Disney's animation classic, "Fantasia", has put on film one of the most terrifyingly imagined witches' sabbats ever.
The Disney film "Fantasia" (1940) is no children's flick. In fact, it's quite creepy. Consider, for example, the death march of the dinosaurs to the tune of a rehashed version of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" (itself based on a probably fictitious ancient Slavic rite of human sacrifice). Then, you have Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", in which a young apprentice steals his master's magic hat and uses it to get a broomstick to carry water for him. The problem arises when he can't figure out how to stop the broomstick. The casting of Mickey Mouse as the apprentice somehow renders this cautionary tale even more disturbing, particularly the image of Mickey standing on a mountaintop calling up the water and calling down the stars with equal unthinking abandon. And to think this film came out before Hiroshima.
But nothing beats the others for creepiness (with the possible exception of Rite of Spring) like "Night on Bald Mountain".
Night on Bald Mountain is full of paradox and syncretism, borne out rather nicely by the now-legendary animation. This was your grandad's Disney. How the mighty have fallen. The composer, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, drank himself to death at age 42. One story has it that he was finished off by a final bottle of vodka that he conned out of a sympathetic but dumb hospital orderly.
Like Saint-Saen's equally famous Danse Macabre (based on the late medieval Dance of Death discussed by Barbara Tuchman from this week's book review), Night on Bald Mountain is usually considered an autumn piece suited to Halloween. One album cover, for example, showed a particularly disturbing detail from Hieronymous Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" of a man-like monster structure in Hell. But it actually commemorates a legend about St. John's Night (June 23-4, one of the shortest days of the year) set on "Bare Mountain" near Kiev in Ukraine. Gogol originally wrote about it in a short story about a young man who lives to regret stumbling upon a witches' sabbat, much the way so many night travelers in Celtic yore regret stumbling upon fairy revels. Chernobog (The Devil's name in the work) was an apparently minor Slavic deity about whom little is known, though he may have been a dark aspect or negative complement to the very important sun god Dazhbog.
Yet, the initial image of the dead streaming out of their graves in a parody of Judgment Day, the succubi dancing on the Devil's fingers, even the name of the Devil (Chernobog), are medieval concepts in origin, as is the final image at dawn of light-bearing pilgrims chasing away the demons to the amazing voice of Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria" (Hail Mary).
