Draug

 

Sometimes it is important to remember the horror element that went into creating Sword & Sorcery.  Howard was not really a horror writer, but he enjoyed horror fiction and was pen pals with both Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, so horror was definitely on his mind, plus, S&S was a product of the kind of strange, cross-genre stew in the early pulps that came to be called “weird fiction”, which was a mix of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, lost race stories, past-life regression, ghost tales, and historical fantasizing.  Horror is a definite component in Sword & Sorcery fiction and that should not be forgotten.

So here we have Swedish movie Draug, which was an independent production originally released in 2018 without much notice.  For those who don’t know, draug or draugr is a term for a kind of undead presence in Nordic myth – something between a ghost and a zombie.  The definition is flexible, which makes it a good term for a lot of things, plus it’s a cool word that looks and sounds menacing in English.

Set in the 11th Century in Sweden, the movie starts right off with a guy named Hakon and his adoptive daughter Nanna.  He has been called upon to investigate the disappearance of a missionary and the men who traveled with him, who all left for the northlands and have not been heard from since.  He recruits some men and they head off into the mountainous forests.  The film benefits greatly from being filmed in the exact location where it is set, and the brooding forests are both beautiful and menacing.

Along the way Hakon and Nanna pick up another guy, Kettil, who is apparently an old friend of Hakon, but who is also a raging asshole.  He provides a lot of tension, as while he and Hakon seemingly share a past, and his men and help are needed, no one really trusts him.  The movie spends a good amount of time with them moving deeper into the wilderness, letting the suspense build up, as the moody music and the isolation are inherently unnerving.

Along the way they encounter some rebels, have a satisfyingly chaotic and bloody battle, and then they are even more isolated, hunted by enemies, and burdened with wounded.  One by one the men die off, and Nanna emerges as the real protagonist, with a connection to the events as they unfold.  It is here that the supernatural horror, only hinted at before, begins to ratchet up.  The buildup is very subtle, and the movie gets a lot of mileage out of the slow pans across the forest while you watch intently, waiting for something to move, and then it does and you get a jolt.  It’s a simple device, but it works.

The costumes are solid, even if there are some anachronistic bits here and there.  The weapons and equipment look good, and the combat is depicted very realistically, without any action-movie flourishes.  The prosthetics are good, and the effects overall are effective.  The story elements are subtle, and not everything is plainly spelled-out, so you have to pay attention.  Plus, horror derives a lot of power from uncertainty, and the filmmakers here remembered that.

So this is definitely a lower-budget movie, but it uses what it has, and it succeeds in creating a dark, haunted mood that will stick with you.  Hardcore horror fans will doubtless find it too light on scares and gore, but I think it is a solid, well-acted, and surprisingly well-written little movie that actually ties up its themes and character arcs in a satisfying way.  This is on Prime right now, and it is only in Swedish with well-done subtitles.  If you enjoyed The Ritual or shows like Zone Blanche, then this is a good bet.

The Deep Forest

 

Dawn lit the far edge of the sea, and the wind came in from shore and snapped the dirty white sails taut.  Jaya watched them as they bellied and swelled, and then the tide began to draw them out to sea and the heavy, ungraceful ship began to move.  It did not glide over the water like a proper canoe, but seemed to wallow and dig into the waves.  Every rope and beam creaked and groaned as the wind pushed it, and she shook her head at such an ungainly beast.

She watched Bastar as he steered, standing close with her hand on her sword to strike him down if he did anything she distrusted.  He worked the great, spoked wheel that controlled the ship with the ease of familiarity, letting it spin this way and then that way, seeming to feel his way out of the cove.  She stood closer to the rail and looked down, saw the sea-foam curl along the heavy hull as they slipped between the headlands of the anchorage and out into the wider sea.

The ship felt the waves shift and swung to the side, and Bastar turned to go with them, letting the currents guide him.  There were rocks and shoals out here, and she had to trust that he knew how to evade them.  She watched how he did it, his feet planted wide to brace himself.  He was so tall that she had to look up at him, and she didn’t like that.  He was even larger than the other giants, even if his hair was not that sickening yellow.  He had so much hair on his arms and his chest that he looked like a beast himself.

The forward sail began to ruffle and her Ekwa hurried to trim it.  They did not know the ways of this ship, but Bastar had shown them everything he could, and the principles were the same.  The Ekwa might not trust this ship any more than she did, but they knew the sea, and sailcraft, and they learned quickly.

Bastar squinted upward, watching the pennons used to judge the wind, and he nodded, gave the wheel another spin.  They were close-hauled, headed southward across the winds out of the west.  Later, they were meant to turn north, tacking westward so long as the winds stayed steady.

