Lunatics Radio Hour: The History of Horror
Lunatics Radio Hour is a non-fiction history podcast about the history of horror and the horror of history. Each episode explores real, documented events where fear, violence, survival, and the unknown shaped human lives and cultures. The show also traces how historical events influenced film, examining how real-world horrors became the stories and images that appear on screen.
Topics include dark history, psychological phenomena, folklore rooted in fact, and the historical roots of horror cinema. Most episodes focus on researched historical subjects. Occasional short fiction stories are included and clearly labeled.
If you’re drawn to the darker side of history and the real events behind horror films, Lunatics Radio Hour explores where history, fear, and cinema intersect.
Lunatics Radio Hour: The History of Horror
Episode 171 - Winter Horror: Folklore and Mythology
This week Abby and Alan present a non-exhaustive look at winter folklore and mythology from around the globe. From Scotland, Norway and Germany to Japan and Native American mythology.
This kicks off a multi-part series exploring the intersection of winter and horror from several different categories.
Sources
- Smithsonian Magazine Article by Dennis Zotigh: The Winter Solstice Begins a Season of Storytelling and Ceremony
- Mythopedia article by Gregory Wright on Cailleach
- Article by Elizabeth Fabowale from OldFolklore.com: The Blizzard Spirit of The Inuit
The Iroquois and The Legends of The First Snowfall, an article from Native American Mythology Worldwide.
Get Lunatics Merch here. Join the discussion on Discord. Check out Abby's book Horror Stories. Available in eBook and paperback. Music by Michaela Papa, Alan Kudan & Jordan Moser. Poster Art by Pilar Keprta @pilar.kep.
Consider donating and volunteering with organizations like National Immigration Project, Immigrant Defense Project, Legal Aid Justice Center, Amica Center and the ACLU.
Thanks to a post by @thefinancialdiet for originally shouting out this information.
We started a seasonal tarot mailer! Join us here: https://www.patreon.com/lunaticsproject/membership
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour Podcast. My name is Abby Branker, and I am sitting here with Alan Kudan.
SPEAKER_01:Hello.
SPEAKER_02:And today we are talking about the intersection of winter and horror.
SPEAKER_01:Not to be confused with holiday horror, which happens during the winter often.
SPEAKER_02:Certainly. This is this is about snow, it's about ice, it's about being freezing cold, avalanches, hypothermia, survival, snow mythology and folklore. It's about all of those things.
SPEAKER_01:And the lesser-known snow poisoning.
SPEAKER_02:And snow poisoning. This is going to be a four-part series. Today we're going to start by covering ancient mythology and folklore. We're also going to cover real-life snow tragedies, isolation, monsters, and of course how all of these like influenced horror in its many forms. In this series, we're going to talk about everything from the scariest winter horror films ever made to mythology, folklore, and real life tragedies from different cultures around the globe.
SPEAKER_01:And some winter horror movies that may not be the scariest movie ever made, but they're still pretty fun.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Or they're really dumb and I still watched them.
SPEAKER_02:Alan's been watching a lot of movies. I have, as always.
SPEAKER_01:This is a great topic to do now for you know because it lines up with the seasons. And I have lots of time to watch movies because just like the temperature outside, my career is very frozen during this type of year. There's not much happening in the film industry.
SPEAKER_02:There's some seasonality to your busy schedule.
SPEAKER_01:A bit of hibernation, if you will.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, which is great. An interesting thing just happened because before this, we were recording this new Patreon project that we're starting, which is sending out quarterly tarot mailers for folks who participate. So it's essentially I'll pull a card for each person, I do a video about what the card means, but there's this like larger theme. And there's actually this newspaper that I've made that kind of, you know, has articles and poems and stories and all these different things from different sources on that theme. The theme is winter for this first one, and it's so fascinating because I bought this deck of cards, winter themed tarot cards, to kick this off and to send to everybody. And through the research of today's episode, I had found some of these like new deities and goddesses and gods of different cultures. And some of those were actually referenced in that deck, which I had never ever heard of before researching this episode. So it was one of those like little small world moments for me today where I was like, wow, all of these themes are colliding. But let's get into our sources today. We have a Smithsonian magazine article by Dennis Zottig. The Winter Solstice Begins a Season of Storytelling and Ceremony, a mythopedia article by Gregory Wright on Callic, an article by Elizabeth Fabowale from oldfolklore.com, The Blizzard Spirit of the Inuit, The Iroquois and the Legends of the First Snowfall, an article from Native American mythology worldwide. And I used Wikipedia quite a bit because here's the thing about researching some of these mythologies and kind of like bits of folklore, there's often not academic sources on them. Or there can be, and they're like really dense textbooks and things like that that I don't have direct access to. Uh, there's a lot of blog coverage, and so a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about today is kind of like blog coverage cross-checked with Wikipedia, things like that. So just acknowledging, right, that I'm not a historian or an expert in all these cultures, but we're going to do our best to kind of represent what we have unearthed through research.
SPEAKER_01:As a macro, what's your favorite thing you've learned while doing this research?
