976-EVIL is a movie about a premium-rate horoscope hotline that either
kills or corrupts its callers. Hoax (Stephen Geoffreys), the nerdy
hero-villain, uses the hotline to escape his reality of not-having-sex
and getting beaten in the graffiti-covered bathroom by high school ruffians. The hotline starts giving him advice, but soon it gives him claws, long, stringy hair,
and a desire to kill his busty Spanish teacher.
A lot of movies simply do not profit from the passage of time. Quite
the opposite, their relevance seems to evaporate as they're left in the
wake of the "whirlwind of progress." These are movies that have
capitalized on fleeting fads and unfulfilled promises. One might expect
976-EVIL to be amongst those. But, the strangest thing, this movie seems immensely enhanced by the otherwordliness
of its obsolescence. It now evokes hidden, disconnected pockets of virtual
space only accessed through antique rituals. Allow me to explain.
In 1971 the 976/1-900 number was first created. Nobody used it for
six years, until good ol' Jimmy Carter came along and created the "Ask
Uncle Jimmy" hotline. I'm not kidding. Of course, you couldn't have
phone sex with Jimmy Carter--that was coming later. Not with Jimmy
Carter, but with fat women with seductive voices. The 976 number had the
unique property of being monitored and screened at local levels, which
gave it a lot of versatility when it came to use as a premium,
pay-per-call number. And since we live in America, that's exactly what
happened.
In the '80s, the popularity of the 976 number, and later the 1-900
number, surged. All sorts of stupid shit was out there for you to call
and waste money on. You could call the Two Coreys if you'd finally worn
out that Lost Boys (1987) VHS tape. You could call the Warrant hotline and
found out if she really is his cherry pie. You could call a joke hotline
and get a cheap, vaudeville joke for $0.99/minute. There was an insult
hotline that would, yes, just insult you. Another one would try to make
you cry. Video game hints, various types of phone sex, KISS, Bill and
Ted, Freddy Kreuger, He-Man--you name it, and there was a premium-rate
number for it.
Here are some links to genuine ads for 1-900 numbers, for your historical enjoyment.
What's really interesting about these lines is that they were such
an analog means of networking. The internet generation has grown up with
a form of databasing virtual space that is easily accessible with a
click. The 1-900 number craze was an attempt to carve out that virtual
space, but when there was nothing but phone lines, tape reels, radio
waves, and paper. The closest thing to databasing the space was a local
TV ad you'd see once after an episode of SNL and never see again, or
simply cheap, paper ads distributed by an old man in a greasy coat.
The idea that there could be lots of strange, obscure niches of this
virtual space that you'd never know anything about was a really high
probability. You'd just have to stumble upon the ad to know it's there.
And so it wasn't implausible that something like the 976-EVIL number
could exist. A goofy, occult horoscope number for whatever small
audience would be interested. (Most of these numbers that were not aimed
at children were, after all, aimed at lonely nerds with odd tastes.)
That there could be sinister, rather than capitalistic purposes to such
a line is not so difficult to imagine.
Something about that old, analog technology seems more feasibly
malign. A mysterious website seems like a very twee sort of notion, as
does a mysterious HDMI signal. A mysterious phone line or radio signal,
perhaps because they have a more elemental nature than their human-coded
digital cousins, just feel more genuinely frightening. Or perhaps because,
on the internet, you can "navigate away". It's a distant, nebulous
connection. A "cold connection," to steal one of McLuhan's notions. A
phone line or radio wave seems to be a physical connection, present in
your home, your ear, near your body: it's a "hot connection." You call
someone and you're bringing them into proximity with you. You don't
always know who or what you're calling, what you're letting in.
When I first watched 976-EVIL, I was perhaps ten years old. There
was no internet--not as it is today, anyway. 1-900 numbers were still
advertised on late-night TV and the scariest thing about them was the
phone bill. Game tip hotlines were part of my world. The notion of a
mysterious phone line like the one depicted in the movie was still
evocative, I suppose, because stumbling upon that ad could actually
happen. Really, what I identified with was the beaten-down protagonist.
The narrative was current for me.
Watching it today, when 1-900 numbers, while extant in some countries, are very
archaic, it is much more evocative. These mysterious, old virtual spaces
are like sorcery; dialing in is a dark art not to be tangled with. Like
slumbering gods, these spaces could still be out there, no longer
advertised, far from any database, but waiting to be awakened. These
lines were housed in physical locations and, as in this movie, could be
automated by very clunky, analog machines with magnetic tape. These machines could still be out there. While most
were not just innocuous, but even downright silly, there could, just
maybe, be some with sinister purposes. Waiting.
