The Coming of the Black Dawn (1965) & The Testament of Caleb Meeke (1969)

In The Coming of the Black Dawn, a young man arrives at the castle of his uncle to bring him a rare tractate that the old man needs to help Cthulhu bring on the end of the world as we know it. At first, our protagonist is into the whole business of graverobbing and letting an ancient evil speak through the thusly acquired corpse, but a vision of the changes that will come to himself after the end of the world do suggest second thoughts may be rather appropriate.

The Testament of Caleb Meeke sees another young men travelling towards yet another uncle’s place. In this case, though, the uncle is dead and the protagonist is attempting to gather his inheritance. Alas, this uncle also dabbled in the occult, as all uncles are wont to do; his diary and grimoire suggest pacts with the Old Ones dwelling in the woods. Obviously, there’s nothing good awaiting our nephew.

From the 60s through the 80s, amateur filmmaker/indie auteur Roy Spence ignored pretty much everything an independent filmmaker in Ireland was supposed to do at the time and produced a singular body of short films. These films mainly belong to the fantastical genres or are documentaries about local craftspeople. In these endeavours, Spence was assisted by his twin brother Neal, now a well-regarded poet. Quite a few of these films are now, happily, available to the public via the Irish Film Institute.

The two shorts movies we are concerned with today obviously belong to the former group of films (unless Irish craftsmen are weirder than anyone could have expected), and seem to be among the first movies Spence made. As far as I could read up on him, Spence was a bit of an americanophile, with a deep and abiding love for the country’s pop culture, especially its B-movies – good, bad and in-between. This influence is rather obvious in these two films, particularly in Spence’s fearless use of cheap and cheerful homemade special effects of the kind Paul Blaisdell cooked up for Roger Corman in the 50s. Like with the best of Blaisdell, the cheapness doesn’t overshadow the conceptual Weirdness (the capitalization is truly earned) but actually helps enhance it; some things are best expressed in cardboard and papier-mâché, it seems.

Another influence on Spence’s style here is silent expressionist cinema – which makes a lot of practical sense with movies shot with one camera, limited technical possibilities and with dubbed sound. Spence’s visual quotations and stylistic parallels to the world of Nosferatu and Caligari create a decidedly non-naturalistic world of big, strange emotions, and shadowed landscapes. In their best moments – and each of these two examples has at least four or five of these in twenty minutes of runtime – the films take on a mood of true strangeness, of things – perhaps some naked dudes in ski masks which stand in as faces without features – lurking in a somewhat disturbing manner in an early winter Irish forest, of the world being out of whack. It’s the sort of strangeness that can only be achieved by talented amateurs who don’t have to take all rules of conventional filmmaking as a given but who do have the spirit, the heart and the intelligence to come up with their own private rules and understand how those are informed by the non-amateurs whose work they have been inspired by.

This sort of thing is of course also exactly what I love in my obscure, somewhat heroic, indie horror movies, so I find myself rather giddy about the prospect of seeing more of Spence’s work. These specific two movies do also recommend themselves to me, personally and specifically, because they are at least somewhat informed by classical Weird Fiction. The Coming does suggest Lovecraft and Derleth through more than just the C-word, whereas The Testament’s dwellers in a pool in the woods do have more than just a slight whiff of Machen about them.