Documentary: On Baron Blood (1972) and House of Wax (1953)

I made this short video essay as a means of making visual comparison between Mario Bava's Baron Blood (1972) and Andre de Toth's House of Wax (1953). I also look at other films that borrowed this imagery and films from which House of Wax may have taken its ideas. My recording and editing equipment at the time was primitive.

Part 1


Part 2

What's so great about George Romero?

I.
Romero is generally praised for two major points. The first is his innovations within the horror genre. He invented the flesh-eating zombie; he introduced a highly realistic, almost documentary style with Night of the Living Dead; he ushered in remarkable, new gore effects with Dawn of the Dead, etc.. The second is his social commentary, particularly critiques of consumerism and capitalism. This is not so beneficial to him. His horror innovations are confined within his genre, for one, and are more mechanical than central to his vision. Whereas his social commentary is criticized, rightly, for being heavy-handed and just too sincere to be artistically serious (Oscar Wilde once said that all bad poetry is sincere).

What, then, is Romero's strength? It is at the level of the pen, first of all; and it is in a particular area, to wit, dialogue. And not just any dialogue, but the dialogue of heated debate, i.e. arguments. No-one, in the history of cinema, has written more realistic, grueling arguments amongst their characters. Many have tried, but have always written themselves down to the level of cliches--whether literary or cinematic--Romanticism, and poetic stylization.

Romero's arguments occur at all levels: between the protagonists and the perceived threat, amongst the protagonists themselves as a group, between individuals within the protagonists' group, and perhaps even within protagonists themselves. In what follows, I'll present an overview of the role of argument in Romero's films.

II.
Romero's use of argument naturally begins with Night of the Living Dead. The living dead don't talk, they just keep coming. They never stop. Fighting against the zombies is not entirely unlike being trapped in an argument with a relentless opponent; the stubborn opponent who will never give in, no matter how well you've made your point.

The zombies, a physical manifestation of argument, mirrored by the real arguments within the farmhouse. At first leadership is gladly yielded to Ben. But when Cooper arrives, there is a constant atmosphere of tension, poised for or in the midst of argument amongst the protagonists. They argue heatedly, realistically, without succumbing to the pressures of cooperation, kindness, and apology that plague most films--including very good ones. There is a sense that neither side is willing to give in a little, not even to the point of listening to what the other is saying.

The Crazies takes this approach to another level. Not only is there a form of zombie on the loose, but there are multiple factions of heroes; and all are in argument with one another. The townsfolk are in argument with the military, violently protesting. The military agents are each in argument with the town leaders. The scientists are in argument with their military employees. The protagonists, fleeing from the military, are arguing amongst each other. Worst of all, the virus causes spontaneous violence: sudden, inexplicable argument. Out of all of these people, nobody is really listening to what anyone else has to say. It can be quite uncomfortable to watch all the heated arguments; one wants to withdraw, or to step in and command these people to be reasonable, to stop, to "smarten up" and be reasonable. This is, of course, testament to Romero's skillful writing.

Dawn of the Dead follows a similar approach to Night of the Living Dead, with the exception of the brutal arguing in the broadcast center at the beginning of the film and is therefore not worth dwelling upon.

Day of the Dead, however, is the pinnacle of this early period. The arguments are so heated and so relentless that they, as Ebert noted in his review, upstage the zombies. The zombies still represent the relentless, stubborn nature of human argument. They're always at the gates, pressing at the boundaries, just waiting to break in; and they never stop. Inside the compound, the constantly shouting characters create a hostile environment of such reality that many reviewers openly despised the film. Why? Because arguments are unpleasant; they are unpleasant to be in, unpleasant to hear, to watch, to the point that arguing parents can traumatize children. What the reviewers of Day of the Dead missed is how these arguments represent real humanity at its worst: stubbornly arguing. It is frustrating, as frustrating to watch as being involved in the real argument. While Romero doesn't work with the best actors and he has never brought out the best acting with his direction, his writing and his direction brings out the fullness of the tension between them and between they and us. Never has human argument been rendered so truthfully on screen.

