Gloomy Sunday

Gloomy Sunday, or the suicide song is a unusual song with an unusual story. Gloomy Sunday was originally written as a silent prayer to go mourning a lost lover and is a pledge to commit suicide to meet the lover again in the afterlife.

Gloomy Sunday was composed by a Hungarian pianist and composer, Rezso Seress and has been preformed by many singers including Billie Holiday who scored a hit version of the song in 1941.

There have been many stories of Gloomy Sunday being banned for causing people who listen to it to commit suicide. The composer of Gloomy Sunday, Rezsoe Seres ended his own life in suicide and it was reported that he committed suicide because of being blamed for touching off a wave of suicides during the nineteen thirties. The show I watched with this story claimed they could not play the song due to a still existing ban, and having searched for 'bbc ban on gloomy sunday' I have found a few sites that support the claim of a still existing ban on the suicide song 'Gloomy Sunday'.

The website Wikipedia claims that the stories around this song sparking off a wave of suicides are just urban legends, and it sure does sound like an urban legend, however this song has been banned in many areas because of the worry of it causing suicides. In the UK there was a ban on this song being played on the BBC, where I first heard this weird story.

The painting to the right is a lovely depiction of the emotion surrounding this song, Gloomy Sunday. When listening to the Billie Holiday version of the song the emotion evoked is embodied visually with this painting in my opinion.

I think that the emotion, at least for me, when I listen to this song or view this painting is a sense of beautiful loss and almost romantic suffering at the loss of love. I do love this sort of haunting art which makes pain very beautiful in it's own way.

The strange story surrounding the song Gloomy Sunday is the inspiration for a movie the "Kovak Box"

The Kovak Box is a very weird and surreal movie based on this idea that a song could trigger someone to commit suicide. A science fiction author goes on holiday with his girlfriend where they get engaged to be wed. That night she jumps off the hotel balcony and commits suicide that very night in the hospital. The author then helps another survivor of jumping off a balcony, a Spanish girl.

The underlying theme that these people have been given some sort of trigger that made them commit suicide in whatever strange way possible at the playing of the song 'Gloomy Sunday'. The song with its strange urban legends lends a depth to this strange movie where the author is faced with his fictional story coming true in true mind control and the possibility of forced suicide as a government punishment and tool for control.

I did say it was a strange and surreal movie. I did enjoy it and would suggest it to those who have a taste for those movies that are allergic to the mainstream. I would include a you tube video but I do worry that it might not be completely responsible of me, you know, just in case......