As a narrative on its own, 976-EVIL is decent. The real tension in
the movie is between Hoax and his studly, popular cousin Spike. They
have a close relationship, despite being so different. Hoax turns to the
phone line instead of his cousin when he's feeling particularly
resentful and abandoned. He shoulda went with the sex line. If there's
any major flaw in this movie, it's in how quickly Hoax turns to the
darkside. It's not like he gradually gets addicted to the number. One or
two calls, and he's already a-murderin'. A quirky detective is on the
trail and actually visits the hotline's headquarters in a scene I
particularly enjoyed.
It's in this scene that we meet the machine behind the eponymous number.
976-EVIL is not such an amazing movie in itself, but it latched onto this strange artifact in such an evocative way. In 1988, the premium-rate hotline was a novelty, like internet cafes
in 1998. Perhaps the farther we get from the reality of such analog
hotlines, the more strange and mysterious 976-EVIL will seem. And the
more strange and mysterious it seems, the better it will come off. At
least this movie, and its Wynorski-directed sequel, stand as the only
1-900-themed horror movies out there.
All of Argento’s films are
deceptive. I don’t refer only to the narrative techniques he uses to mislead
the viewer like a street magician, though they offer an interesting parallel. I
refer rather to the appearance of simplicity or even superficiality that masks
the often ambitious complexity of his films. Trauma may be one of Argento’s
most complex and ambitious. Trauma appears on first viewing to be a
convoluted narrative littered with a mess of characters and saved only by the
obvious efforts at the elabAurate stylistic techniques for which Argento is
known; on repeat viewings it reveals itself to be a very deliberate homage to America.
‘Homage,’ however, may not be the
right word. Trauma was, or at least was intended to be, an important
step in Argento’s career. Had it been successful, Trauma would have
moved Argento into Hollywood.
Difficult though it might be for Argento fans to imagine him as an American
filmmaker, there is ample evidence that going to America
is just the career trajectory Argento had been planning for some time. He had
four years prior produced Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Argento’s
previous film, made just two years before Trauma, is Two Evil Eyes,
an anthology film made with Romero. Trauma at last was Argento’s own
American horror movie. What Argento does with Trauma is not just pay
tribute to his favourite American horror filmmakers, or even the history of the
Amrican horror film—though he does that—but uses the opportunity to engage the
very idea of America, or at least his idea of American, perhaps one formed
primarily from viewing American horror films. Trauma is not just an
American horror film, then, but in its self-conscious American-ness is an
American horror film about American horror films.
What we want to do in analyzing Trauma
is understand what Argento has to say about America.
And to do so we have to begin by interrogating the film’s self-consciousness.
The best starting point, then, is the very surface, the film’s cast and crew.
Given Argento’s admiration for Romero, it’s no surprise that for his first
American film he acquires Tom Savini’s services for make-up effects. Piper
Laurie is cast in the role of the psychotic mother, an unmistakable and
intentional parallel to her role in Brian De Palma’s Carrie. Brad
Dourif, of horror and cult film fame, also plays a small role. With this
casting Argento makes a deliberate effort to provide audiences with cues to the
film’s American-ness and with these cues he places Trauma within the
history of the American horror film.
This casting has deeper
significance, furthermore, by paying tribute to particular and influential—and
to Argento, it seems, thematically important—American horror filmmakers. Savini,
of course, provides Trauma a link to the quintessentially American
horror films of Romero, whose films are perhaps second only to Hitchcock’s in
establishing the modern horror film. De Palma for his highly-stylized,
Hitchcockian horror thrillers is often seen as the closest American correlate
to Argento, albeit even more Hitchcockian and, I think, more talented. Dourif
calls to mind both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for the electroshock
therapy motif it shares with Trauma and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet,
a film Argento admires enough to reference favAurably over Eraserhead in
Do You Like Hitchcock? So Argento is not just placing his film in the
history of the American horror film, but of the very best, most important
American horror films, ones that scrutinize aspects of American life.
That Argento’s perception of
American and what characterizes it is largely mediated by American films, particularly the films of a few key filmmakers, would therefore be a fair
statement. Trauma is a comment then on the idea of America
that itself is a comment upon the American cinematic perception of America.