With later efforts, like Monkey Shines, Romero made this notion of heated argument much more subtle. It is here represented not as human nature, but as the dark, primal side of humanity that is normally hidden. The monkey's presence draws the primal rage out of the protagonist and he begins lashing out heatedly at everyone who gives him the slightest reason.

This writer, alas, has not seen Martin--arguably Romero's most personal film--nor Romero's post-millennial films and is therefore unable to comment on this trait of argument in Romero's more recent films. It should be noted, however, that Romero's two King adaptations (Creepshow and The Dark Half) did not contain this trait; to claim they did would require mental gymnastics of a self-defeating order.

III.
What we may derive from the above light analysis is that the Romeroan worldview, as it were, is a rather cynical one. Even before it happens, one knows the scientist's discover in The Crazies will never make it to its destination. And this cynicism derives from this World In Argument depiction pervading Romero's early films. As long as people continue to argue, they damn themselves. When there is free exchange of views and ideas and the struggle for domination is relinquished, his characters stop arguing and start surviving. Hence the conclusion of Day of the Dead, which offers some hope.

The great breakthrough in Romeroan cynicism comes with Monkey Shines, a minor masterpiece. Romero no longer seems to see humans as doomed to relentless argumentation, as represented by his zombies. Rather, their struggle for power and for ideological domination and position is seen as an animal instinct that can be overcome; and it's overcome by respect of others as equals.

Respect, in Romero's films, comes in a variety of forms, but it has always been there. It receives one of its most positive expositions in one of the few calm interludes in Day of the Dead's madness, when our female protagonist allows the pilot and engineer to express their views even while she disagrees. What they say is not as important as that she listens.

Whereas in Monkey Shines, respect takes a sexual form. It is the respect males and females accord one another as males and females, not berating, challenging, or struggling, but an equal regard. The protagonist, whom we see in the beginning has a trophy girlfriend, is not treated as an equal male force throughout the film. He thinks he is by one female, the monkey, who turns out to be a master manipulator. The conclusion shows a male and female in a relationship of respect.

Again, this dynamic of argument and respect does not arise in Romero's King-written films; and their presence in his post-millennial films will be left to the reader to discover.

IV.
In short, what's so great about Romero is that he's developed, both in a semantic taxonomy involving flesh-eating zombies, evil monkeys, doppelgangers, amongst other things, and in his creation of fully emotional characters, a truly complex and fascinating worldview embracing a dynamic of conflict and respect with the natural consequences each of these entails. That, I hope I've supported, deserves respect.

I expect to revise this in the future, once I've seen Romero's complete oeuvre.

A Terse History of Gore in Horror Cinema

Pre-Cinema (thanks to Chris, Scarecrow, and tbirkhead):
0.1 Although not given public spectacle, early Greek tragedy sometimes included elaborated descriptions of off-stage gore. This is especially true of Euripides' The Bacchae, which includes descriptions of animals and people torn limb from limb by ecstatic women. Found in the Roman drama of Seneca are the horrible acts of the House of Atreus, including Atreus' butchering his brother's children and secretly feeding them to him in a banquet.

0.2 The first instances of gore as a spectacle come with Jacobean revenge tragedy, which was heavily influenced by Seneca. For instance, the nihilistic conclusions of The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, and Shakespeare's almost comedic violence in Titus Andronicus, including lopped-off limbs, cut-out tongues, rapes and murders.

0.3 Also notable, particularly in England, were the public executions, which attracted large mobs.
The Grand Guignol theater, opening in 1897, not long after photographs of the grisly murders of Jack the Ripper made the papers, moved the display of gore to the fore, making gore the raison d'etre of the plays being presented. This lasted until 1962--just one year before Blood Feast--when cinematic gore had already rendered the Grand Guignol theater redundant. The Grand Guignol tradition, by then, had been absorbed by the cinematic medium.

