In mainstream culture, pagan imagery and Christian symbolism are rarely juxtaposed as bravely as they are in horror media. Film revels in apocryphal visions of mythical, demonic terror—Ken Russel did in The Devils (1971), with his agonizing nun exorcism containing a note of Dionysian delight in the vein of Hieronymus Bosch. Such representation of hell, dark underworlds and rituals, even with their didactic intention, always seems to spill over into self-indulgence. However, The Devil’s Bath by director duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, one of the newest additions to the canon of cinematic interpretation of religion, never opposes Christian morality with obscene, old-world customs. Through the point of view of the chaste leading lady Agnes (singer-songwriter Anja Plaschg), faith exists as a broad spectrum of societal customs, rather than a strict dogmatic machine. The lines between canonical and heretical are blended to the point where they become unrecognizable, both in the plot and the main character.
Set in the hinterlands of XVIII century upper Austria, The Devil’s Bath follows Agnes, a young bride of a fragile and sensitive nature whose descend into a self-destructive depression is followed throughout the picture. Having a hard time handling her wifely duties, she yearns for a child, which her impotent and/or disinterested husband Wolf (David Scheid) can’t seem to provide for her. Besides the Catholic chapel, there seems to be little Messianic attitude among the villagers, not least because the rough terrain of their inhabited landscape requires a stone-cold, apathic existence. Even Agnes and Wolf’s wedding ceremony resembles more a vaguely pagan, collective ritual rather than the exchange of God-fearing vows bonding a divine union. Soon, Agnes finds herself in disaccord with the brutishness of her husband and fellow villagers. She prays to the Virgin Mary (or is it the idea of chaste motherhood that she’s praying to?), but also revels in nature worship and superstitious relics.
The ‘rural’ of rural horror almost always relates to religious traditions. In many film examples, village life becomes a cinematic playground for exploring a pre-historical pastoral Utopia as much as it can be a morality-based fear mongering terrain. For a more or less seasoned horror connoisseur, the rural set-up of The Devil’s Bath is very reminiscent of its 1960s and 1970s genre precursors. Allusions to paganism and folk horror associations recall the cult classic The Wicker Man (Robert Hardy, 1973) in a very matter-of-fact manner. The overt representation of the idolatrous world of pre-Christian faith in folk horror relies on the polarity created between a collective of Them (the pagans, the villagers, the ‘old believers’, the unchristened ‘savages’ from the point of view of a monotheist) and an isolated black sheep, more often than not, an outsider, like in The Wicker Man or the more recent fan-favorite, Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2016). The Steven King-inspired franchise Children of The Corn, with its Midwestern quasi-biblical sect of underage killers, uses this ostracization from society in cults as a catalysator for a slasher-typical massacre. The Devil’s Bath complicates this question by relating not directly to religion, but to the very consummation of it. Agnes is not ostracized from others because of faith, but rather due to her delicate way of being. She is, in her own right, a pious Christian figure, living in fear of sin. Franz and Fiala completely abandon the drift between Christianity and its supposed pagan enemies, but rather treat all forms of religion as a source of societal repression, or, in other cases, comfort.
With Agnes’s agonizing earthly life and her suicide by proxySuicide by proxy is a historical phenomenon where people (mostly women) would commit crimes (often murdering a child) in order to be convicted and killed as a punishment. In this way, they would be able to confess and be absolved of their sin, which would not be possible if they were to commit suicide. as the road to eternal rest, the movie’s protagonist becomes a cinematic martyress. Female martyrdom on screen can be read in a twofold way. It can be a radical act of feminism that serves as a cathartic eye-opener for the audience, but it almost always teeters on exploitation. Perhaps the underlying reason for writers to criticize the role of feminine corporality in the horror (sub)genre(s) shares common ground with the instrumentalization of female suffering in early Christianity. One might walk into a chapel, ending up face-to-face with the gaping stigmata of the pre-resurrected Messiah or the lithe, arrow-spiked Saint Sebastian. What is the difference between these two figures of noble pain and the martyrdom of a woman, both in history and on screen? The idea of women as sinful creatures of the flesh in Christian theology makes their piety all the more spiritually lucrative.
