Creatures of the Night

VHS cover

Creatures of the Night is the first episode of Creatures Fantastic, which aired in 1997 on the Discovery Channel and Arts Channel. The topic of this episode is the different kinds of nocturnal monsters and spirits to appear in mythology, with explanations about what they may represent to us.

## Episode

Click here for the full transcript for Creatures of the Night.

### Introduction

*“Once every twenty-four hours, we all spend a while in a foreign place. The sun slips away, our sight becomes partly disabled, hearing and sense of smell becomes sharper. Somehow, the surrounding world seems both small and limitless and the night sky infinitely deep. Night can bring solitude and fear. Fear of the darkness swallowing us up. Night is when people pull deep into themselves. They sleep and dream or tell each other stories about wild creatures of the night. But why do we have these stories? Why fear things that can’t even be seen? Beasts that lurk and wait and threaten.”*

**Episode outline**

The episode begins in eighth-century Europe, where people had all sorts of fears about monsters in the dark. In the epic poem Beowulf, a night monster threatens to destroy an entire kingdom.

*The storyteller tells his first story, of Grendel who is roused from a dark swamp by the sounds of revelry in King Hrothgar’s banqueting hall. The monster, who hates humans enjoying themselves, moves through the forest to the hall where he then breaks in and kills one of the now-sleeping warriors.*

The narrator says that, although Grendel was eventually killed in the poem, the fear of night creatures is still common throughout mythology. The Anglo-Saxons referred to night as the death-mist. We can sleep through the night, but there is no guarantee that something won’t get us while we sleep. It is our fear of the dark which also makes night a time for intimacy. The combination of fear and intimacy goes to the root of nightmares – the word comes from the Anglo-Saxon marra, a demon that leaps on sleepers and fills their dreams with fear. In Greece, this creature was known as an incubus which also caused sleep apnoea, that causes people to stop breathing in their sleep and wake gasping for air. The greatest nightmare of all is that one day the dawn won’t come. Aztecs performed human sacrifices to ensure the sun would come up, while in mythology characters like Apollo from ancient Greece and Ra from ancient Egypt fought a battle with darkness every night to ensure the dawn would come. The human body’s reactions change at night, so we have an innate fear of the dark and the creatures in it. Our eyesight is not made for darkness, unlike the eyes of nocturnal creatures that can eerily glow with reflected light. The fleeting sights and sounds of night creatures make our minds run wild, making them appear as ghosts or witches. Real nocturnal animals may become the witch’s accomplice, such as cats, owls and amphibians. In European legend, witches were hideous old women who served Satan and brewed potions, cast spells and stole souls. If something bad happened in medieval Europe and they were looking for a suspect, the obvious one would be an old woman living alone, especially if she owned a cat. Some women lived alone because of circumstance – with the number of wars, there were doubtlessly a lot of widows. But there were also women suspicious because they chose not to marry. An example of the medieval liberated woman can be found in one of King Arthur’s stories.

*The second story from the storyteller is about King Arthur, trying to find out for a giant what a woman truly wants. He has a year to find the answer and the penalty for missing the deadline is death. He asks everyone he meets, instinctively knowing every answer is wrong. He then finds a witch who offers to tell him, but only if she can be married to one of his knights. Arthur agrees, and the witch tells him the answer. “Since he first walked, her one desire is still, in all her dealings, just to have her will.” Arthur knows deep in his heart that this is the right answer. The knights are aghast with the idea of being married to a foul-smelling old hag, and angry with their king for testing their fidelity in this way. But Gawain, understanding Arthur’s plight, agrees to marry the witch. After the wedding, Gawain finds himself in the witch’s bedchamber and forces himself to kiss her. When he opens his eyes, he finds she has turned into a beautiful young woman. She explains that she can be beautiful either during the night or the day, but not both, and asks Gawain which she would prefer. When Gawain lets her choose, she decides to be beautiful all the time, because he has given her free will.*

