By
Kevin Cooney
Tremendously flawed but much loved, The Keep (1983) was director Michael Mann’s first and only horror film thus far. For all of its cinematic beauty and meticulous production design, studio meddling and production delays turned the movie into a legendary failure. However, hidden within the mangled edit is a foreboding portrayal of evil. While The Keep falls short with its supernatural antagonist, it does turn an archaic place, the eponymous stone and slate keep, into a monstrous character unto itself, a malignant genius loci whose evil is matched by the characters in jackboots.
The Keep, a 1981 horror novel by F. Paul Wilson, tells the story of the pseudo-vampiric Molasar, an ancient evil imprisoned in the eponymous Romanian keep. Freed inadvertently by an occupying Nazi detachment, the antagonist proceeds to pick his way through the troops while spreading madness to the village beyond. Populating Wilson’s novel is a pair of German officers, a withered academic, his daughter, and the inscrutable hero, each playing a small part in a conflict that has festered since the dawn of time. Director of Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Heat (1995), Michael Mann reshaped the novel into a screenplay of intense visuals and the estranging power of nightmares. The movie, troubled by filming and post-production problems and cost overruns, prompted Paramount Studios to step in and take the film away from Mann.
Captain Klaus Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow)
The film released to theaters was a 90-minute edited maze of dead ends. Left behind is a beautifully shot, often confusing movie where the set, rather than Molasar, delivers oppressive fear. The version of Molasar that Mann put on film was a product of shifting ideas and lackluster execution. In its first form, a column of moving smoke, Molasar was at its most enigmatic, evoking Biblical manifestations of God. From that point, the formerly disembodied creature is revealed as a hulking, glowing-eyed titan of foam and latex. Rising from the mangled edit and eclipsing the ill-formed antagonist was the ominous, austere, brutalist set. The true evil and menace of The Keep was the material keep itself.
Choosing a minimalist interpretation over the Wilson-described classic gothic castle, Mann’s team, led by art directors Alan Tomkins and Herbert Westbrook, created a brutalist-style fortification within a Welsh quarry. With the equally bleak yet grand interiors shot on a London soundstage, the Keep’s exterior wall is a wide, towering, and neat pile of small slate-colored stones bristling with horizontal log supports. The viewer’s first glimpse of the keep’s slate façade coincides with the arrival of Captain Klaus Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow,) a cynical Wehrmacht officer who mockingly declares to a bellicose underling that they are “rulers of the world” just before the keep dwarfs him. The officer confidently strides into the keep, revealing a human-made cavern of hard angles and colossal buttresses, with inset nickel crosses dotting the walls. Woermann quickly observes the structure was built backward, more inside out, with the small stones on the outside and the large blocks within. To the military-minded Woermann, the defensive fortification was not designed to keep someone out but to keep someone or something in.
Textures change within the keep. Shadows grow longer and deeper as the slate grows from chips to monstrous blocks. A sense of cold seeps from the mortarless walls as it uniformly looms over the soldiers and the SS stormtroopers. A warning by the keep’s caretaker that no one stays in the fortification as it causes dreams or nightmares prompts Woermann to reply, “The real nightmares man has made upon other men in this war. The bad dreams of your keep are nursery rhymes in comparison.” Mann, as screenwriter, makes it clear that the film’s unequaled horror is the keep itself. Ghosts and demons are dismissed, for the keep’s power comes from its seeming immortal mass, a weighty presence that presses down on the occupiers and viewers. As a structure, the keep is the malignant genius loci, the architectural realization of a terrifying antagonist.
Architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz took the Roman genius loci, or divine spirit of a place, and reinterpreted it through the discipline of architecture as “a means to visualize” the transcendent, existential power of a single location (5). Applying this to the sets of The Keep, we perceive something grotesque or horrible via the architecture of the keep. Austere on the inside as it is on the outside, the Keep, as developed by Mann’s team, portrays an evil transcendent of time. Molasar’s eventual appearance adds little dread to the viewer experience, for the dramatic power within the film is the constructed keep.
The Keep pulls an ancient supernatural manifestation of a locale into the twentieth century, revealing it to be oppressive, menacing architecture. As a non-rational place, reducing characters and viewers to helpless creatures drowned by its imposing form, the film evokes Rudolf Otto’s recognition that religious experiences are like “submergence into nothingness before an overpowering, absolute might of some kind” (10). When the occupiers interact with the cavernous interior, there is awe in their hesitance. Heads craning to take in the unseen vaulted ceiling, attempting to position themselves within the massive space, the characters wither into insignificance in the presence of the genius loci.
As an architectural manifestation of evil, we see how the set denies the characters what Norberg-Schulz identified as a key to worthwhile construction. Humans, the critic noted, require a “‘good’ relationship” to a place in a “physical as well as psychic sense” (18.) Within the film’s earliest moments, the fortification unsettles and disrupts the characters. Denied basic comforts, before the terrors even appear, the soldiers and stormtroopers not only fail to realize physical sanctuary, but they discover their psychic or mental well-being eroded. This latter revelation means the film’s setting upsets Norberg-Schulz’s dwelling as an “existential foothold” (5.) The occupying Germans’ reality is upended, leading to panic and terror, exposing any notion of authority over the keep as fantasy.
Norberg-Schulz believed “man has to be able to orientate himself; he has to know where he is. But he also has to identify himself with the environment, that is, he has to know how he is a certain place” (19), something which the occupying Germans never realize. The film set and place pull apart the required elements of Norberg-Schulz’s ideal. The keep prevents the characters’ orientation while simultaneously revealing that the occupiers are the flesh-and-bone equal of the monstrous structure. The soldiers’ ability to position themselves within the place is quickly rebuffed before they are literally torn apart.
The moment pitons are driven into the walls to string lighting, and as rumors spread of silver within the walls, the keep’s malevolence confronts the lodgers, reneging on the promise to shelter. The set’s ancient lithic design confuses and corrupts all senses, distorting the occupants’ perception of safety and normality. It dislocates physical and psychic comfort while at the same time demonstrating to the viewer that the grey-hued evils, one in wool and the other stone, do match.
However, the horror of the keep for the occupiers is that they cannot see that they belong there. They cry victim as the unseen forces assault them, yet the structure matches the blackness of the soldiers’ souls and cause. Their terror is a product of their refusal or ignorance to acknowledge that they do “identify” with the place. They are soldiers in grey and black, stern and uncompromising, just like the keep. Attempts to fight against the steady advance of evil produce no victories or safety, for the stone structure is their equal, at first, before usurping the soldiers.
The keep is the embodiment of a supernatural force waiting to be freed. Representation of an improbable, architecturally disorientating stone structure, so out of human scale, suggests the occulted power or spirit of a place. Pulled from a palette of stone, The Keep sets, and place depict evil better than the flayed-skin, muscle-bound antagonist. The viewer’s patience with the disjointed movie is rewarded by the texturally rich and evocative setting. Ultimately, the keep’s reflectionless walls reproduce an accurate picture of evil better than any mirror.
Kevin Cooney is a Harvard University FAS graduate and contributor to the 2021 British Science Fiction Association-winning anthology Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction. His diverse interests and writings include examinations of religion, class, or the environment in genre literature and film (science fiction and horror.) His work can be found at https://linktr.ee/kcooney.
Works Cited
Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. Rizzoli, 1980.
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: an Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Oxford University Press, 1973.
The Keep. Directed by Michael Mann. USA. Associated Capital, 1983.
