The Morrigan review – spirit of pagan demon queen unleashed in Irish burial chamber horror

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Archaeologists blunder into an ancient and unwittingly release a vengeful monster – with predictable and conventional results In Irish folklore, the Morrígan is a powerful goddess of death and war. This horror movie imagines her as an actual historical figure: a pagan queen massacred with her followers by Christians. A quick scene at the start of the film shows the dirty deed. The Morrígan’s rage against misogyny has screamed down through the centuries – so it’s a shame the film frames her not as a feminist icon but a highly conventional horror movie nemesis; a malign vengeful female to be crushed and destroyed. There is nothing to punch the air about in the end. Saffron Burrows plays an archaeologist called Fiona who has been repeatedly passed over for tenure at her US university. When Fiona presents her radical theory that the myth of the Morrígan may have a basis in real life, her slippery colleague Jonathan (Jonathan Forbes) is made the lead on the dig. Fiona is forced to bring al...
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Piper Laurie obituary

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American actor best known for her roles in the classic films The Hustler, Carrie and Children of a Lesser God

For those who remembered Piper Laurie from her days as a contract player in a series of formulaic escapist pictures made by Universal Studios in the 1950s, it was hard to believe that the lonely young woman in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), who takes her own life when she is rejected by the pool shark Paul Newman, was one and the same. This Oscar-nominated performance was a surprise, and nothing Laurie did before or after touched it.

Having proved that she could act, Laurie, who has died aged 91, immediately retired from the cinema. She returned 15 years later, in another guise, this time specialising in playing harridans, principally in horror movies. The most celebrated was Brian De Palma’s repulsive and compulsive Carrie (1976), for which she was also Oscar-nominated, this time as the religious mother of the pubescent Sissy Spacek, intoning “the first sin was intercourse”.

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