The Pied Piper (An American's Guide to Czech Movies) (Patreon)

The Pied Piper of Hamelin never ran out of ways to be fucked up. He was a mass kidnapper from the beginning. In some renditions of his tale, he’s a mass murderer. A rat catcher was a direly needed presence in 13th Century Lower Saxony, but his price was so exorbitant that it made you kinda prefer vermin plagues. We all have bad days at work, but unless you work at Lockheed Martin, your job generally doesn’t involve slaughtering dozens of children.

This teutonic angel of death has hypnotized troubadours like Goethe, Robert Browning, and the Grimm Bros. The Grimms snuck in an origin story for Transylvania, and Goethe smuggled bits of the Piper’s story into Faust. These tellings tended to retain the Piper myth’s xenophobia, the figure of a traveling, paganish vagabond who comes to town and whisks away the children. The Pied Piper is quintessential European folklore: didactic social horror about the atrocities that ensue when the Other sweeps through the polis.

By 1915, the Pied Piper was still offering his services to paranoid Europeans. The Czech nationalist Viktor Dyk had signed the Manifest českých spisovatelů, or Manifesto of Czech writers, declaring support for the Allied Powers in World War I. Austria-Hungary jailed this secessionist, but ultimately Dyk got his dream of a non-Austro-Hungarian Czechoslovakia. Czech dramatists and folklorists of the period used folk stories as engines to discuss the paradox of life under Austro-Hungarian rule, and the possibility of Czechoslovak autonomy. Naturally, Viktor Dyk was going to bring back the Pied Piper for this era.

Dyk’s Pied Piper — entitled Krysař, or “the rat-catcher,” is not unexpectedly grim, seeing how Czech folklore is bleak even when the Pied Piper is nowhere in sight and the author isn’t a Czech nationalist during World War I. The town of Hamelin becomes a microcosm for the depraved wickedness of medieval civilization, an aborted deal with the devil comes into play, and a fridging by suicide prompts the Piper’s actions in the back half of the story. Dyk unites the different versions of the story into one, and brings in the bleakness of them all, having the Piper slaughter the townsfolk of Hamelin by leading them into an abyss.

Then in 1986, stop-motion animator Jiří Barta doubled down on all of that. His adaptation of The Pied Piper makes Dyk’s version read like a comforting bedtime story. This checks out — the U.S.S.R. would have its talons in Czechoslovakia for a few years yet. Fairy tales were going to be incredibly bleak.

Barta’s choice of German aesthetics is Expressionism — he creates a gloriously cubic, Caligari-esque Piper, where everything is a mechanism, people look like wooden contraptions, and everything is a cog in a machine. Things are distilled to their function and the role they can play as an instrument of labor. It’s the sort of movie that would have gotten banned if it were part of the Czech New Wave. It’s not undermining the very idea of form the way Jan Švankmajer does, but it does reduce all things to labor in a way that recalls Soviet realism.

And of course, this is borderline unwatchable. It’s so misanthropic that Fantastic Planet would bristle at it — even Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd - The Wall isn’t quite this miserable. The Piper’s girlfriend is gang-raped and murdered, the townfolks are purely evil misers, and the Piper ultimately transforms the whole population into rats before sending them all into the river. It’s ugly, even by the standards of the Pied Piper. And ultimately, it’s the Piper the Soviet Union deserved.