem to be the best entertainment these guys are going to get; it’s no wonder the boy likes that cow so much.

Having prepared the field this way, the entry of the clearly and obviously supernatural only seems logical, not just on the psychological level where the repressed (in Senn’s case) or the much too un-repressed (Hirt) urges of the men come to life to haunt and kill them in exactly the form they loathe and desire, love and hate at the same time, but also simply following the folkloric logic the men themselves live by to its final consequence.

It’s a rather effective film in that, at least if a viewer has the patience for, or even better, interest in, watching Tressler first build the world that is going to come crashing down on the characters.