SPEAKER_02:The thing that I found most interesting is that there's a lot of deities across different cultures that personify winter and explain parts of the season or even the landscape. And so, oh, this is happening and that's why it's snowing. Also, kind of this overarching theme of winter being necessary to protect the earth and let the earth rebuild for spring. So sometimes like winter is obviously a harsh season, especially for early humans, you know, and uh ancient humans that didn't have the luxuries of heating and electricity and cars and things like that. So some of it certainly is okay, there's like fear in winter and there's this cruelty of winter. But a lot of it was kind of positive or neutral. And it seems like a that's kind of because there was this rebirth that they thought was was happening, and that without this like blanket protection of snow, the earth wouldn't be fertile in spring. It was it was like a necessary step, which I thought was kind of, I don't know, was new information to me.
SPEAKER_01:Now you're you're you're definitely onto something. So if you want to get all zen about it.
SPEAKER_02:Sure.
SPEAKER_01:Years ago, uh, when I first got into bonsai, all you know, my my whole first batch of trees died. Uh because I was growing them indoors. You know, I had grow lamps, I was doing all these things, and it wasn't until I was a bit you know, it wasn't until I basically lost most of my trees, all but one, that I learned that most trees need to winter. It's it's a key part in the growth cycle. When nutrients are abundant, it gets lots of sun, the temperature is nice, it grows, grows, grows, it tries to do as much as it can. But then when the winter comes, the tree freezes. And uh, you know, it retracts all its nutrients deep into itself, and it uses this as a time to basically muster its forces to get all its nutrients ready to go uh for the next growth cycle. And so I d didn't really understand why that was going to be necessary. It seems like without winter, great, it can just grow all the time. But then it's just like a person, it burns out. Uh it just stretches itself too thin, it tries to grow too much, it doesn't take the time to really center itself, and then the tree dies, unless you have a tropical tree which is climatized to growing year-round. But I just thought that was kind of like a a beautiful thing where you look at winter as being something that needs to be survived, but instead this is something that is necessary to survival.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Yeah, I love that. Aren't there some tortoises that need to be like put in the refrigerator? Like literally, like some people who own tortoises in like they put them in the refrigerator for a month or something to I think it's a similar sort of thing.
SPEAKER_01:That's sounding really familiar. I I don't know the details off the top of my head, but I've I've seen reptiles where yeah, they put them in refrigerators. Or I don't know if it's refrigerate. There's got to be some kind of airflow. Cause like I actually I don't know.
SPEAKER_02:I think they are in refrigerators, like in Tupperware.
SPEAKER_01:But like bears, you know, when they hibernate for the winter, they still like have bodily functions and they still do things. They're just kind of like sleeping with a very slow metabolism. And then they walk out of the end in the spring and they're all like the skinny polar bear, which is kind of cute. But no, I've I've I I've seen the images of like, yeah, the turtles in Tupperware. I I I want to learn more about that.
SPEAKER_02:Tune in next time.
SPEAKER_01:Dating back thousands of years, people used to You used to have to put their their turtles into stone Tupperware.
SPEAKER_02:Dating back thousands of years, people used to explain the world through story. Mythology is humanity's earliest attempt to explain existence and the natural world around us. It is a system of stories used to identify where the world came from, why nature behaves the way it does, and what happens when we die. This is something we've talked about a lot on this podcast, but maybe not recently. It's been a little bit since we've had a nice meaty mythology topic. But something I love so much about ancient mythology and folklore is that you to me it's it's a time capsule of people at the time when these stories originated and how they were trying to explain the world before there was this understanding of science. Long before lightning could be measured or snow patterns understood, let alone predicted on the weather channel, these forces felt alive. The wind had intention, storms had moods, and sometimes they were brought by people or gods or deities. Winter did not simply arrive, it was sent. We're starting this series off with an episode on folklore and mythology because it will help set the foundation for the rest of this series. So much of this folklore is dark and spooky, but not all of it. For example, we're gonna talk a bit about Native American mythology and creation myths. Deities and gods emerged as a way to give shape to the unknown. When a society could not control famine, for instance, whether disease or death, belief sort of became this survival tool. It became a way to rationalize what was going on and the cruelty of what was going around, and the cruelty of what was going on around people. It was believed that gods turned chaos into a narrative, right? If something had a name and a personality, it could be feared, respected, bargained with, or appeased, and you would get sacrifices and you would get rituals and traditions in honor of these gods as a way to try to keep them at bay or keep them behaved, right? These beliefs were not naive in the way that sometimes we might imagine today, right? So we might be like, oh man, those folks didn't understand science, and so they were so naive and they made up these stories, but they were practical. If winter killed crops, then winter must have a will. If the sea swallowed ships, then the sea must have a temper. Appeasing a god meant creating order in a dangerous world, even if that order was symbolic. Myths also serve as moral instruction. There's a lot of these myths we're going to talk about today that have kind of clear allegories and messages, and they're meant to maybe dissuade people from doing things that were dangerous, etc. They taught communities how to behave, what to value, and what to fear. Stories of divine punishment reinforced social rules. Stories of favor rewarded obedience, bravery, or sacrifice. In this way, gods were not distant beings, but active participants in everyday life. But most importantly, mythology helped people cope with powerlessness. When survival depended on forces far beyond human control, belief offered meaning. A harsh winter was not random cruelty, it was a trial, a punishment, a test. Or the work of a god whose presence could be felt in the snow itself. Even as societies changed, these stories still endured. They evolved into folklore, superstition, religion, and eventually horror. Because while science may explain the mechanics of the world, mythology explains how it felt to live in it. And nowhere is that feeling more vivid than in the stories of winter. In 1952, a film called The White Reindeer was released. It's a Finnish folklore movie, the first film by Eric Bloomberg. It tells the story of a woman who is cursed through a shamanic ritual based on Finnish Lapland folklore. Winter is a character in this movie. Some critics point to this as one of the earliest movies that really treats winter as a supernatural force. Another movie with similar traits is November from 2017. This is a movie based on Estonian folklore. What's really cool about this movie is that it portrays folklore as part of daily life, which is kind of like the point I was just trying to make, right? Not something bigger or fantastical. We're going to talk about November in a few episodes in this series for different reasons. So I wanted to mention it at the beginning.
