Viral: Christopher Smith’s Black Death

[Editor’s Note: This was published during the 2010 edition of the Fantastia Int. Film Festival. The film was subsequently picked up by Magnolia’s Magnet Releasing label and has been available on On Demand since February 4.  We are republishing the article to coincide with the theatrical release on March 11.]

When a film is set in 1348 during the throes of the bubonic plague, as Black Death is, and is directed by British horror master Christopher Smith (Creep, Severance, and the woefully underseen but brilliant Triangle), it’s understandable that genre fans would expect wall-to-wall grisly deaths and spraying bodily fluids. But while the film has its fair share of that kind of stuff, Smith has delivered a surprisingly thoughtful philosophical treatise on religious faith, making for a truly frightening horror film that was among the best of the festival this year. 

A conflicted young monk named Osmund (Eddie Redmayne, Elizabeth: The Golden Age) volunteers to lead a group of knights on a fact-finding mission to a village that is rumored to not have been affected by the plague. Little does he know that the knights, led by the brooding Ulric (Sean Bean, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy’s Boromir), are actually a group of witch hunters trying to find the village because a suspected necromancer (Carice van Houten, Black Book, Repo Men) is rumored to be leading a tribe of pagans. Once they arrive, nothing is as it seems and true heroes are hard to distinguish. Bearing some similarites to the 1968 Vincent Price vehicle Witchfinder General and 1973’s The Wicker Man, it’s Ken Russell’s hard-to-find classic The Devils – which also played at Fantasia this year, with Russell in attendance to accept a lifetime achievement award –  that Black Death most closely resembles, with a direct indictment of some of the hypocrisies of organized religion in every form.

Director Christopher Smith and co-producer Phil Robertson were in attendance to introduce the film and for a Q&A session afterward. In the footage below (spoiler alert: some integral story elements are revealed) the two discuss, among other things, how the film isn’t really atheist but is more anti-fundamentalist, how they consciously tried to make Black Death look more like a war movie instead of your typical medieval costume epic, and that a large focus of the story is the idea of the churches selling fear to the masses in olden times. Smith also admits that he consciously dialed down the gore in Black Death so that the central idea of it is not lost in a sea of red, although he says that he was still told by some people that they felt the violence and gore was gratuitous.