I love hearing about the gross stuff. Like this one, from The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft by Kathryn Paulsen, 1970:

For Love: Put a frog in an anthill. Powder the skeleton obtained, mix it with bat blood and dried flies, and make it into tiny buns. Add them to the food of the one you want.

Yes, willful poisoning will surely have ‘em knocking down your door. Like many things I love, there’s never much talk about this kinda stuff beyond my own apartment. So imagine my delight when this news story broke:

Witch bottle is uncorked to discover spellbinding content:

Take a small heart-shaped piece of leather, a handful of iron nails, eight brass pins, a lock of hair, some nail clippings, a pinch of navel fluff and place them in a bottle. Then add a pint of urine, seal the bottle and bury it by your front door — this is the recipe for warding off a witch’s curse.

Great! I love the navel fluff most. How do some of my books recommend warding off witches?

From the book noted above:

Against elf and strange charm-magic, into wine crumble myrrh and an equal portion of white frankincense, and shave a part of the stone jet into the wine. After fasting at night drink this for three or for nine or for twelve mornings.

From A Treasury of Witchcraft, Harry E. Wedeck, ed., 1961:

Black-luggie, hammer-head,
Rowan-tree, and red thread
Put the warlocks to their speed
- Old English charm

The Discovery of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot, 1665:

In some countries they nail a wolf’s head to the door, to prevent and cure all mischiefs by charms and witchcraft.

Or again from The Complete Book, noted above:

The urine or blood of a person who has been bewitched is put in a tightly sealed bottle with iron nails and hair clipping and boiled at midnight inside a sealed house. The witch, feeling painful burning, will come knocking at the door. When she is not allowed to enter, she will die, and the spell will be broken. The bottle and its contents must afterward be buried.

Well that certainly seems to corroborate the spell done for that pee-bottle. Wonder if it worked? I’ll leave you with a quote from the chemist who tested it:

When I first heard about witch bottles I assumed that you had to catch a witch and make her wee in it. But of course it is much easier and makes more sense to do it yourself, based on the ‘scientific theory’ behind it.

One of my absolute favorite newer horror films, produced for the Spanish television series, Películas para no dormir (Films to keep you awake). The DVD set is worth picking up for this film and Cuento de Navidad alone.

The movie hasn’t had the attention I think it deserves. It’s a clever, engaging, well-made, and thought-provoking. So many viewers have been thrown off by the very last scene that it seems to erase the enjoyment they got out of the first 75 minutes. But for me, Adivina quién soy is really captivating. Without the last scene, you have a surrealist-lite horror movie. With it, you go a little deeper.

There aren’t many girls in horror films I can actually identify with, but a few I can (to an extent): Bridget in Ginger Snaps, Paul in Heavenly Creatures, most recently Christine in Drag Me To Hell (which I think is a sign I’ve grown up). The first two, anyway, fit a type: disaffected loners who retreat into fantasy worlds of their own making, until the fantasies collide violently with the real world. They also hate their parents. I love mine, but we’ve all been teenagers, or pre-teens, or in Estrella’s case, ten. Watching Estrella in Adivina quién soy reminded me so much of my own childhood that it made me love the movie much more than I might had I no personal connection to it. But I do, so…I love it.

The movie opens with a military complex, a dead man with a tattoo, meaningful looks and long walks down the hallways of squalid apartment buildings. You have a pretty good idea of what kind of movie you’re watching—until the setting changes almost immediately to a comfortable but lonely apartment and a latchkey kid.

A young girl, Estrella, is a loner and horror fan whose only friends are the monsters in her imagination—Leatherface and “Vampiro,” a man who looks like Murnau’s Nosferatu. Her single mother, Angela, works late and leaves Estrella at home alone. Estrella watches horror movies and lets her imagination run wild.

Angela assumes the worst when she hears Estrella is talking with “monsters.” That implication, coupled with all the attention paid to Estrella by older men, monsters or not, had me cringing.

At this point I want to adopt Estrella and whisk her away to safety. But the film veers away from that idea and goes for something much more interesting.

Estrella is adorable, and so real.

Horror fans will probably see a little of themselves in her, as she’s watching something that’s suspiciously not The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—even if you don’t get a little teary-eyed over Leatherface’s final chainsaw-swinging scene like she does. And anyone who grew up with a single parent should have a lot to identify with in Estrella.

She understands the monsters, she knows they’re friendly to her. She doesn’t understand adults. They—her mother, her teacher, her building’s security guard, even Vampiro— are involved in some very unsavory activities. Her fantasy world also collides violently with real life, when Vampiro comes over for dinner, and reveals a connection to Angela and Estrella beyond anything Estrella imagined.

Vampiro reveals himself to be cruel and abusive, hinting at a shared past with Estrella and Angela, and Angela is terrified. Estrella’s monster friends come to her aid to defeat him.

And then there’s the short final scene. Not spoiling anything, but at the end of the film, you aren’t sure what parts have been real and what haven’t. Normally I really hate that kind of ending, as I think most people do, but here it worked for me. This time it was actually refreshing to chalk up the entire plot to one girl’s imagination, and marvel at how she incorporates pieces of her real life into her fantasy.

But what’s more interesting to me is how the movie asks you to confront your own worst assumptions about the characters surrounding Estrella, when it’s Estrella who’s determining all the action, and conjuring up such a disturbing fantasy world, with the adults she knows as the inhabitants.

The movie is beautifully shot in La Villa Olímpica, Barcelona, and the modern, abstracted architecture does a lot to heighten the surreality. And a lot to make me want to live in Barcelona. This movie makes an interesting contrast to Låt den rätte komma in (Let the right one in), similar in lots of ways, with their lonely kids and empty apartment block houses and strange manifestations of burgeoning puberty, but very different in intent. But that’s a talk for another time.

More screencaps here.

I have A LOT to say about this movie, and I will once I get a non-taped-from-free-weekend-of-premium-channels copy. Starring my dream boyfriend Robert Sean Leonard, Rene Auberjonois (who has been featured in every good televison show in history), and Fannie Flagg.

I am now the first person to search Google Images for “fannie flagg vampire.”