Cinema:
1.1 Cinematic gore has its roots in some experiments in historical re-enactments by Edison Laboratories, particularly in their beheading videos. The beheading of Mary Queen of Scots is one such instance, occurring a full two years before the Grand Guignol even opened in Paris, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ES7ujycXo. It is also rumoured that some Grand Guignol performances were filmed. (thanks morebrains)

1.2 The first instance of gore in a feature film is probably Griffith's Intolerance (1916), which features two on-screen decapitations and a spear bloodily transfixing a soldier's body. A few years later, Dali and Bunuel infamously sliced an eyeball on screen and had ants crawl from a wound in a hand in their surrealist short, "Un chien andalou" (1929) (thanks Chris).

2.1 Where gore began to be used in horror films I can't say for sure. But Carl Dreyer's fascinating Vampyr (1932) was notoriously censored for its graphic depiction of the staking of a vampire woman at its climax. All other horror films at this time rarely featured even blood.

2.2 Two years after Vampyr, an American poverty row exploitation film, Maniac (1934) included a horrific scene of a cat's head being squeezed until it's eyeball popped out, which was then eaten by the titular maniac. (thanks Chris)

2.3.1 The most traditional starting place for gore, however, is given as capitalist extraordinaire Herschell Gordon Lewis. Yet five years before Lewis made gore an official part of the horror film--a profitable part of the horror film--with Blood Feast (1963), Fiend Without a Face (1958) had a splattering climax of exploding brains.

2.3.2 While I don't know fore sure if Fiend Without a Face is the first real gore film, it's a pretty good contender. Similar proto-gore films include Eyes Without a Face (1955), with its explicit face-transplant scene, Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959), The Ghost Story of Yotsuya (1959), and of course the infamous shower sequence in Psycho (1960), with its blood running down the shower drain. (thanks Franklfw, t-birkhead, and annamae)

2.3.3 At the same time, Hammer Studios in the UK were bringing colour to gore, particularly with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Horror of Dracula (1958), influenced as they were by the Grand Guignol tradition. (thanks leroy gomm)

3.1 Come 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, Romero gave gore an eerie reality, with his living dead chewing on what appears to be real flesh. Since then, the pairing of George Romero and Tom Savini took gore to a new level with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the gut-pulling finale of Day of the Dead (1985).

3.2 Carrying on the tradition in Europe was Lucio Fulci's Romero-influenced gore films, in which latex resembling skin is melted, eaten by spiders, torn, pierced, and all that good stuff. Mentionable, too, is Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox (1981) for pushing the gore to a level rarely seen save in Mondo films.

3.3 At the same time, the gialli were giving gore-spattered death-scenes a stylish elegance that gave it a legitimacy not easily swallowed, but eventually influential. This is especially true of Mario Bava's Bay of Blood (1971), a subversive extension of the giallo genre that he himself more-or-less invented, that puts the destruction of that awful human race at the forefront.

3.4 The experimental horror of David Cronenberg, during the '70s and '80s, revealed human flesh, in the world of cinematic horror, to be a malleable stuff, subject to graphic, horrific mutations and modifications, memorable depicted in Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986). (thanks scarecrow)

3.5 Somewhere along the line, the realism Romero brought to gore was lost. This is especially apparent in the comic gore in Evil Dead II (1987) and reaching its apex in Peter Jackson's wild, record-setting gore flood in Dead Alive (1992).

3.6 At present, a return to realism--obsessive, clinical realism--prevails with films like Philosophy of a Knife (2008) and the August Underground series, which brings an unprecedented reality to the cinematic destruction of the human body. More cinema-friendly applications of this same principle have resulted in the genre some call 'Torture Porn.'