“Four or five days,” he said, “if the winds hold.  Sometimes there are storms this time of year.”  He glanced at her.  “You don’t know these waters.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.  “They do,” she said, indicating her warriors.  Nine, now, including Dhatun.  They had burned the two slain by the dragon and scattered their ashes to the sea.  The others had not asked to return home, and she had not offered.

“The Ekwa,” he said, and shook his head.  “They tell stories of them to curdle a man’s blood, how is it they obey you?”

“Perhaps they fear me,” she said.  “Perhaps they should.”  She gave him a meaningful look and he ducked his head, made a placating gesture with his fingers, still holding the wheel.

Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan

 

This is another Netflix docu-drama not far from the vein of Rise of Empires: Ottoman, with a combination of documentary-style narration with fully-acted scenes depicting the critical moments of the history in question.  If you couldn’t tell from the title, this is a series about the end of the so-called Sengoku Period.  The period actually stretches from the mid-1400s to the very end of the warring states in 1615, but this 6-part series focuses on the fairly coherent period from the rise of the warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1551 through the Battle of Sekigahara and the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600.

For the novice, this is a dense and complex period of history, and the show does a good job of laying things out and explaining what went on.  For those already familiar with the period, it will seem to belabor things a bit, but really, making this tangle of alliances, betrayals, and wars make sense is a challenge the series rises to pretty well.  Six episodes is not a lot of time to cover the three great unifiers of Japan in their fifty-year dance of conquest and power, but they do it well.

The acted scenes are not as in-depth as the ones in Ottoman, but the production values are first-rate, with especial praise needed for the costumes and armoring, as they look fantastic.  The interior sets are decent, even if a lot of them look smaller than you would expect, and the battle scenes are largely more impressionistic, with a lot of disconnected moments of violence cut together to give the feel of a battle, rather than masses of troops maneuvering.  You do get some larger-scale shots, though they are obviously done with CGI.  The quality of the violence is pretty good, even if they do use a bit too much digital blood for my taste.

What really makes this of interest to the Sword & Sorcery fan is the laying out of the period as a highly dramatic opera of larger-than-life personalities engaged in one of the most Byzantine struggles for power ever seen in any country.  Oda Nobunaga, the first of the great warlords to begin the unification of his island nation after centuries of warfare, was known as “The Demon King” for his ruthless slaughter of defeated enemies, and his campaign of conquest only came to an end when he was betrayed by one of his own generals and committed suicide before he could be slain.

His death led to another scramble for power, and the one who succeeded him was Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a common-born soldier who had risen through the ranks by sheer ability, and who avenged his fallen lord and then proceeded to dominate Japan for the next sixteen years, enlarging his power base, defeating and then allying such colorful vassals as Date Masamune, the “One-Eyed Dragon”, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the future master of Japan.

The show carefully details the personal and political conflicts that fueled the warfare within the realm, and so it makes sense that once Hideyoshi had pacified Japan, he turned that energy outward in a bid to conquer mainland China.  The drama of the small, island nation hurling itself against the massive, ancient empire, ruled by a fading dynasty, is irresistible, and from a narrative standpoint, it is disappointing that the invasion bogged down into a quagmire in Korea and never achieved anything significant.

The ultimate victory of the Tokugawa – after the festival of beheadings, massacres, betrayals and suicides that preceded it – seems almost anticlimactic in retrospect.  Ieyasu built on what had already been done, and simply took the last few steps that needed to be taken.  The curtain came down on the warring states period, and Japan became an isolated totalitarian state for 268 years.  The battle of Sekigahara – while easily the decisive battle in Japanese history – does not have the barbaric drama of the earlier wars.  Tokugawa was a schemer and a strategist, but no one was ever going to call him a “Demon King”.

This is a solid show, and it provides plenty of grist for the mill of ideas from which Sword & Sorcery springs.  Themes of war and cruelty are universal, as are struggles for power, conquest, and the collisions of personal hatreds with political ambition.  A setting like this, in a period of war, when war has been the rule for centuries, is a rich one for tales of adventure and bloody action.  Warriors with rigid codes of honor, clashing in savage struggles where morality is erased beneath ambition and necessity – that sounds like the essence of S&S to me.

The Devil's Island

 

Beyond the fall of night, as the waves roiled over the deep and the sky turned to fire in the west, Jaya and her men rowed for the dark shape of the island.  The ten Ekwa rowed silently, wise in the ways to cut the water without a sound, hunched low behind the rail of the longboat.  Dhatun himself rode the tiller, his leg hooked over the side to steady it with his foot.  Jaya was in the bow, bent low so she would not make a high shape above the waves.

She had spent almost the passing of a moon with the Ekwa, recovering from her ordeal, and now the scars of the sea only stung slightly when she touched them.  She had new tattoos on her shoulders, marking the heads she claimed and was entitled to, as well as new marks on her hands to make her known to all Ekwa she might encounter.  She wore her hair like one of them, twisted into braids and knotted behind her.  She had painted her face black tonight, so she would not be seen.

