Welcome to a very special edition of Sects, Lies, and Videotape. To celebrate the first anniversary of the column, I am doing a double feature. Not only that, but I have recruited fellow AE columnist Dr. Mandy Albert, Ph.D., to discuss one of her favorite films. As always, I am open to reader requests (if you don’t mind waiting; 2024 is full).
On the afternoon of June 22, 1954, Pauline Parker of Christchurch, New Zealand, age 16, bludgeoned her mother Honora Rieper to death with a brick in a sock. She was abetted in this heinous crime by her very close friend Juliet Hulme, age 15. Unfortunately, Pauline did not have access to prestige television, which would have taught her not to take notes on a criminal conspiracy. Within hours, the police discovered Parker’s diaries, which outlined her intense relationship with Hulme, their equally intense interior life, and a step-by-step guide on how they intended to murder Pauline’s mom. They were convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, narrowly escaping the death penalty because of their age. They were released—or so it is rumored—on the condition that they never see each other again. And they never did—Hulme died earlier this year, after a long life as a successful novelist under the name Anne Perry. Parker lives as a hermit under the name Hillary Nathan.
The Parker-Hulme affair became a cause célèbre, first in New Zealand, where it scandalized the public, and then in the wider world. Its most important contribution to the arts is Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson’s fourth feature film, based directly on Parker’s diaries. It is the last film of Jackson’s Kiwi era, the first film to have even a little bit of Oscar respectability, the first film for BOTH Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet (who play the girls), and something of a dry run for the second phase of Jackson’s career, which has drifted further and further from the thesis statement of his first film, the appropriately titled Bad Taste (his other, better films of this period are Meet the Feebles and Braindead, both of which could also have been titled Bad Taste).
Heavenly Creatures, however, is not the first adaptation of the Parker-Hulme case. A quick glance at the Wikipedia page shows that the tragic event has inspired novels, plays, and at least one other film, sporting the delicious title Don’t Deliver Us From Evil (Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal). It is a French film from 1971, which almost tells you all you need to know. If you want to know more, it was the first film of Joël Séria, who made a lot of off-kilter stuff in the 1970s and almost nothing after. It also features the début performance of Jeanne Goupil, Séria’s muse and, eventually, the mother of his children. I haven’t run into her yet (Paris is a big city), but I get the sense she’s a bit like the real-life version of Wednesday Addams.
Don’t Deliver Us is very, very, VERY loosely based on the actual events, which makes it more appropriate for this column. It has traded up Anglicanism and imaginary fantasy dreamscapes for their heavy metal counterparts, Roman Catholicism and Satanism. Since the French film pairs nicely with Heavenly Creatures, I have invited fellow AE columnist Mandy “Embala” Albert—whom I forced to watch Don’t Deliver Us—to discuss the two films with me, since Heavenly Creatures is one of her favorites. Let’s begin!
Sects!
Gavin: Let’s start with the basic questions. What are the religions in this movie? I mentioned Catholicism and Anglicanism (the established Christian religions) as well as Satanism. We can discuss what constitutes “Satanism” later. But my first question: What do you know about the Fourth World?
Mandy: Uhhhh… pretty much what’s in Heavenly Creatures, where it’s basically heaven, but there are no Christians, and all the artsy non-Christians of the world are there making sweet music together.
Gavin: Great. Now I have to do actual research! It appears there are two concepts at play. First there is Borovnia, the collective paracosm where the girls set all their fantasy stories. The Fourth World is something else. I’ve only found one diary entry about it. It appears as a voiceover in the film:
1953, April 3 (Fri). Today Juliet and I found the key to the 4th World. We realise now that we have had it in our possession for about 6 months but we only realized it on the day of the death of Christ. We saw a gateway through the clouds. We sat on the edge of the path and looked down the hill out over the bay. The island looked beautiful. The sea was blue. Everything was full of peace and bliss. We then realized we had the key. We now know that we are not genii, as we thought. We have an extra part of our brain which can appreciate the 4th World. Only about 10 people have it. When we die we will go to the 4th World, but meanwhile on two days every year we may use the key and look into that beautiful world which we have been lucky enough to be allowed to know of, on this Day of Finding the Key to the Way through the Clouds.
That’s all we really know about it. I think it’s only mentioned one other time in the film, when Juliet (who seems to be the architect here) introduces Pauline to the veneration of the saints. And that’s the only concrete religious practice that I can find in the film, unless you consider constructing a paracosm a religious activity.
So, the saints. Mario Lanza is a saint. James Mason is a saint. Orson Welles is a little unclear. It might just be Harry Lime (the character he plays in The Third Man). They get their own little clay figurines, and the girls imagine what they must have been like in bed.