The films in American horror history to which Argento draws attention are
therefore necessary ciphers for decoding the vision Argento expresses in Trauma.
How plot and Argento’s personal style and ideas interact with these influences
provide the means whereby Trauma is understandable in its complexity.
The plot of Trauma
concerns a young girl, Aura, who is rescued from suicide by David, a graphic
designer for a news station. When Aura believes both her father and medium
mother suffer a double murder at a maniac’s hands, she flees to her hero, David.
While he gives the teen a place to stay and tries to help her overcome her
anorexia, they become sexually involved. This infuriates David’s girlfriend,
who turns Aura in to her psychiatrist, Dr. Judd. Soon the killer is trying to
get at Aura in the mental hospital. David rescues her before the maniac can get
to her and they begin trying to solve the murders. By looking into a victim’s storage
locker they find a clue that all the victims were doctors or nurses at the same
hospital. Each potential victim they try to talk to refuses to communicate and
is murdered. Finally, Dr. Judd and the killer invade the David’s house at the
same time. While he pursues Judd, the killer escapes with Aura, leaving a bogus
suicide note behind. The trunk of Judd’s car is found to be full of heads, so
he is presumed to be the killer. David is plunged into despair and drug
addiction, believing Aura dead, until he notices by pure chance a woman wearing
Aura’s bracelet. He follows her to the house of the killer where the little boy
has been snooping throughout the film. There David discovers Aura is being
held. While investigating the house, he is incapacitated in a nursery dedicated
to ‘Nicholas.’ He awakes in chains. The killer is revealed to be Aura’s mother,
Adriana, who was traumatized when her son, Nicholas, was accidentally
decapitated during labor. Though the trauma was repressed by electroshock
therapy, it spontaneously erupts, sending her on a decapitation spree. Aura’s
memory is clarified now. She realizes she saw not her parents’ heads in two
hands, but her mother holding her father’s head. Adriana readies to kill Aura
and David, but is prevented by the neighbor boy, who lowers the decapitation
device from a hole in the ceiling and turns it on, decapitating her. The police
arrive to question David and Aura. The movie ends as a girl dances to reggae on
a balcony.
Beginning with the general, what
generic structures and tropes can we identify in this plot summary? I think
what we find is a fusion of the slasher with film noir. The complex and
extensive plotting, though uneven in execution, derives particularly from the
noir tradition of films like The Big Sleep and especially The Seventh
Victim. In many noirs, including those mentioned, innocent, young girls
with psychological issues draw men into the roles of hero and detective, and
into a world of perversion and murder. This is just what Aura does for David.
One of the elementary events that begin the plot is David rescuing Aura from
suicide. His efforts to rescue her bring him into the mystery of her mother’s
decapitation murders.
The American genres of horror and
film noir were both born from the import of German Expressionist filmmakers to America.
Noir was really crystallized in the horror-crime films of Val Lewton, however.
These films begin with Cat People and reach perfection in The Seventh
Victim. Both of these films are important, not just for the horror and
American cinema, but for Argento in making Trauma. Indeed, Argento names
the film’s psychiatrist “Judd” after the only re-used character in the Lewton
films, Dr. Louis Judd, psychiatrist of both the ‘cat person’ of Cat People
and the titular character of The Seventh Victim.
In Lewton’s films, Judd is a
particularly interesting character for his moral complexity. He has a tendency
to take the cases of strange and alluring females. Once he takes them as
patients, they tend to go ‘out of circulation,’ as it’s put. He himself is
highly intelligent, emotionally detached, perhaps diagnosable as a narcissist.
He strives to genuinely help his patients, however, despite his unorthodox methods.
He is ultimately a good person with amoralistic and libertine values; a person
who casts himself too prominently in the lives of his patients with the best of
intentions. At war with his narcissism is his tragic hero complex that leads
him to his doom.
The Judd of Argento’s film, who
could conceivably be a descendent of Louis Judd (and without a doubt is his
cinematic descendent), similarly takes on the cases of the alluring women, Aura
and her mother Adriana, with unorthodox techniques and strange behavior. And
he, as his forbear had done, casts himself too prominently in their lives. This
Judd, we realize from his introduction wearing a neck brace in the film’s early
séance scene, knows all along that Adriana is a murderer. Throughout the film
he wears the neck brace only when Adriana is near and functions fine without it
so long as she’s not present. He is ensuring his head remains where it belongs,
at least physically. He also very likely knows she faked her own death. For
this reason Judd subjects Aura to a psychotropic berry. In his effort to
sharpen Aura’s hazy memory of her parents’ murders, we realize, he’s trying to
discover what has become of Adriana. He doesn’t have to wait long, because Adriana
breaks into the clinic to kill the nurse and get Aura. Judd presumably finds
her and, in order to help her, keeps her murders a secret. He even puts the
decapitated heads in his car truck when he drives her to get Aura from David’s
lakeside cabin. He dies for his trouble, however, just like his grandfather,
the great Louis Judd dies in Cat People for getting too close to his
patient.
