If your parents weren't disgusting crackheads, you will have grown up watching short animation kino The Snowman at Christmas time. No doubt your young heart will have thrilled to the innocent joy of creation, the bravura flight around the world, and the whimsical dance sequence.
But it will also have been cruelly punctured by the ending, which I will spoil for the crack babies (the snowman melts), because it's far too late for them now. I'm here to rectify that, by revealing that the snowman is a servant of the dark Elder God Cthulhu, who even now slumbers at his cyclopean house in sunken Rl'yeh.
The first sign something is amiss is when the snowman turns his head as the young boy observes him through the glass of his front door, in what horror film viewers will recognise as classic horror film grammar. Compare the moment in Scream (1996) where Drew Barrymore sees Ghostface from behind through the window and he turns around to face her. Something-seeing-you-from-behind-glass is horror grammar, and the animators know it, as they are professionals. This is why only patricians can appreciate art.
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| This happens at the witching hour, by the way. |
The snowman then proceeds to gain the boy's trust so he can take him as a sacrifice to his dark master. The second clue to his true nature is that the cat shits its pants when it sees him. As we know from Stoker's Dracula and others, animals can sense the presence of the uncanny. In fact all the animals in the picture run away from the snowman or behave wildly in confusion, except for the owl, and the owls are not what they seem.
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| One day I shall write at length on the connections between the Lovecraftian and Lynchian branches of cosmic horror. |
The snowman then takes the boy flying around the world, and we get the only lyrics in the whole picture (silent cinema, as you will know, is preferable wherever possible). These include the following:
Suddenly swooping low on an ocean deep
Rousing up a mighty monster from its sleep
That sounds like Cthulhu to me. The kino shows a whale, and the plebeian will interpret that as the "monster" of the lyrics, but it's evident to me that true kinographers know to suggest the presence of the true horror through environmental signifiers. Consider Spielberg's use of the water ripples to suggest the T-rex in Jurassic Park; Park is a very good film, but it would be kino had he never shown the dinosaur at all.
In other words, the presence of the whale indicates the forces arising far beneath the surface: it is driving even massive creatures to the surface in flight.
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| Absolutely eldritch. |
Given just one more day, when the stars were right, the snowman would have sacrificed the boy to bring about Cthulhu's rise. The day is still coming when he will rise up from the sea. His vast wings will black out the stars, and all the Earth will tremble in horror and terror as he walks upon the land!
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| Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! |