The island was a low shadow, like the raised spine of a dead animal, the central ridge jagged and cloaked by high jungle.  Even from so far away Jaya could smell the quick scents of flowers and smoke, the sour odor of sweat and shit and castoff food.  Men were there, it only remained to see how many.  If there were few, they would slaughter them, if there were more she would have to plan, as she wanted more than blood: She wanted a prisoner.

The harbor was on the north end of the island, so she had been told, so they cut for the southern shore, which was too rocky and exposed for large ships.  Dhatun knew the approach, and she watched carefully as they headed in for land.  She saw the slight disturbances of the water where reefs haunted and noted the way the currents broke.  Most of all she watched for any flicker of light, for they did not wish to be sighted.

The canoe’s bottom scraped on the sand and she jumped out, the others a breath behind.  They grabbed the boat and dragged it up beyond the reach of the water – easily done at high tide.  They moved it in among the rocks, and the other warriors quickly fanned out to gather seaweed clumps and large palm fronds to cover it, so it would not be easily spotted from afar.

Jaya took her new spear in hand and stood guard, watching for any sign that they had been noticed, but the night was quiet, with only the sounds of birds and insects in the trees.  She touched the sword sheathed at her side and sniffed the air, catching only a hint of smoke in among the jungle decay and, beneath it, something bitter and reptilian.

Furious

 

This is a 2017 Russian-produced film based on on the historical Siege of Ryazan and events surrounding it, though we don’t have a huge amount of hard information about the battle, so people can – and have – felt free to invent a lot of heroic detail.  The main plot centers around the warrior Evpaty Kolovrat and his efforts to at first defend the town, and afterward to avenge it.

Set during the mongol invasion of Russia in the 13th century, this is a quasi-historical epic that doesn’t let accuracy get too much in the way of the action.  At the beginning our hero, Evpaty, is just a child, and he sees his lord and retainers cut down and captured by a mongol ambush.  He is wounded in the head and left unconscious.  We then cut ahead to 13 years later, when he has grown to belong to the prince’s guard and suffers from a strange type of amnesia, where whenever he sleeps he wakes up in a kind of berserk rage, thinking he is back on that day.

The movie takes a good bit of time to show us his daily life before it gets wrecked, and I think that was a good choice.  We see his wife and his children and his friends, we see Ryazan before it is destroyed, and so later there is more emotional weight to the death and ruin in the town.  Also, the sets, both indoor and outdoor, are outstanding, and combined with the first-rate costuming we see an imagined slice of Slavic life from the middle ages, which is not something often seen in the West.

Once the action gets going, it is good stuff.  The weapons and armor are all pretty good, even if the mongol costuming can get a little outlandish.  Accurate or not, the costumes look fantastic.  The fight scenes have good choreography and imaginative cinematography, so they are exciting and visceral.  Unknown actor Aleksandr Choi is magnetic as Batu Khan, and he probably gives the best performance in the whole movie, really giving the villain of the piece a lot more depth than you would expect.

This was shot in Russia, and so the filmmakers made great use of the snowy, frozen vistas you can probably only find there.  There are also a good number of CG backgrounds and digital flyovers, and while these look like CG, they are not terrible, and they sell the kind of oversaturated, hyper-real world of the movie.  The plucky bunch of misfits, led by their vengeful warrior with his two swords and his traumatic brain injury, poison the mongols, set their camp on fire, and terrorize them with various masks and costumes, all while fighting off numerous attempts to kill them.  I do like that the mongols are played by actual Asians, and that they are not made into caricatures or racist demons.

By the midway point it becomes pretty obvious that this movie is basically trying to create a Russian-themed version of 300, right down to the hopeless but dramatic last stand and even directly referencing some specific shots.  Choi’s Batu Khan is definitely in the same ballpark as Rodrigo Santoro’s Xerxes, though not so cartoonishly depicted.  And as with 300, the filmmakers are kind of stuck with the fact that Batu Khan won this war – he flattened the Russian principalities and the Golden Horde ruled Russia for 250 years.  It can be hard to make an uplifting ending out of something like that, so they mostly don’t try, rather embracing that tragic aspect of Russian folklore and history.

I will note that the dubbing on this is absolutely unbearable, and if you are going to watch it at all, switch over to Russian with subtitles, as otherwise you will be groaning too hard to pay attention to anything but the bad, bad voice-overs.  In the original language, however, this film is transformed.  Some stunning scenery, great cinematography, good fight and stunt work combined with stellar sets and costumes that really evoke a different world.  If this movie had thrown in Baba Yaga or something, then it would definitely be a Sword & Sorcery movie, as it is, this sits comfortably on the shelf beside Howard stories like “Swords of Black Cathay” or “Shadow of the Vulture”.  You can watch this on Prime and it is definitely worth a look.