I have digressed at such length
on the subject of the two Judds because I believe the connection between Cat
People, the first and greatest horror-noir, and Trauma is
intentional and an important element in Argento’s conception for Trauma.
Both films, Trauma more explicitly, attribute the sudden burst of
violence from a non-violent person to the awakening of something repressed, a
trauma. For Irena, in Cat People, the trauma is her belief in her cursed
genetic lineage, which entails becoming a vicious cat whenever she is in a
sexual relationship. For Adriana, it is the much more real trauma of her son’s
gruesome death during birth and the electroshock treatment designed to repress
the memory of this event. Irena’s trauma is excited by her new husband, who has
convinced her to marry him and to consummate the relationship. Adriana’s trauma
is excited by an unknown event, though the first scene of the film, a short and
seemingly out-of-place shoebox theatre vignette of the French Revolution with
historically-accurate decapitations, may have been the innocent spark.
In both films, moreover, there is
a sexual component to the trauma. Irena is afraid of sex and of how it may
transform her into a monster. Adriana’s trauma occurs at a much later stage of
the reproductive process, namely birth, but is nevertheless sexual. Argento’s
homage to De Palma, all of whose horror films are predicated upon sexual
confusion in some form, is not so trivial in this light. Nor is Piper Laurie’s
casting, for, in De Palma’s Carrie, her role is a mother whose religious
fanaticism psychosexually retards her daughter until the repressed energy is
released in psychokinetic mayhem. Her character in Trauma is similarly
repressive to both herself and her daughter.
But the real significance of the
link to Cat People is Argento’s view that all of American horror and
noir is predicated upon the notion of trauma, a first, repressed trauma, the
escape from which is violence and death. From the early, great, and truly
American horror that is Cat People on through Romero and De Palma and Lynch,
psychosexual repression and trauma appear, Argento seems to suggest, as the
essential characteristics of American cinematic violence.
Perhaps it is for this reason
that Argento begins the film with the French Revolution vignette. The vignette
links the idea of decapitation with that of revolution. And America,
unlike, say, Canada,
begins with revolution, the Revolutionary War in particular. America
achieved its freedom with revolutionary violence. Argento could be suggesting America’s
revolutionary beginning was a historically traumatic event that continues to
motivate America’s
sexual ills, drugs, anorexia, and violence. More likely, however, Argento is
suggesting decapitation as a revolutionary act. Adriana’s decapitations are her
revolution against her own trauma and externally-enforced repression. The scene
in which the boy next door sees the first victim’s head supports this view. He
sees the African-American woman’s head in a pan, her dreadlocks getting snipped
by the hands of the killer. The shot of the head, with its particularly ordered
dreadlocks, intentionally resembles paintings of Medusa’s head--particularly Rubens's, which contains the salamander motif Argento employs in Trauma--a motif Argento
would return to in The Stendhal Syndrome. The decapitation is thus
linked to the triumph of Perseus over Medusa. And Medusa’s petrifying stare,
which the boy notes, isn’t unconceivably intended to be the electroshock
therapy designed to repress but not destroy traumatic memory. This is not,
however, to be confused as a pro-violence statement from Argento, but a
representation of the mindset of Adriana, who does believe that in violence
there is liberation.
What we see, then, is that there
is some complexity to what Argento is saying about America.
He is not merely noting the importance of trauma or of violence, but using the
idea of trauma to express his view of America.
And he seems to see America,
or rather the American people, as being generally traumatized. David admits to
having been a heroine addict and returns to drug abuse when Aura goes missing.
This is to say nothing of his sexual relationship with a troubled and
vulnerable sixteen-year-old girl. We discover no further background regarding
this character, but he is clearly ‘troubled,’ which, for Argento—and Freud, for
that matter—suggests some past trauma.