Unless you have anything to add on this subject, I would like to move on to Satanism. Mandy, I suspect you have at least some background on this subject because of your degree in medieval studies. What do you have to say about it?
Mandy: You seem to think my degree in medieval studies was considerably more exciting than it actually was. I’ll try, though.
The name “Satan” is a transliteration from the Hebrew שָׂטָן, “adversary,” and is used several times in the Old Testament to refer to “accusers” or “obstructers.” Only in the New Testament does the term become inextricable from Lucifer, the fallen angel, the destroyer, the Devil. In the Middle Ages, Satan is primarily a pathetic figure. Consider Dante’s depiction of Satan in Inferno: a speechless, mindless brute, forever devouring the three great traitors, condemned to utter defeat and inertia for eternity. He’s even a comic figure, the subject of a lot of scatological humor, and sometimes with a butt on his face. Then along came the Reformation, and the central authority of the Church began to dissipate. Stability decreased, division and uncertainty increased, and the power of Satan to deceive fragile sinners became a more serious threat.
Now, medieval Christians did sometimes like to call each other Devil-worshippers, because a heretical Christian was far more dangerous than a pagan, who was merely misguided. They also liked to lodge these accusations against Jews. The very term “Satanism” first begins to appear during the Reformation, when Catholics and Protestants hurled it at each other like baboons flinging fistfuls of excrement. Theologians would accuse their rival groups of cannibalism, infanticide, sexual perversions, idol worship, and of course, witchcraft, all part of pacts they had made with different demons. References to groups of “Luciferians” who prayed for Satan to conquer Heaven appeared in theological and civic records throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth century, but we have little to no evidence that any such groups existed.
Satanist moral panic peaked in the early modern period, the time of the witch trial. In 1484, the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer wrote and distributed a treatise called Malleus Maleficarum, “Hammer of Witches,” which he promoted as a demonological encyclopedia and witch-finding manual. Contrary to popular belief when scholars first began looking seriously at the tome, Malleus did not represent anything close to the “official Church position” on witches or Satan-worshippers. In fact, Kramer’s contemporaries dismissed him as an annoying pervert kook and condemned his book as antithetical to Catholic doctrine. But, as so often happens with visionaries, Kramer found new appreciators after his death, and under pressure from a public that loved the book, secular magistrates across Europe revived Malleus as the ultimate witchfinder’s guide to Satanic practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Malleus Maleficarum explores the question of whether witchcraft is a real phenomenon (TL;DR: yes, because the Devil is real and has real power, which he can exercise through his followers), the powers and recruitment tactics of witches (mostly done by other witches, not the Devil himself), and the most effective strategies for the prosecutions of witches (exceedingly painful torture). Kramer was, to put it lightly, a bit preoccupied with the sexual histories and habits of accused witches, and his view of witchcraft as an inherently sexual act of seduction probably contributed to the common perception of witches as both sexually alluring and dangerous beings.
Gavin: Thanks for the history lesson! I have one slight correction, but it allows me to pick up where you left off. Lucifer, “light bearer,” only became an epithet for the devil in the later Middle Ages (consider the fourth-century bishop Lucifer of Cagliari, venerated as a saint in Sardinia). The name plays into the concept of Satan as a Promethean figure, someone who wanted to give humanity access to knowledge forbidden by God. The idea is ancient. John Milton revived the sympathetic portrayal of the devil by accident, and the 19th-century Gothic and Romantic movements ran with this portrait of Satan as ultimately tragic. The girls in Don’t Deliver Us From Evil read poetry and novels in this vein. Maybe a little more hard-edged than Gothic.
The other side of the coin is the actual practice of Satanism, which is conceived as a parody of Christianity. This certainly applies to heresy, considered a defective form of “true” Christianity, and Judaism, where Jews were believed to kill Christian children and bake their bread into matzah—a kind of mock-Eucharist. Jews didn’t actually do this. But there is a wide chasm between perception and reality. Jews did not worship the devil (as documented in this book by Joshua Trachtenberg), but they did practice magic and other forms of folk belief (as documented in THIS book by Joshua Trachtenberg). In this they did not differ from their non-Jewish neighbors. I have very fond memories of reading Carlo Ginzberg’s The Night Battles and its account of an alleged werewolf who told the Inquisition that he fought against witches during the night on behalf of the Church. I would have loved to have seen the Inquisitors’ faces.
Of course, when witch hunters write down extensive how-to manuals, the bored and curious are going to start using them. That’s where the likes of Anne and Lore come in.