Before you assume that quasi-Freudian symbolic analysis of knives, wounds and guns comes next, let me put your mind at ease: that’s not the case. The fact that such an approach would be completely irrelevant and useless, makes the refreshing awareness of Franz and Fiala’s approach to female pain in horror stand out even more. Agnes’s suffering builds up over the course of the film’s runtime, in track with the heroine’s distorted view of self. To Agnes, self-mutilation, like scraping her tongue with thorns and scratching her face in the coarse ground, provides comfort in the inability to process her own emotions. The usual fetishistic treatment of female pain, ranging from Hitchcock’s prosecuted housewives, the nameless stabbed beauties of giallo cinema, all the way to the unrestrained cinematic sadism of Lars von Trier, now becomes self-actualized, as gruesome as it is. The violence of The Devil’s Bath is both “barbaric” and noble, liberating and restraining at the same time.
Even Agnes’s name reminds one of the sacrificial lamb of God (Agnus dei), so it’s not hard to see her as the representation of purity and sacrifice. But as mentioned earlier, Agnes’s death is also her self-assertion, which makes her martyrdom heroic in the theological sense. In his praise of female chastity, De Virginibus, Middle-Age theologian St Ambrose wrote about St Agnes of Sicily: “She was fearless under the cruel hands of the executioners, she was unmoved by the heavy weight of the creaking chains, offering her whole body to the sword of the raging soldier, as yet ignorant of death, but ready for it”.St Ambrose (1896) ‘De Virginibus’, Peter Schlaff (Ed.) A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: Second Edition, Vol. 10, p. 364. One could easily think this extract to be taken out of a synopsis for The Devil’s Bath, talking about the last minutes of the protagonist’s life. Saint Agnes is known to have been young in her hagiographies, just as The Devil’s Bath’s Agnes is innocent and inexperienced in the material world.
For Agnes, death represents the ultimate purification ritual and, paradoxically, makes her human. The visual orientation of violence in this film keeps coming back to the remorseless detachment of a butchery—there is little difference between the decapitation of a rooster and the taking of a human life. French philosopher Georges Bataille wrote that “death accentuates the transgressiveness that characterizes animals. It enters the depths of the animal’s being; it’s the bloody ritual that uncovers the existence of this depth.”Georges Bataille (1987) Œuvres complètes, tome 10, p. 84. But even in its primordial nature, this violence is never put in opposition with the Christian faith of the Austrian folk. Franz and Fiala frame the villagers’ cruelty as a survival instinct, almost an initiation ritual, especially in the climactic punishment scene at the end of the film. Agnes is so desperate to leave this life and social order, that she resorts to taking an innocent life. That way she may be pardoned before her execution, instead of suffering eternal condemnation for the unforgivable sin of suicide.
In a petrifyingly suspenseful forest sequence, Agnes asks a village boy to take her to the hill to show her an altar. Once they’ve arrived, she bribes him to stay with her and pray for a moment before going back. They get on their knees and, as the boy falls deep in thought, kneeled next to her, Agnes pulls out a pocket knife and stabs him in the neck. The boy screeches in pain, wailing for help with screams akin to those of a slaughtered animal. Agnes inflicts the second, deadly wound and soon after, holding the boy’s lifeless body in her arms, she rejoices. Muttering, she calls him an angel of God, as the boy has died before being able to sin. Many elements of the scene are reminiscent of the Biblical story about The Binding of Isaac by his father Abraham—the hilltop, the altar and the sacrifice, but instead of the Angel of God interfering with the bloodshed, film scene applies transcendence to the boy’s physical form after the gruesome act has already been committed. In a transliteral reinterpretation of a famously controversial Abrahamic tale, the creators of The Devil’s Bath get to the very core of sacrificial symbolism in any religious form—putting (the) God(s) in your favor. No winged Gabriel would come around to save the boy in this godforsaken corner of “Catholic” world.
At the end of the film Agnes undergoes a quasi-apotheosis: she is at once both the heretic and the martyr. An invert final girl, at that. Contradiction, without any negative connotation that may be attached to this word, seems to be the main ingredient of this film. Religion represents both restraint and freedom, and the seemingly opposing routes of Christianity and old-world religion coexist in both of these categories. It’s as if Agnes goes through two character arcs at the same time, one as a sinner and one as a saint—as she’s decapitated, the crowd cheers on the slaughter of a morally dubious killer; at the same time, she symbolically represents the evangelical martyr, whose suffering is celebrated by the pagan horde, humiliating her in her reverence. The duality of Agnes might be the key to understanding just how inseparable Christians and heathens are in a (folk) horror context.