Aura’s trauma, however, is of
much greater concern to Argento. While anorexia afflicts males and females in
many parts of the world, it does represent a particularly American sort of
disorder, a reaction to the conflict between American abundances and American
vanity/perfectionism. Anorexia is really a reaction against a parent, however,
particularly, as Argento has one of the film’s minor characters explain, a
domineering mother. Aura’s mother, Adriana, certainly runs the household,
ultimately not just castrating but decapitating Aura’s father. When Judd
administers the psychotropic berries to Aura, a major and traumatic event she
recalls is walking in on her mother and Judd mid-coitus. If Adriana represents Aura’s
dark side, as Argento claims she does in a DVD featurette, she also represents America’s
dark side. Let’s see how.
Adriana, as discussed above, is
herself not free of trauma. Indeed her trauma is the main force moving the
whole plot. Adriana’s trauma is the loss of her son in birth. The trauma can
only fester because it has been repressed by shock therapy. When it is
reawakened—we don’t know for sure how, but as stated above I suspect it is the
revolutionary shoebox play and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to suspect
Judd intentionally set that play up—then she reacts to the trauma with violence
and vengeance. Where Aura’s response to trauma is violence against herself, an
excessive self-criticism, Adriana’s violence is toward others. She struggles to
cope with the trauma by destroying those who participated in its cause, for
only in these terms does she see the possibility of liberation from her trauma.
Both reactions to trauma are doomed to failure. The difference is only that one
results in the death of oneself and the other in the death of others.
This is why I think we can say
Argento sees Adriana as America’s
dark side. As Argento seems to see America
as a traumatized nation, Adriana represents its violent, aggressive,
domineering aspects as a reaction to its own revolutionary trauma. The
alternative reaction to that represented by Adriana, however, cannot be Aura,
for that reaction is no healthier. It must be the other influence in Aura’s
life, David. His approach to trauma, while originally as self-devastating as Aura’s,
is ultimately balanced between reaching out to help others and artistic
expression as a graphic designer.
What we find, then, is that David
represents the bright side of America,
the side of America
that deals with its own, peculiar traumas in Dawn of the Dead, Carrie,
and Blue Velvet as much as in its global relief efforts. Violence can be
liberating for Argento, but it must be used correctly. In American cinema,
through fantastical violence, horror purges and purifies, and so helps the
nation deal with its own trauma and the individual traumas of its citizens.
Similarly, by the conclusion of Trauma,
Aura has been liberated of her ‘dark side.’ The voyeur boy living next to Adriana
finally comes into action and rescues the protagonists. A message to the
audience is sent that it is the voyeurs, the filmgoers, who save the day, who
conquer the dark side and trauma. By viewing horror films like Dawn of the
Dead, Carrie, Trauma, and especially the American films of
Hitchcock, by enduring the horror, we emerge as Aura and David purged.
In this way, therefore, Argento
places Trauma within the lineage of American horror films while
simultaneously commenting upon the nature of that lineage. A great deal of
complexity is required to work out these ideas in a horror film, bound as it is
by generic conventions. Thus is Trauma so convoluted for a film of its
type. This complexity does sometimes interfere with the momentum of the pace
and obscures the narrative moves, requiring from the viewers more effort to
comprehend. Nevertheless, for these same reasons, Trauma rewards
multiple viewings and reminds viewers that Argento’s films ought not to be
taken superficially or trivially.
Originally a made-for-TV movie that got new life on DVD and Netflix, Organizm is a beautifully perverse film that flew under the radar for that reason. The lot of made-for-TV movies is to fly under radars, because so much has to be flown under the radars of the producers and censors. With Organizm, writer-director Richard Jeffries gets away with a lot. This is a film in which the ‘obligatory sex scene’ is the protagonist coating a newly-widowed woman’s naked body with his own blood, and in which the climax is basically a death-by-fisting. If we’re to see all this film has to offer, however, we shall have to go through it carefully, and, I think, with the aid of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is not always the ideal tool for approaching a film, but this film in particular is structured around it and the perverse treasures it has to offer are best found using it.
The plot is deceptively simple, even hackneyed. A high school teacher warns military officials that they must not disturb the old base they’re destroying, because his mother told him so the night she killed herself. The army takes him seriously and investigates, causing a cancerous mass to explode from a body into a sea of tendrils that spread over the base and begin growing at an exponential rate. The teacher and a female soldier discover the developer of the tentacular organism is his father, a Russian scientist who defected to the USA. The shared genes gives the teacher an in-built vaccine for the organism. He realizes he must plunge his blood into the organism’s source, his father’s body, in order to kill it. He does so and it dies.