Lies!
Gavin: The “Lies” section is supposed to be about adaptational elements. I think, maybe, since we are talking about a pair of true crime films, we should discuss how the two films handle the facts of the case, especially since the “religions” involved are mainly confined to the girls’ imaginations.
Mandy: Well, Don’t Deliver Us is, as you mentioned, very very very very loosely based on the Parker-Hulme story. I have no idea whether Séria was familiar with Leopold and Loeb, or how familiar, but I saw elements of their story creep into Anne and Lore’s relationship here too: the friends who become partners in crime, first with experimental petty crimes, then slowly escalating to shocking violence. Jackson, on the other hand, is much more interested in the “true” part of the true crime, to the point where he includes voiceovers from Pauline’s diary entries.
Gavin: I wasn’t familiar with Leopold and Loeb! I think one of my disappointments with the film is that I thought the fantasy element was going to be a bigger thing. And it’s just… maybe the film would be better without it? Although, in that case, we wouldn’t have Orson Welles executing the vicar.
What draws me in about Don’t Deliver Us is the nature of the girls’ personal obsessions. Parker and Hulme created their own imaginary kingdom and wrote stories and novels about it. Lore and Anne are into decadent literature like the Songs of Maldoror and Flowers of Evil.
I do wonder how one goes from the facts of the Parker-Hulme case to out-and-out Satanism. Where do you think that came from?
Mandy: Well, as you mentioned, Parker and Hulme were Big Big News in New Zealand. Parricide isn’t supposed to happen in dozy little middle-class suburbs of Christchurch, and certainly not in such a melodramatic way. Exploitation filmmaking digs into the sensational, lurid elements of its subject matter by its definition. It would not surprise me at all to learn that there was at least some speculation that the girls had actually been Satanists or had otherwise been led into Satan’s grasp. And even if there wasn’t, it doesn’t require too many leaps and backflips for an exploitation director to get from “we don’t like Christians” to “therefore, Hail the Antichrist.” Heavenly Creatures has a much more Bridge to Terabithia approach to the girls’ fantasy-land and goes for serenity and whimsy in most of the places where Don’t Deliver Us dives headfirst into violence and sacrilege.
Gavin: You have given me the perfect transition to something that absolutely must be discussed. Speaking of deviant behavior… The girls claim that they were not lesbians. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much did that previous sentence make you scoff?
Mandy: Eh…five or six. Do I believe that they had no desire for each other? Not for a second. But female sexuality is fluid; I agree with the people who think it’s generally more fluid than male sexuality. I’d believe the Pauline and Juliet from Jackson’s film if they told me they’d never desired anyone but each other. As for Don’t Deliver Us, the girl’s relationship with each other is, if anything, de-sexualized, because it’s more concerned with their, uh, relationships with men. That’s certainly a choice Séria made. Not sure it’s a choice I like.
Gavin: Unfortunately, I now have to clarify what you’re talking about. The girls in Don’t Deliver Us are teases. They never plan to commit murder. They do plan to give all the men a deadly dosage of blue balls.
The film caused an uproar in France. I think it has less to do with “blasphemous” content than the moments where the girls strip down—all the way down—and the men… well, the men try to rape them. Multiple times. They never succeed, though, because the girls escape or—in a crucial scene—the assailant gets Parker-Hulme’d.
It IS a strange adaptational choice because the girls’ sexuality was a major source of speculation in the real-life case. It would have been natural to portray Anne and Lore as more than just very close friends. Exhibit 1: They read Flowers of Evil together! And yet, I don’t believe they are anything more than besties spending their summer riding bikes, teasing the locals, and killing birds.
Mandy: Ugh, the bird-killing is so hard to watch, because it’s so needlessly cruel. The birds belong to Leon, a developmentally disabled groundskeeper employed at Anne’s family chateau, and he’s about the only man in the film who doesn’t do anything horrible to the girls before they decide to torment him.
They just decide to kill his beloved pet birds, one at a time, because won’t it be hilarious to watch this man cry? It’s certainly harder to watch than their unbelievably lame Black Mass, which is performed with all the passion and vigor of two schoolgirls reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
As is fitting for a movie called Don’t Deliver Us From Evil, the girls’ devotion here is to wickedness. Not each other, not music or art or their fake saints, not even Satan. They just want to burn the world together.
Gavin: The Black Mass is indeed lame. And sexless. The decadent novel Là-Bas, which the girls could have (but don’t) read, describes a fin de siècle Black Mass in lurid detail, including dipping the host in others’ pudenda (PSA: This is both sacrilegious and unhygienic). I don’t know if I really wanted to see that, just as I didn’t want to see so much of Lore or Anne, but it definitely would have been hard to forget.