SPEAKER_01:This is crazy. Why am I watching movies about like kids stuck on chairlifts?
SPEAKER_02:That's coming.
SPEAKER_01:And you have all these like real ringers that you're not sharing.
SPEAKER_02:But those are coming. It's a great example of folklore surviving into modern art. Deities that personify seasons span many cultures. One of the most interesting that I found is Kalliak, a divine hag from Gaelic mythology. She is associated with the arrival of winter and the creation of the landscape across Scotland, the Isle of Man and Ireland, the three Gaelic-speaking regions. She rules over the cold and the wind. She's connected to the inhospitable regions of landscape and the cruelty of harsh and wild winter weather. She is also sometimes known as the Hag of Beria, the Queen of Winter, or the Veiled One. In Scotland, she is believed to have created mountains. The legend says that as she was traveling across the countryside, several large rocks fell from her wicker basket and made mountains. As she traveled, she also made mountains purposefully when she needed stepping stones. She used a special hammer to shape the landscape. She could also use her hammer to create storms and thunder. In some traditions, she also controlled a special well that would sometimes overflow and flood the countryside. She was a goddess of grain, which was important to survival for the people that believed in her. The last grain harvested for the season was often dedicated to her. When you were a kid, Alan, did your family ever say that thunder were the gods bowling?
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, my family said that. It reminds me of this. Some thought of her as a giantess cyclops with white hair, rust-colored teeth, and dark blue skin. But other depictions visualize her with two eyes and more traditionally human features. Sometimes her clothing is adorned with skulls. But again, she is this personification of winter. And so she is known to use her staff to freeze the ground, fight off spring, and herd deer.
SPEAKER_01:When when you say fight off spring, is spring a deity also they fight?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, exactly. So to answer your question, she, Kalik, rules between Sao Wynn and Beltane, and Brigid, another pre-Christian goddess from Ireland, rules between Beltane and Sao Wynn right, so it's kind of the opposite. They're two kind of heads of the same coin, if you will.
SPEAKER_01:What's Beltane?
SPEAKER_02:Beltane is like May the 1st. It's like May Day festivals.
SPEAKER_01:Nothing to do with Bel Schnickel.
SPEAKER_02:No, Beltane is fantastic because there's these huge bonfires in Scotland. It's like this really fun spring festival. On the Isle of Man, it was believed that during Beltane, Kalyak would actually transform into Bridget, like they were one of the same deity, and she would sort of transform between the two depending on the season. In the Manx, which is the Isle of Man mythology, she was thought to be a shapeshifter that could shift into a giant bird. The interesting thing about Kalyak is that she wasn't inherently good or bad. More so she was seen as wild and destructive, similar to the harsh winter weather itself. She acted as a representative for nature. She cared very deeply for animals. And in some traditions, she was even the patron of wolves. This idea of winter as an impartial but punishing force shows up constantly in horror. You see versions of figures like her in films like The Witch from 2015, where the wilderness acts as kind of this judge of morality, or the black coat's daughter, also from 2015, where isolation and cold become extensions of kind of this spiritual punishment. The Witch is a really interesting example here too because it mimics the wild and unruly foundation that we see in Calyak, right? The fear and dependence on nature and that you just need to bend, right, to the rules of the natural world. In the Manx version of the mythology, she spends half of the year as an old crone and half as a young woman, taking a potion halfway through that would restore her youth. A really important tradition tied to Kaliac is collecting wood. I'm quoting here from the Mythopedia.com article, quote, on embolic, or February 1st of each year, the Kaliac runs out of firewood for the winter. In the Manx tradition, she transforms into a giant bird and collects firewood in her beak. In Ireland and Scotland, meanwhile, she collects firewood as an old woman. If she wishes for winter to last longer, she makes the day sunny and bright for her search. If she accidentally oversleeps, the day is stormy and gray. Thus, tradition holds that if February 1st, it is gray and wintry, winter will be shorter that year. If the day is bright, winter will return due to her preparation. In the United States, this tradition was transformed into Groundhog Day, removing the Kaliac while retaining the central ritual. And while Calyak isn't represented broadly in a ton of pop culture, she did inspire the blueskin and general vibe of the Brewer Hag in Dungeons and Dragons. Amaterasu is a deity from Japanese mythology, believed to have ruled over the heavens until her brother challenged her to become a new ruler. Now there are many variants, and that is one of them. But let's talk about one origin story here. The brother won this challenge, and Amaterasu hid away in a cave, and with her in hiding, winter came to the land. It took a lot to get her out of the cave. Eighty other deities tried to lure her out with a party, but she only came out and reset the balance of the seasons when she was given a mirror and a visit from her daughter. She was lured out by Ame no uzume. Other variants say that she hides away because of her brother's destructive behavior, not because of a direct challenge from him. Stories like this, where winter arrives because balance is broken, later evolve into horror narratives where environments turn hostile when something goes wrong. Films often borrow this idea, treating snow and cold not as random weather, but as consequence. Yuki Ona, or snow woman, is another figure associated with winter from Japan. There are many tales of these women. Sometimes they are described as beautiful, and other times as old hags or crones, similar in some ways to Kalek, right, in how sometimes she is seen as young and beautiful and sometimes as an old crone. In some regional traditions, the Yuki Ona are believed to appear at the door during a blizzard and lure men out of them. It's kind of reminds me of a siren.