Unfortunately, most medieval men weren’t as gallant as Gawain, and from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries thousands of people, mostly women, were pronounced witches and burned at the stake. Some night creatures can’t be killed by a mere burning. One of the most feared would attack people in their sleep – the vampire. Vampires deal out a gruesome fate. Immortal, they sustain themselves on the blood of mortals. Once they bite, the victim’s soul is traded in for immortality and the victim becomes one of them. One of the most chilling coincidences between myth and science is the discovery of vampire bats living in South America. These animals didn’t inspire vampire myths, as they live in South America which was discovered far later than the earliest European vampire stories. Stories about vampires are probably as old as storytelling itself. They range from the biblical Lilith, who sucked babies’ blood, to the real-life Romanian ruler Vlad the fifth, who impaled and boiled his enemies alive. It was Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula that transformed the vampire into a glamorous, sexualised count. By the late 19th century, when women were challenging what was perceived as the normal order with the suffragette movement, vampires gained a new sociological meaning. Dracula depicted what became of women liberated from normal morality, who lost all decency and became unprincipled nymphomaniacs. In the 1930s, when Dracula was turned into a movie, the word vamp became current. A vamp was a woman who seduced men and sucked them dry of all their self-respect. People’s fear of vampires and the undead may have come from premature burials. The narrator then looks at a crossroads at night, a place where ghosts often gather. Ghosts are often believed to be the souls of people not buried in consecrated ground. Criminals were often hanged at crossroads and provided fertile breeding grounds for people to imagine ghosts. Ghosts exist in almost every culture and religion. Even hard-headed people, including atheists, can make an exception for believing in ghosts. It’s not just crossroads – just dark, lonely roads can be frightening. There are still many stories about ghostly encounters late at night with a solitary traveller in a car.

*The final story from the storyteller is one of these phantom hitchhiker stories. Bill is returning home from a business meeting and takes a shortcut through the countryside. Heavy rain forces him to slow down, and he suddenly finds a teenage girl at the side of the road. He offers her a lift and she silently gets into the back of the car. She only speaks when asked where her house is in the next village, and then lies down and goes to sleep. As Bill enters the village, the dawn breaks and the rain suddenly stops; here the road is a bit dusty. He speeds up to make up for lost time and soon arrives at the cottage. When he arrives, he turns to wake the girl and finds she is not there. There was no way she could have left the speeding car and his seat is still wet. He decides to knock on the door of the cottage. The woman who answers the door tells Bill that her seventeen-year-old daughter had died two years previously in a car accident, on a stormy night while returning from a dance. Ever since then, strangers have appeared at her door with tales of sudden storms and a waif in a chiffon dress.*

When we are alone, the dark and its natives are at its most frightening. We wait out the night in hopes of a new dawn. But eventually, there will be a night for all of us that lasts forever. But should we fear it? After all, we begin life in the dark so why should we be afraid to end it there? Life’s greatest mystery is our fate after the death-mist envelops us.

## Animal species filmed for the programme

### Studio footage

* European common toad, *Bufo bufo*
* Colorado River toad, *Incilius alvarius*
* Domestic cat, *Felis catus*
* Domestic horse, *Equus ferus caballus*

### Stock footage

* Tawny owl, *Strix aluco*
* Least weasel, *Mustela nivalis*
* Common barn owl, *Tyto alba*
* Grey wolf, *Canis lupus*
* European polecat, *Mustela putorius*
* European wildcat, *Felis silvestris*
* White-faced scops owl, *Ptilopsis leucotis*
* Domestic dog, *Canis familiaris*
* Domestic cat, *Felis catus*
* Great horned owl, *Bubo virginianus*
* European common toad, *Bufo bufo*
* Common vampire bat, *Desmodus rotundus*
* Domestic horse, *Equus ferus caballus*

## Stock footage sources

Alien Empire: Metropolis (1996) - Moon rising behind gravestones

## Credits

* Director - Jenny Ash
* Narrator - Zoë Wanamaker
* Storyteller - John Shrapnel
* Script Consultant - David Helton
* Production Designer - Graeme Thomson
* Graphic Designer/Director - Richard Higgs

## Home media releases

As with all Creatures Fantastic episodes, Creatures of the Night has only been released on VHS. The cover of the box shows a cloudy sunset sky, with the main picture being of two brown long-eared bats with artificially added glowing red eyes. Also on the cover is an old artwork depicting a winged harpy-like creature attacking a man, and a faded background image of a woman sleeping.

The picture on the spine and back cover is a composite image showing both the vampire from the episode attacking a woman and a barn owl.

The blurb on the back cover of the VHS reads:

Night can bring solitude and fear. Fear of beasts that lurk in the darkest shadows. **Creatures of the Night** dramatically recreates mythical tales of vampires, witches, ghosts and other monsters, such as Grendel. The film asks what might have given rise to these gruesome stories and ancient terrors that cannot be banished with the flick of a switch.

Back cover of Creatures of the Night VHS

**Narrators** Zoë Wanamaker (primary narrator) • John Shrapnel (storyteller narrator)
**Episodes**: **Creatures of the Night** • Dragons • Creatures of the Deep • Mythical Cats • The Apocalypse • Werewolves • The Underworld • Man Beasts • Spirits of the Forest • Mythical Horses • Birds and Things with Wings • Tricky Tricksters • Aliens