Mandy: There’s a better Black Mass in The Exorcist (the novel) too. On the whole, I think Séria should have gone for bigger and more damnable lies. You’re making an exploitation film! Exploit things!
Videotape!
Gavin: So, I have a confession. I like both films about the same. But I do prefer the French film slightly. I imagine you have the reverse opinion.
Mandy: Your imagination is correct. I respect Don’t Deliver Us From Evil quite a bit more than I like it, I think. It’s a lovingly constructed object, especially in its most gruesome imagery, and I think you’d have to be legally dead for your jaw not to drop a little at the bat-guano insanity of the ending. But where Heavenly Creatures shines for me is as a portrait of a friendship, and the particular sort of jealous, obsessive friendship that teenage girls can be especially vulnerable to. Honestly, that’s where the religious fervor lies for me in Heavenly Creatures—not in the Fourth World, but in Pauline and Juliet’s devotion to each other.
Gavin: A big obstacle for me is that I don’t find the girls very likable, but Jackson demands that we be on their side. The dealbreaker is that Pauline and Juliet actively plot to murder someone who is portrayed too sympathetically. Anne and Lore, of course, are horrible people. Unlike Pauline and Juliet, they are committed to doing evil. But they don’t INTEND to kill anyone, and the guy who gets it kind of deserves it.
Before you say, “What about the birds?”, I would like to point out that the second time we see Anne kill a bird, she breaks down crying. It’s a crack in the facade. There’s a sense in which all of this was just a game that has gone too far.
Mandy: I’m still going to what-about-the-birds you, because ugh, the birds. It’s an act of such deep mystifying cruelty. The guy they killed was a scumbag, but what had Leon done to Anne and Lore before they decided to be monsters to him for shits and giggles?
Whereas I’m not sure I agree that Jackson wants us completely on the side of Pauline and Juliet. He and Fran Walsh are savvy enough that they I believe they knew what they were doing when they wrote Honora Rieper as they did, and then cast Sarah Peirse—a relentlessly likable actress—in the role. By doing that, they set themselves a hefty challenge of making the girls’ murder of this woman comprehensible to a viewer. I think they succeeded. I believe that Pauline and Juliet believed themselves the possessors of something unique and precious in their friendship, while, in reality, bringing out each other’s demons.
Gavin: Melanie Lynskey does a great job of incarnating Pauline’s searing hatred for her mother. She has this glacial death stare where it looks like she’s trying to kill people with her mind. These are the moments when Orson Welles emerges from Borovnia and kills the person in Pauline’s imagination.
The movie sets up Honora’s death as the climax, and the depiction of her last day is particularly tense. It is also kind of strange in that the film is heading towards a foreordained ending. The audience, presumably, knows how this story ends, and if they don’t, the very first scene announces it. I wonder why Jackson did this. Both times I’ve seen the film, I was put off that it ends at the exact moment of Honora’s murder. Nothing of the trial afterwards. And the presiding sentiment is not “Oh no, I’ve killed Mum!” but “Oh no! I’ll never see my soulmate again!”
Mandy: Okay, if we’re gonna talk about endings, Don’t Deliver wins hands-down. I do like the end of Heavenly Creatures, as I think the trial is outside the scope of Jackson’s project to depict the evolution of the girls’ friendship and internal lives. And of course Pauline doesn’t give a shit that she just killed her mother. She hates her mother. She’s convinced that her mother is the only thing standing between her and a life of devotion to Juliet and the Fourth World. She didn’t anticipate the Kiwi judicial system also getting in the way.
So I think Heavenly Creatures ends in a fitting way for a character/relationship study of Pauline Parker and Julet Hulme. However. If Joël Séria knew how to do one thing, it’s end a film. After Anne and Lore start to panic that the local police have figured out that they murdered a guy, they decide to off themselves in the ultimate act of devotion to Satan. They volunteer to recite a poem by Baudelaire at a school talent show. Their act is a big hit, even as the nuns start to suspect that something’s up. And then they light themselves on fire.
The whole thing is shot with the soft, dreamy quality of a teen romance until the fire starts, at which point the blaze lights up the screen so hard it seems like it might come out of your TV. I knew the scene was coming, because the Blu-Ray cover spoiled it, and it still knocked me ass-over-head.
Gavin: One last question. Orson Welles: Would?
Mandy: In an earlier, more innocent time, perhaps. At this point in my decadent life, I’d see him and start thinking about Transformers.
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.