Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. Recently on Weird House Cinema, we discussed Luccio fulci fantasy film Conquest, a gory and dreamlike
jaunt full of stone age combat murderous monsters. In Dark Magic, the villain of the piece was Okron, a sorceress who commands a war band of beast men and masked warriors. She has depicted clad only in a golden chain mail bikini, and her head is enclosed entirely within a golden helm until in the film's climax, when our hero destroys the helmet with an arrow of light, revealing a hideous hag's face beneath a helm. Now, on one hand, we might
dismiss the details of the character as pure titilation. In a night Sword and Sorcery film, a genre is pointed out by Robert A. Rushing in his book, descended from Hercules that often pitted a hyper masculine hero against a feminine villain, but the juxtaposition of Hag's face, an exaggerated monstrous take on aging women, and the body of the model playing the role in this film, it brings to
mind larger trends in folklore, mythology, and more. As we've discussed on the show, older depictions of the Greek monster Medusa were entirely monstrous, but later traditions and certainly modern traditions often depict her with a monstrous head atop an otherwise alluring humanoid body. We can also look to the tradition of yokai and yuri in Japanese folklore, in which such figures are prone to draw men in and then
frighten them with a shocking reveal. The kuchasaki Ona reveals the monstrous mouth between beneath her surgical mask, and the Noperabo reveals the complete smooth flesh absence of a face entirely. Okron's unmasking either meats or subverts expectations, depending on where you're coming from. There's also something to be said for a figure that combines imagery of both a youthful woman and an old woman, or of the living and the dead.
Consider the Nordic goddess Hell, who is often depicted as half blue, half dead, signifying her connection to the underworld. In neopaganism, we have the figure of the triple goddess, composed of maiden, mother, and chrone archetypical stages of the feminine life cycle. We also encounter various myths and folk tales in which an aged witch takes on the likeness of a youthful beauty, as well as the reverse, in which a goddess in the form of a maiden or mother takes on the eyes of a crone or hag.
In some cases, these dueling forms are linked to the cycle of the seasons and the resurrection or rejuvenation of spring. Not to say that Okron is directly tied to any of these ideas, but the convergence of images cannot help but invoke much older modes of symbolism As an aside, the young lady or old hag image is a popular optical illusion. When viewing the illustration, it may look like either an old woman's side profile looking down or a younger woman facing away from us. Your brain can see
either image, but not at the same time. Tune in for additional episodes of the Monster Fact each week. As always You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is the production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.