SPEAKER_01:Except they could they do house calls.
SPEAKER_02:Except they do house calls, exactly. One of the most direct adaptations of this folklore appears in the 1964 film Quiiden. In this film, Yuki Ona is portrayed as both beautiful and deadly and lethal. The balance of elegance and danger becomes kind of a recurring blueprint for winter spirits in horror cinema. But the Yuki Ona were known to avoid baths. And finally, if they did bathe, they would melt away and only leave icicles in their place. And that's a regional variant.
SPEAKER_01:That's gross.
SPEAKER_02:Other tales describe her as icy cold, a woman who could change into snow and escape through the chimney. Even further variations describe her as standing alongside a road or outside at night in the snow. I think this one is the scariest, holding a child and asking them for help to keep warm. It's said that she might ask the passerby to hold the child, and the baby would become heavier and heavier as snow piles onto you and you slowly freeze to death overnight.
SPEAKER_01:Why would you just stand there?
SPEAKER_02:You're kind of stuck, I think.
SPEAKER_01:Too heavy?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Like pretty quickly you become slowly trapped in the snow.
SPEAKER_01:That's very sneaky.
SPEAKER_02:Mm-hmm. Well, I think that's her specialty. Unlike some of these other snow deities that are more representations of winter, she is She's just mean. She's mean. Why? It's like she's she's like a siren, but in uh she's a snow siren.
SPEAKER_01:But what does she want?
SPEAKER_02:To kill men.
SPEAKER_01:To kill men.
SPEAKER_02:It seems there's a movie called The Snow Woman from 1968, which is a Japanese horror movie directed by Takuzo Tanaka. The exterior Scenes of this movie were purposefully shot in studio instead of outside on location to give an unnatural otherworldly feel to the movie. Old Man Winter isn't from a single myth or culture. He emerged from European and North American folklore as a personification of Winter, shaped by centuries of storytelling rather than one origin story. And that's true for all folklore, right? There's no one origin story. He draws heavily from Germanic and Slavic traditions that imagined Winter as an aged male figure, like Morosco or Father Frost, and from medieval European art and poetry that depicted the seasons as human characters.
SPEAKER_01:Old Man Winter is different from Father Frost?
SPEAKER_02:Excellent question, Alan. Yes, Jack Frost and Old Man Winter are two different beings. They're they're parallel beings, but they are slightly different. Over time, this image traveled into Anglo-American folklore, where Old Man Winter became a familiar name for Winter's cold, hardship, and authority rather than a specific god. In modern horror and genre films, that authority often turns antagonistic. Movies like Rare Exports reinterpret winter folklore as something buried and dangerous. And even disaster films like The Day After Tomorrow treat the cold as this unstoppable, almost sentient force, right?
SPEAKER_01:I mean Day After Tomorrow is very much done by human meddling. They talk about how we've we've fucked up the ocean currents by melting the glaciers and created the superstorm.
SPEAKER_02:Right, but that's exactly one of these main themes of winter folklore horror, which is like winter as punishment, winter as morality, winter as values.
SPEAKER_01:You fuck up the global currents and then they give you a baby that gets too heavy.
SPEAKER_02:That's right. Exactly. And then you disappear in bicycles. Gross. Jack Frost is similar to Old Man Winter, and he's also the personification of all winter weather. He is actually a variant or a parallel figure to Old Man Winter. Jack Frost is traditionally believed to be responsible for the delicate fern-like frost patterns that once commonly appeared on window panes during cold winter mornings. Think, you know that scene in Fantasia where there's like the little fairies that are fluttering across the water and leaving the little patterns?
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_02:It's ex- that's like that's Jack Frost.
SPEAKER_01:That's what Jack Frost does?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_01:He dances.
