Giselle: The Proto Slasher Ballet
Part doomed romance, part supernatural Horror story, Giselle dances a classic Slasher format.
Originally published in the 2020 October issue of We Are Horror, “Slasher”.
We open our slasher as teenagers party and make out in an idyllic country setting. By the time someone dies there are several intended victims right behind, because the first victim does not stay dead. Instead she is rises again, Jason-style, and comes back to wreak her confused vengeance on those who are left. This is Giselle, but there is no film adaptation: it’s a classic ballet that premiered in the 1840s.
Before the classical slashers of the 1970s, and even earlier than the Italian Giallo films, there is a stretch of horror storytelling that acts as a sort of proto-slasher. Giselle was informed by interpretations of folk dances and themes that predated even Gothic fiction. It also has something of the fairy story: the dark unknown in the looming forest. In these stories, men are lured to their drowned death, dread robbers discuss far too loudly what terrible tortures they plan for their quary, and Bluebeard slashes down wives.
Even as a proto-slasher, there are numerous similarities between Giselle and the modern horror we have come to recognize by its tropes. Act I is the build up: we have a party, a horny little love story, the reveal that some guy is a jerk, and then Gisele falls on a sword. This is where the folk elements come in the strongest. The idyllicism of this little country village is amplified. Midsommar style, there are small dramas, but otherwise everyone is provided for and happy. Nothing bad could happen here beyond a tiff at a holiday party.
Again similar to Midsommar, Gisele is named a queen at the harvest festival and after the reveal of her lover’s false identity and that he is betrothed, stabs herself. Interestingly, here Giselle met with some of the censorship that is all too familiar to Horror fans. The ballet received several edits over the years, but the most important one narratively is the removal of the bloody suicide.
In any case, Giselle goes mad. She cries out, she tears at her hair and clothing. She falls, she rises. And she falls a final time, sword or no.
Act II is where stuff gets truly dangerous. The Wilis finally appear. They are beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. Their movements mimic each other and they all fill a specific role: that of hunter. They induct others who have died like them into their cult, their family. This dynamic is similar to horrors like the witches from Suspiria, another ballet story, but it is also parallel to the family in A Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Albrecht’s hunt at the opening of the ballet mirrors Giselle’s own hunt as a member of the Wilis. This is a quintessential element in any slasher: not only are victims being slashed down, they are also being hunted. The potential victims in this narrative make out, lie about their identities, and are the possessors of jealous plots. Just like in Friday the 13th.
While mourning, Albrecht weeps over Giselle’s grave. She reappears without his knowledge, swirling around him in supernatural distress. He realizes, but instead of communing with her, the wronged lover throws his flowers back at him and her transformation into a Wilis is complete.
The Wilis are a kind of edited Vila, nymphs who are to alluring for men to handle. Their backstory as dead women with broken hearts is a common one in folklore, but is specifically inspired in this case by a poem by Victor Hugo, which begins (translated from French) “Alas! how I have seen young girls die!” In this case, the young girls die and are reborn to hunt men who cross their paths.
Just like any slasher, the hunt is a grand spectacle that whets the appetite. We want sorely to see Albrecht possessed and dispatched, perhaps even with his own sword. Yet at the same time we struggle to imagine the men who have been presented as heroes, or as too naive for their own good depending on your view, being devoured by the terrifying hunters.
The trap is set after immense technical skill by the ballerinas in the roles of the Wilis. In the Halloween production by the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago in 2017, two dozen ballerinas performed the same movement at the same time, all in a row, while wearing floor length veils draped lightly over them. Giselle is renowned as being one of the most difficult to dance in a standard repertoire, and this is due largely in part to the Wilis complicated coordinated movements.
Alongside the immense spectacle, the careful use of pantomime and exuberant movement infused with folks dances was a refreshing addition to the post French revolution ballet scene. Even in the 1980s, art commentator Lincoln Kirstein called it “danced hysteria” in his comprehensive Four Centuries of Ballet.
So seductive was its renewed interest in spectacle that it lent influence to Swan Lake’s more sinister elements and inspired the abstraction Les Syphildes. Perhaps more memorable than the actors’ movement themselves in slashers are the fantastic scores. How many Halloween parties are DJed with tantalizing tunes that have now become iconic? In this vein, Giselle again matches the genre: instead of using music as a backdrop for dance-theater, writer Adolphe Charles Adam wrote his own score. He even drafted it on a movie timeline: The entirety of the original music was finished in a week.
The ending of the ballet again shows his sensibility for the high emotion of horror: Instead of having Giselle gracefully return to her grave, the ballerina collapses and is carried by her saved lover to her final resting place. In original productions, she was then returned to the earth by sinking through the floor. But still, one waits for her to pop out, Carrie-like, when an unsuspecting and regretful fellow teen goes to lay flowers across her grave.
Giselle is not a scream queen: she goes to her death of her own volition. She is then reborn, Jason-like, Candyman-like, with the help of the queen of the Wilis, to terrorize those who had previously shared her life. It can in many ways be likened to the folk horror that has been revived recently, as well as the slasher.
One of the most famous ballerinas in the world, Anna Pavlova, begged to play Giselle and it was a defining role for her. The character cemented her as more than a chorus damsel for romantic ballet fare. Pavlova, as so many leading ladies before her was renewed by her role as a titular woman in a horror story. And just as some franchises seem to remake their final girls and villains over and over again, Giselle is redefined every time it is put on stage, placing a new ballerina in the role to tell us her version of the story all over again.