3.7 Meanwhile, the German splatter movement, exemplified by Andreas Schnaas Violent Shit films, bridges both movements, having both the clinical realism and the involvement of human sexuality as a component of the core that is a part of the clinical gore tradition, as well as the ridiculous excess of '90s splatter comedy.

0.0 Competing with such films is the reality, in the form of viral videos on the internet, depicting brutal murders, offensive acts of masochism and sadism, violent deaths in accidents, as well as executions, attracting, just as the public executions of old, large crowds.

The Silent Horror of Otto Rippert

Otto Rippert (1869-1940) had a directorial career spanning from 1913 to 1924. Out of his dozen or so feature-length films, he directed four horrors that are either lost or simply not available.

1. Homunculus - Homunculus is a six part serial dealing with the creation of an artificial man. Before The Golem, Alraune, and Metropolis, this film dealt with the theme of artificial life built from scratch. A scientists builds a homunculus, an artificial man; when the homunculus discovers that he is artificial, has no soul, and that true love can never be his, he is furious and uses his superpowers to begin a tyrannical reign of terror.
Early serials were often excellent, unintentionally avant-garde, like Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires and Judex. To my knowledge, Homunculus would be the first horror serial. It's a shame it isn't available.
Pictures:
The homunculus
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3139/3054722397_7c0cd65195.jpg?v=0
The homunculus shows his amazing strength
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3225/3054722437_5e80e2a980.jpg?v=0
The homunculus rescuing(?) a child (Edit: It's very clearly a dog, what was I thinking?)
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3177/3055557960_41bc7b9a1c.jpg?v=0
The homunculus, not looking terribly happy
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3036/3054722461_209087e4a7.jpg?v=0

2. Das Verwunschene Schloß (The Haunted Castle) - There's not a lot available on this one. From what I can gather, a Count flees from something or other and leaves the castle without an heir. The castle is haunted and casts strange lights over the village. A farmer guards the castle and is trying to get an heir from the Count's daughter. If anyone can clear this up, please do. Werner Krauss (who played Dr. Caligari) is in this one.
Pictures:
(Alas, none could be found.)

3. Totentanz (The Dance of Death, or Danse Macabre) - Written by Fritz Lang, this is unfortunately a lost film. Doug Sederberg writes in the IMDB plot summary,
"In this apparently lost film, a beautiful dancer's sexual allure is used by an evil cripple to entice men to their deaths. Falling in love with one of the potential victims, she is told by the cripple that he will set her free if her lover, actually a murderer himself, survives and escapes a bizarre labyrinthe which runs beneath the cripple's house."
It sounds fantastic! It's a shame it's lost. Even if it weren't lost, would it be available?
Pictures:
A woman (the dancer?) and a man lie slumped, another man is entering from behind
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3004/3054722531_462c0384d8.jpg?v=0

4. Die Pest in Florenz (The Plague in Florence) - Another Fritz Lang script, this time adapting Poe. Again, I give you a synopsis from Mr. Sederberg,
"Suddenly appearing in Florence, an evil seductress causes Cesare, the city's ruler, and his son to both fall madly in love with her. The son, killing his father before an order to torture the woman can be carried out, then turns the city's churches into dens of sexual debauchery. Acts of evil and corruption continue unabated until the arrival of Death, who brings with her a horrible plague which she is about to loose upon the city."
This film, which also sounds amazing, is still extent, but is simply not available. A Fritz Lang-penned German Expressionist silent Poe adaptation and it's not available? Where is justice in the universe?
Pictures:
Death (or some creepy monk) walks with a young lady:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3271/3054722277_88426b79a3.jpg?v=0
Cesare's son and the seductress? Note the deep focus, long before Citizen Kane.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3019/3055557852_c2a08858a2.jpg?v=0

[Fritz Lang also wrote a third script for Otto Rippert, Die Frau mit den Orchideen (The Woman with the Orchid)--also starring Werner Krauss--but it's a melodrama, not a horror.]