SPEAKER_02:He leaves those little patterns, those little frost patterns. As well as for the biting cold on fingers, toes, and noses. He's like a little nippy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he nips at your toes. That's I know all about that.
SPEAKER_02:Stories of Jack Frost are thought to trace back to Anglo-Saxon and Norse winter traditions. In Finnish folklore, a comparable figure known as Pakasuko appears prominently, even lending his name in a chapter of Finland's national epic drawn from ancient oral traditions. Swedish folklore features a similar character called Kung Bor or King Bor, a name linked to the 17th century Swedish writer Olas Rudbeck. In Russia, Jack Frost's counterpart is Grandfather Frost.
SPEAKER_01:Grant wait, so not to be confused with Old Man Winter or Father Frost. Is there a woman involved? Sorry, that's not my business.
SPEAKER_02:Morozuku or Father Frost is a Russian fairy tale dating back to the mid-1800s. It has a similar framework to Cinderella.
SPEAKER_01:A lot of mice.
SPEAKER_02:And tells the story of a woman who has a daughter that she loves and a stepdaughter that she loathes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, she sucks.
SPEAKER_02:We unearthed last night that you have never seen Cinderella.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, it's stupid.
SPEAKER_02:That is mind-blowing to me. It's a classic. First off, it's a classic fairy tale.
SPEAKER_01:Why on earth would you ever have glass footwear? That is so dangerous. And people are trying to like a delicacy. They're trying to shove their foot into a glass. What if you crack it?
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's what happens. That's the plot.
SPEAKER_01:What? She breaks the slipper? No. Yes. What do you mean?
SPEAKER_02:You've never seen it. You don't know what happens.
SPEAKER_01:I know the story. She it falls off. I've read the Grimm version. It falls off. And then he goes around with the glass slipper to try to find whose foot it fits.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but then the evil stepmother breaks it so that he can't realize that it's her.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I missed that part. Yeah. All right. Why would she do that?
SPEAKER_02:Because she hates Cinderella. Alright, let's talk about Russian folklore. So remember, right, there's a woman similar to Cinderella.
SPEAKER_01:There is a woman involved.
SPEAKER_02:There is a woman similar to Cinderella who has a daughter that she loves and a stepdaughter that she hates, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yep.
SPEAKER_02:The woman orders her husband to take this loathsome stepdaughter out into the winter weather and leave her to die. The husband horrifyingly agrees, because that's his real daughter. He leaves her at the base of a tree in the woods. She's discovered by Father Frost. And she's kind and polite to Father Frost because she's a good girl. And so in return, he gives her a chest of jewels and clothing.
SPEAKER_01:Like her chest is made of jewels now?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, like a chest, a treasure chest of jewels.
SPEAKER_01:A box of jewels.
SPEAKER_02:It doesn't make her bionic, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Is it bionic if it's crystalline?
SPEAKER_02:I don't know, but I don't know the other word. Later, the evil stepmother then sends the husband to fetch the dead body for burial. But instead, he brings back the little girl alive and dressed in fine clothing and wearing beautiful jewelry, which makes the stepmother very angry and envious. And so she orders her husband to bring her biological daughter out to the same tree. But the girl is rude and mean to Father Frost. When the dad returns, he finds her dead body.
SPEAKER_01:Her dead body.
SPEAKER_02:So again, this is winter and Father Frost as morality, as an allegory about manners and politeness and kindness.
SPEAKER_01:Don't be a dick.
SPEAKER_02:Don't be a dick. What's really what it all comes down to.
SPEAKER_01:Unless you're Japanese, in which case that's your nature.
SPEAKER_02:Why?
SPEAKER_01:Because you're trying to do that so then you can lure men.
SPEAKER_02:Well, she's not being a dick. She's being a seductress.
SPEAKER_01:She gives people babies that are heavy. That's mean.
SPEAKER_02:Well, sometimes babies are heavy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but a baby that gets even heavier and I guess that's all babies technically.
SPEAKER_02:That's how babies grow up.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but I don't know, it still seems mean. Or just to leave icicles in the bath.
SPEAKER_02:I understand. She's more mean-spirited.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, fuck off.
SPEAKER_02:Leaving icicles in the bath is her greatest sin.
SPEAKER_01:That's disgusting.
SPEAKER_02:Frau Holly is from German folklore associated with winter, weather, and again, moral order. She is best known for causing snow to fall when she shakes out her feather bed.
SPEAKER_01:Sorry, are we still in Russia?
SPEAKER_02:Now we're in German.
SPEAKER_01:Germany. We're in Germany.
SPEAKER_02:She appears in the Brother's Grim Tale as both a rewarder and a punisher, blessing the diligent with gold while covering the lazy in pitch. Neither purely benevolent nor cruel, Frau Hawley represents the belief that the natural world responds to human behavior, making winter itself a force that observes, judges, and often remembers. This moral structure carries directly into modern horror. Films like and stories like Hansel and Grendel and The Lodge echo Frau Hawley's legacy by framing winter as a test of character, while survival depends not just on strength, but on behavior. There is also a movie called The Juniper Tree from 1990, which plays with Icelandic folklore and it stars Bjork.
