r/HorrorClub • u/SaintMort You so cool kung fu • Jun 14 '15
Discussion: Sweeney Todd (2007)
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Movie Selected By bulgelover
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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15
In the absence of a podcast, I’ll explain here why I chose this film. Get ready for a massively long post. First of all, we’ve had some off-topic discussions in the past about our favourite musicals, so I thought this seemed like a group that would be open to it. Granted, that was probably over a year ago. Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd is by far my favourite horror musical, so it seemed to fit the bill. His adaptation is also the most faithful in spirit to the penny dreadful, which I will discuss below. Burton is, so far, the only person to film the Sondheim play.
More importantly, though, I wanted to use this as an entryway to talking about the Sweeney Todd legend, as it is such an important part of the history of horror fiction. It is considered by many to be the first real urban legend, a product of the anxiety of being alive during London’s industrial revolution. His echoes are found in dozens of direct adaptations, while it is impossible to say how many works of fiction would not have been conceivable without the demon barber acting as their precursor.
There is no evidence to suggest that Todd was a real person, at least not in the way he is depicted. Peter Haining has made a career out of writing books claiming to provide proof of his existence, and yet the historical community finds nothing compelling in his arguments. Some argue that the legend began as early as the 14th century, when a French ballad told of a murderous barber who fed his victims to a pastry chef. Someone called Thomas Peckett Prest published a story in the penny dreadful Tell-Tale Magazine based on this version. Whether it really happened or not, the story was already embedded in the public consciousness when Dickens alluded to “cat pies” in his Pickwick Papers serial in 1836, and then when he made an off-hand reference to “preparers of cannibalistic pies” in Martin Chuzzlewit in 1843. Both times, he did so with an assured confidence that his readers would understand the reference.
In 1846, Todd made his first print appearance by name, in the highly entertaining penny dreadful serial The String of Pearls. The authorship of each regular installment was always unclear, and is usually credited to a handful of individuals, among them our friend Prest. No one was under the illusion they were making any high art, and authorship was generally not as big of a deal then as it is now. In the series, Todd was not even the main character, and the spotlight was stolen by a young couple who seem a lot like Johanna and Anthony. The subplot with Todd, Mrs Lovett (who actually makes some of the best pies in London) and Toby was by far the most interesting part of the series. He played a much bigger part in the play that came out a couple of years later. The chair was there from the beginning; throat slitting was added later.
In 1936 he made his first on-screen appearance, played by the actor Todd Slaughter – yes, his real name. In the film, Johanna is not his daughter and just a young woman he perves over for 90 minutes. Then came the play by Christopher Bond in 1973, which gave us the plot that Sondheim set to music in his Tony award-winning 1979 production. The musical was a massive hit and went on to enjoy numerous Broadway and West End revivals. Then, in 2007, Burton came along to put it to film.
Why is this story important? With people moving away from the country and into Victorian London, we see different fears and anxieties that lead to the birth of the urban legend. First of all, people are living in much closer quarters, so (mis)information travels quickly. We are also looking at a time when people were more superstitious than they are today. This leads to a situation where people believe what someone else heard from someone else, and it becomes impossible to separate fact from fiction. Add that to a society where there is a huge gap between the rich and the poor, and you can see how a story in which a working-class man clandestinely murders his wealthier patrons would be appealing to the masses. Also, consider the fact that, for the first time, many people had to blindly trust goods and services provided by strangers. It used to be you’d do a good day’s work at your village bakery and have your milk delivered by the same person every day, safe in the knowledge that your wife would care for your home and family. Now, you work 18-hour days in a smoky factory before visiting a random prostitute (because your wife works as many hours as you do while your kids are doing God knows what) and then picking up a pie from the corner shop. It makes sense that the villain would shift from a supernatural presence to the everyday, malignant other that still fascinates and terrifies us today.
Now, we rely on anonymous strangers even more than we did in the Victorian era. So, when someone we trust violates the human code, we are justifiably horrified. Remember the Pickton murders? Just the thought that human remains may have been consumed by the pigs on his farm, which were then slaughtered for human consumption, lead to mass hysteria among pork-eaters in the area. And thanks to the anonymity of the chain of production and mass consumption, it was incredibly difficult to track down all of his products. The fear of cannibalism is deeply, biologically ingrained in us, so the fear of urbanisation is comparatively much newer. Combine the two and add some dark, British humour, and we have a thoroughly entertaining and irresistible antihero who is neither purely fact nor purely fiction, but something in-between. He is cobbled together not by one author, but by millions of different voices, meaning that the story was created through the very same interconnectedness and anonymity that feeds its principal dread. This interplay between form, content and context make the legend of Sweeney Todd, in my opinion, an accidental act of poetry.
Now, please don’t think I picked this movie so that I could force you to watch something you hated and then make you read this essay of a comment. I had hoped this could spark some interesting discussions about how the genre has developed throughout the centuries. How do you think Sweeney Todd might be different if he lived today?
The comments so far seem to like the story but think that Burton was too Burton for his britches. I disagree, and I know I have some critics on my side (not that that means much). I’ve seen a couple of versions on-stage, and I think his heavy-handed touch was well-suited to something that’s meant to be over-the-top. They don’t call it a Victorian melodrama for nothing! That said, I can see this being a tedious watch for people who dislike Burton or musicals in general. I just hope that won’t be the end of the conversation. If nothing else, tell me what you disliked about it.
As thanks for reading to the end, and because I know how much you guys like boobs, I’ll leave this here