Recently I was having a conversation with my friend Leila about jubokko – a type of yōkai tree that amounts to a vampiric tree. Sometimes claimed of folkloric source, it may have been invented by GeGeGe no Kitaro creator Shigeru Mizuki. However, it is a tree (often found on the sites of battlefields) that has become yōkai by drinking the blood of the dead and now subsists on human blood. When cut it bleeds.
The conversation turned to the 1990 William Friedkin directed film The Guardian – but I struggled, I don’t think I’d seen it since the heady days of VHS rentals. I sourced the film to view and this is the resulting ‘Vamp or Not?’
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| Dianna looks in on her ward |
The film begins with the following intertitle: “For thousands of years, a religious order known as the druids worshipped trees, sometimes even sacrificing human beings to them. To these worshippers, every tree has its guardian spirit. Most are aligned with goodness and life, but some embody powers of darkness and evil.” We see an owl and then we are in the home of the Sheridans. Mom (Natalija Nogulich) and dad (Gary Swanson) have a young son, who is reading Hansel and Gretel to their new-born baby, and a nanny called Dianna.
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| the tree |
They are going away for the weekend but, as soon as they have gone and the infant is asleep, Dianna leaves with the baby. Mom realises she has left her glasses at home, they come back and, whilst getting them, she looks in on the kid and, of course, the baby is missing. She runs out to her husband hysterical as we see Dianna walk through a forest to a huge menacing tree. She holds the baby up, which vanishes and we see a baby face formed in the bark of the tree. Wolves come and Dianna talks of the cycle being complete and another beginning, she turns into a wolf…
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| new nanny |
Phil Sterling (Dwier Brown) is offered a job in LA and he and his wife Kate (Carey Lowell) move out there. She is newly pregnant. They build a life, making friends with the architect of their home, Ned (Brad Hall), and the film skips over the pregnancy with alacrity. Once born they decide that Kate will have to work and so look for a nanny. We get a potted view of the interviews and they decide to offer the position to a young lady called Arlene (Theresa Randle) – cut to her cycling, hitting a pothole and dying on a cactus. The post goes to Camilla (Jenny Seagrove) instead. Now just a moment to note that it probably isn’t purposeful but her name is very close to Carmilla who, of course, was a vampire who entered a home in strange circumstances.
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| the tree kills |
Camilla mentions that a new-born’s blood is somehow different for four weeks after the birth, at which point it changes. Phil has warning dreams that he ignores at first, she is not shy about her body (to be fair the film avoided going down an infidelity with the nanny route) and when Camilla and the baby are hassled by thugs she manages to run through to the tree, which protects her. This sees the tree hitting with branches, grasping with roots and literally chomping on a thug. The presence of the tree was problematic to me, in that it is in the woods literally behind the Sterling’s home. It would have been better, to me, if the tree was physically located in faery but nevertheless…
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| avatar's face in bark |
Essentially what we have is an avatar of the tree, in the form of Camilla, and the tree needing sacrifice. The babies are incorporated into the tree “forever” but it is the quality of their blood that is needed, specifically wanting them before the blood changes. The tree can heal the avatar and an injury to the tree injures her also. Owls seem connected to it; she gives the baby plush toys including an owl called Pyewacket – the name of a witch’s familiar according to witchfinder Matthew Hopkins. Also connected are wolves, which Camilla demonstrates control over (though they are called coyotes by a character, in dialogue, I think they were actually more wolf-like). When the tree is cut it bleeds, like the jubokko.
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| flying |
And that decides it for me – the sacrifice’s blood condition being key, the control over “the meaner things” and the ability to transform into a wolf (which only Dianna does but it still occurs), the fact that Camilla can fly and the fact that the tree seems sentient (it can defend itself when Camilla isn’t there), and bleeds when cut. Indeed Camilla has an inhuman, bark like, form and when wounded her scabs are bark – the tree has her face on its trunk as well as the baby faces. The film draws strong parallels to jubokko, even if the filmmakers knew nothing of the yōkai tree, and the tree is certainly vampiric.
The imdb page is here.
On DVD @ Amazon US
On DVD @ Amazon UK
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