SPEAKER_01:I'm just I got the image of uh Hansen and Grendel of the three Hansen brothers and this giant troll thing.
SPEAKER_02:Hansel and Gretel.
SPEAKER_01:I know, but it's kind of funny. You know, Hansel Beowulf reference.
SPEAKER_02:Hansen were my fave band growing up, and now they've turned kind of dark.
SPEAKER_01:They've turned dark. They're still around? I mean, I know they're not dead. I mean, I actually didn't know.
SPEAKER_02:They're on social media.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's why. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:The Juniper Tree, starring Bjork, is a dark haunting film based on the brother's grim fairy tale. It tells the story of two sisters, Margit and Kotla. Kotla, living in a remote Icelandic village. When Kotla marries a widower with a young son, her jealousy and cruelty set off a chain of tragic events, including the boy's murder. From there, the story unfolds with supernatural revenge. And so it's kind of like this, uh, you know, which is what we're talking about today, but this mix of horror and folklore through the lens of this morality that we see in almost all of these, except Japan.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Frau Holly is also closely linked to the Germanic figure Perkta.
SPEAKER_01:Perkta.
SPEAKER_02:She is said to live at the bottom of a well, travel in a wagon, and to have taught humans how to produce linen from flax. Scholar Erica Timm suggests that Perkta developed from a blending of Germanic and pre-Germanic traditions in the Alpine regions following the migration period of the early Middle Ages.
SPEAKER_01:She seems really helpful.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, she is.
SPEAKER_01:She has no problem with living in seemingly undesirable housing. She gets around in a pretty sustainable form of transportation.
SPEAKER_02:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:And she makes stuff out of what?
SPEAKER_02:Flax.
SPEAKER_01:Flax.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:She taught she teaches crafts.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Great. Well, get a load of this. So there's a 16th century fable that describes a quote army of women armed with sickles and sent by Frau Holda. So Frau Holda, Perkta, Frau Holly, they're all kind of these similar figures. Martin Luther also referenced Holda in 1522, portraying her as a grotesque embodiment of rebellious natures opposing God, using her image symbolically in his theological critiques. Jacob Grimm developed his interpretation of Holda based on what he believed were her earliest references, including an 11th century addition to the canon Episcope, which he cautiously associated with the same deity. Early scholars questioned whether Holda could truly be considered a pagan goddess, as her earliest clear appearances connect her with the Virgin Mary, often referred to as the Queen of Heaven. During the 15th century, a pagan version of Holda appeared widely in lists of superstitions and in sermons. Martin Luther continued to invoke her image, using it to personify what he viewed as the failings of antagonistic human reason in theological debate. There are a handful of winter horror movies that play with themes of female winter spirits and morality. Hagazusa from 2017, which was inspired by Alpine paganism. A lot of this movie is about isolation, which we're going to cover in another episode, but it also draws from Pektra and Holly traditions. Sedentucci from 2010 was inspired by Swiss Alpine folklore. And all of these films that I'm talking about are not English films. They are films from these countries. And a lot of them actually are nominated to be best foreign film. Like they're so they're put forward and then not picked to be nominated, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01:They're not picked to be nominated?
SPEAKER_02:Right, but like the country has put them forward to say Academy Awards, we this is our, you know, this is Austria's submission for best foreign film. Oh. And then from that pool, they pick. But like as I was looking through these, so many of them had that side note. And Thale from 2012, which is interesting because it combines an exploration of both folklore, fantasy, and skepticism. Thale is a Norwegian movie that tells the story of Elvis and Leo, who run a crime scene cleanup business and are hired to handle um the specific death where they uncover Thale, a female humanoid creature who has a cow's tail and is uh unable to speak as a human, and she's hidden in a basement. I'm not gonna give too much more, but there's kind of a fun through line to hold to here. So Nane Sarma or BB Barfee or Grandma Snow is from Iranian folklore. Grandma Snow is associated with winter and survival, sometimes described as an old woman or spirit whose presence is felt in harsh weather, embodying both the danger of cold and the resilience needed to endure it. Native cultures across the globe developed rich winter folklore shaped by geography and survival, and of course this spiritual relationship to the land. For many tribes, winter was not an abstract season, but a living presence, marked by spirits, animal guides, and powerful forces. The different folklore, which varies not just tribe to tribe, but family and lineage to lineage, explain why winter came, how to endure it, and what behaviors ensured survival. The real difference here is that it also really emphasizes in a lot of cases a respect for nature. Winter figures in native folklore could be both protective and dangerous, teaching that cold and darkness were a necessary part of the natural cycle, not enemies. These traditions were passed orally through generations, embedding lessons of resilience, balance, and reverence. So let's talk about some of them. I found an article on oldfolklore.com, Ipa Vulik, a legend that is rooted in Inuit or indigenous folklore around the Arctic region. The Ipa Luvik is known as a blizzard rider, but also a being that can control storms. Even in some cases, creating a path to flee them. So, like for instance, could bring upon a storm, but also kind of create a way for someone specifically to survive. According to the article, he confronts people who are wasteful or hunt without respect for animals. Through his actions, he teaches about the importance of community, thoughtfulness, and connection to the natural world. In other sources, I've also seen him defined as an evil sea god. So this is one of those things where sometimes researching folklore can be a little bit difficult or challenging because there's so many different versions of things. Inuit traditions and folklore vary greatly depending on region and again family, different family stories that are passed down. Isoyamstan, or the cold maker, is a snow god from Mantana Blackfoot mythology. He is known as the bringer of frost, snow, and storms. He is visually described as a white man with white hair and clothes. He is also known to ride a white horse. The Blackfeet indigenous people live in the Great Plains, an area that spans from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and areas of Montana. Only Blackfeet elders are permitted to tell stories and tend to try and keep them internal and sacred to the tribe, so we are going to leave that one there. In Iroquois mythology, there is a great spirit who is responsible for the balance of nature. Snow also represents cleansing and renewal. It gives meaning to each season. To the Iroquois, snow is a gift from the Great Spirit. It's about embracing change and the flow of the seasons. Animals are often seen as messengers of the Great Spirit and play a role in the creation myth, which goes like this. A girl named Skye starts to dance. She represents the spirit of winter. As she dances, the snow starts to fall. There is also a character from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that centers around a being called Heike Lunta, the snow god. But interestingly, Heike Lunta is still celebrated in this region. There's even an annual fireworks display to him. And this is in large part because the character was created in the 1970s, inspired by Finnish folklore. David Ryuda originated the character, whose name translates to Hank Snow. At the time, a snowmobile race organized by the Range Snowmobile Club in Atlantic Mine was at risk due to insufficient snowfall. So the creator, who worked at a radio station, played a song on air called the Heike Luta Snow Dance Song. The lyrics called upon the Heike Lunta, described as a Finnish snow god to bring snow in time for the event. And according to local legend, the snow did come, but in overwhelming amounts. Many people believed that the song was responsible for the excessive snowfall. And after public complaints, Ryuda recorded a follow-up track called Heike Lunta Go Away. Both songs were released on a 45 RPM record with one track on each side.
SPEAKER_01:So I don't fuck around with public radio.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. It's the most powerful medium we have. Have you ever seen The Fog?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Case in point. Over time, the mythology, quote unquote, right? Modern mythology, surrounding Heike Lunta grew through children's books and theatrical performances. These expanded stories explore his they kind of gave him background, right? His supposed origins in central Finland as the son of Elias and Saima Lunta, along with details about his siblings and his childhood sweetheart. The Wendigo is a supernatural being or malicious spirit from Algonquin folklore. Over time, the idea of the Wendigo has been widely incorporated into literature and other creative work, like Until Dawn, one of our favorite video games.
SPEAKER_01:You'd say widely incorporated?
SPEAKER_02:I mean, in when you look at Native American creatures, yeah. He's probably the most well known.
SPEAKER_01:I'd say Bigfoot is more well known.
SPEAKER_02:Is that a Native American myth?
SPEAKER_01:The the Sasquatch?
SPEAKER_02:Okay, so sure, but he's the second most well known. I mean, he's he's much more like, you know, he's he's around.
SPEAKER_01:I think we are aware of him, but the the the Wendigo was a r was a was really a s a slept-on cryptid, if you ask me.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, I I'll be totally honest. I wasn't aware of the Wendigo until I met you.
SPEAKER_01:Well, there you go. And like also it's the depiction of the Wendigo is it's it's a very it's a very wide swath. Like it's think of the movie Antlers. That's what I picture the Wendigo to be, like, you know, this sk skeletal moose man. Sure. You know, that's pretty pretty cool. But that's not at all what a traditional Wendigo looks like. They're not even antlered.
SPEAKER_02:The Wendigo is commonly portrayed as a hostile entity, sometimes shown with human-like features and the ability to possess people. It is believed to drive those it affects into unending hunger, a compulsion to consume human flesh and kind of act out violently. In certain versions of the legend, the Wendigo appears as a towering humanoid with a frozen heart, announcing its presence through a terrible odor or kind of bringing about this sudden cold. In contemporary psychiatry, the term Wendigo psychosis refers to a condition marked by symptoms such as an overwhelming urge to eat human flesh and an intense fear of becoming a cannibal. This condition is classified as a culture-bound syndrome. Within some First Nation communities, behaviors like extreme greed and environmental destruction are also interpreted as manifestations of Wendigo psychosis. We're going to talk about that more on a future episode in this series when we get to isolation. A related figure known as Wachugay appears in the traditions of the Athabascan people of the Northwest Pacific coast. Like the Wendigo, it is associated with cannibalism, but it is distinguished by its connection to ancestral knowledge and heightened awareness. And I just want to pause on both of these figures to say, if we didn't paint this background clear enough, the reason why there's a connection between the Wendigo and cannibalism is because it's it's believed to be sort of a response to extreme hunger that certain tribes maybe felt in very snowy, desolate winters that were driven to towards cannibalism to survive, or in other words, like a punishment of greed of people who overindulged when the tribe was rationing food, things like that. It's very much linked to the survival and lack of food and the cruelty of winter. The Wendigo belongs to the traditional belief system of several Algonquin speaking nations. While specific details differ among these cultures, they share the understanding of the Wendigo as a hostile, cannibalistic, supernatural entity. It is closely linked to the north and to the conditions of winter, extreme cold and famine. Basil H. Johnston, an Ojibwe educator and scholar from Ontario, offered the following description of the Wendigo. Quote The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation. Its desiccated skin pulled tightly. Over its bones, with its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion, the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets. The Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton, recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody, unclean and suffering, from a superation of the flesh. The Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption. End quote.
SPEAKER_01:Um Yeah, probably.
SPEAKER_02:What's your top three?
SPEAKER_01:Uh Wendigo, Mothman, Lochness Monster.
SPEAKER_02:Ooh.
SPEAKER_01:That's really good. What are you what are yours?
SPEAKER_02:Mothman? Lochness Monster. Bigfoot.
SPEAKER_01:Bigfoot? No. Mermaids.
SPEAKER_02:Mermaids aren't cryptids. I thought of it.
SPEAKER_01:They're absolutely cryptids.
SPEAKER_02:Well mermaids are above all else.
SPEAKER_01:Why would a mermaid not be a cryptid?
SPEAKER_02:You think a mermaid is a cryptid? I think it's a deeper mythology than that.
SPEAKER_01:Cryptid is is too niche?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_02:Mermaids are mainstream.
SPEAKER_01:I'd say Bigfoot is mainstream.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but he's a cryptid. There's not a Disney movie about him.
SPEAKER_01:There's no Disney movie about a Yeti?
SPEAKER_02:No. In certain traditions, Wendigos are portrayed as enormous giants, far larger than human beings. This is a trait that's not commonly found in Algonquin legends. It's kind of, you know, in different different offshoots. When do you find big Wendigos? I've seen that in movies before. Well, when? In Ojibwe, Eastern Cree, West Main, Swampy Cree, and Inu traditions. According to these beliefs, each time a Wendigo consumed a person, it increased in size relative to the amount eaten, ensuring that it would never truly be satisfied. As a result, the Wendigo is depicted as both endlessly ravenous and unnaturally thin, perpetually starving despite constant consumption. Yeah, I think that's the part about Wendigos that are really interesting, that it's just the idea is that it's never satisfied.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but it's rarely explained. Like, you know, zombies will just eat forever because they're brain dead, you know? Mm-hmm. With the Wendigo, they just explained it where the body will grow bigger than what the meal would sus sustain.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, exactly. The Wendigo is often interpreted as a physical manifestation of gluttony, greed, and excess. After killing and devouring one victim, it will seek out others without end. This interpretation is one of the most influential bridges between mythology and horror films when it comes to Wendigo's. The 1999 movie Ravenous draws heavily from Wendigo lore, using cannibalism and starvation as metaphors for moral decay.
SPEAKER_01:We did a deep dive into that movie.
SPEAKER_02:We did. We do have a very early Wendigo episode, which I'm not I'm not advertising here as worthy to go back and listen to. More recently, Antlers explicitly uses Algonquin Wendigo traditions as inspiration, while The Last Winter connects the legend to environmental destruction and climate anxiety. In many stories, a Wendigo does not lose its human intelligence or ability to speak, and in some versions, it is capable of directly addressing, threatening, or mocking those it intends to kill. In certain traditions, people who are consumed by greed were believed to transform into Wendigos, making the story a cautionary lesson meant to promote moderation and communal responsibility. Other accounts suggest that Wendigos came into being when a person turned to cannibalism in order to survive. It is also believed that prolonged exposure to a Wendigo could cause a human to become one as well. Across so many different horror movies, snow is used as the perfect setting for these stories. Films trap characters in silence, strip away civilization, and force ancient fears back to the surface. In these moments, horror doesn't just borrow from mythology, it actually continues it. In a lot of cases, these legends and myths, right? Like we don't know what they're being pulled from, but the filmmakers are actively looking at folklore to inspire the scripts. And so in this kind of roundabout way, they perpetuate these legends that might otherwise be lost. And we might not be able to name them when we watch it and say, oh, that's, you know, that's from Japan or that's from this or that's from that. But they're still retelling the stories in a modern way, and they will go on to inspire other horror movies and other types of media, right? Kind of in turn.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, it's just kind of a staple of the human condition. Like, no matter how much uh technology that we have, no matter how much our intelligence grows, you can still freeze to death. Like unless you have your tools, you're gonna die from exposure.
SPEAKER_02:Right. The basic human fear of the basic humanity. Yeah. As science explained the mechanics of winter, it didn't make anything about winter's cruelty less horrific, Shallon's point. The gods faded, but the fear remained. Hunger became monstrosity. Isolation became madness. Snow stopped being ruled by divine figures and began manifesting as creatures, curses, and environments that strip people down to their most desperate instincts. Horror cinema didn't invent these fears, but it inherited them. Every frozen landscape and film, every starving figure, every snowbound nightmare is an echo of the same ancient stories, reminding us that winter has always been more than a season. It is a force that watches, tests, and waits. Continued next time on Lunatics Radio Hour.
SPEAKER_01:Until then.
SPEAKER_02:Talk to you soon. Bye.