What is interesting in this plot is its gradual progression deeper into the subconscious. We begin with the pure, conscious facticity of the present: tendrils swarming military artillery and invading a bowling alley, where a soldier tries to flee and fails. This is the diseased, apocalyptic present, a present in extreme conflict. We then rewind thirty-three years to a boy being terrified by his disturbed mother. She warns him to remember “sublevel 3, vault 12” at all costs, carves it into his hands, and sashays out to kill his father. If the present is the consciousness in conflict, then the flashback we’re given is to the source of the trauma that would eventually erupt into the diseased state we see thirty-three years later. We’re given the two extremities of consciousness that matter; in between is the period of festering in the subconscious, metaphorically ‘sublevel 3, vault 12’.
We then join the high school teacher (Jonathan Schaech) on his way to the army base. We realize that he is the little boy we saw. Therefore, this film is to be his psychodrama. He has heard that the base is to be destroyed, so he comes to warn the Colonel that there is something that should not be disturbed. When he busts in, he’s captured, but by the intelligent records experts who decide his story is worth hearing, despite the Colonel’s objections. They are going to plumb the depths of sublevel 3, vault 12. It is this exploratory action that releases the disease into consciousness, that causes the eruption of the tendrils into the light of day. What they discover in the vault is a man’s pickled body with a horrendous, spreading growth on his chest. From this body the tendrils spring.
What’s interesting thus far is the teacher’s relationships to father figures. We know that when he was a child he witnessed the death of the man he thought was his father. When he arrives in the town where the army base is located, he tries to get the attention of an old man, who simply walks away without answering. The Colonel in charge of the army base is difficult to get in touch with, and, when he is reached, doesn’t want to deal with the teacher. He tries to reach out to older men instinctively, and finds it impossible to have a meaningful connection with them.
The teacher’s difficulty with father figures is important to note because of the next major plot point. As the teacher escapes with a female solder who just lost her husband to the rampaging tentacles, they speak to the old man who shunned the teacher earlier. They discover through him that the body at the source of the tendrils is a Russian scientist and that this scientist is the teacher’s real father. The source of the eruption of the diseased consciousness and the reason for the childhood trauma, then, is the teacher’s biological father. The repressed horror at the heart of his subconscious is the father.
The teacher and soldier run from the growing tendrils to a school where they watch an old film reel. The reel shows the Russian scientist discussing his work, explaining that his quest for the ultimate biological weapon ended in his own body. His own tissues were growing at a phenomenal rate, consuming any energy at all, from fire to nuclear radiation. At the same time, the teacher is infected and successfully fights off the tendrils, turning his blood into an instant tendril-cide. However, we’ve just learned that the tendrils are, literally, his father’s body, meaning that tendril-cide is a sort of patricide.
Now the teacher and soldier realize they have to go to the body at the source of the tendrils and kill it. To protect the soldier, the teacher coats her in his own blood, but the imagery is that of a newborn covered in birth-blood. They then fly a helicopter to the base, landing in a disturbing terrain of all tendrils. They are plunging into the subconscious, to the repressed monstrosity of an absent father. In a stroke of excellent set design, the tendrils swarm the closer they come to the center.
As they do this, the threat of bombing looms. The military plans to drop nuclear bombs in hopes of destroying the tendrils. Curiously, the Russian scientist described the US military as his new father, enriching the interplay between patricide and infanticide already at play in the film.
Finally the teacher confronts the body of his biological father, simultaneously alive and dead, present and absent. In the center of his father’s chest is what is unmistakably a throbbing, pulsing anus out of which all the tendrils grow. As perverse as any Greek myth, the teacher thrusts and knife into his father’s heart-anus and digs, metaphorically fucking his father. He then slices at his hands, drawing blood, and thrusts both hands into the orifice, in an act that can be best described as fisting his father to death.
Meanwhile, the soldier is sidetracked by the discovery of his husband in some sort of amniotic sack. Clawing with her hands, she digs the sack open, giving birth to her own husband in a way, but washing the protective blood off her own body in the process, leaving herself vulnerable. Fortunately, the father dies from the fisting just in time. The trauma has been overcome in facing the repressed, subconscious absent father that the disturbed mother so desperately tried to repress in sublevel 3, vault 12.
Not everything in Organizm makes sense to me. I don’t even mean the chronology, which would make the obviously late-thirties teacher in his fifties. I mean it’s not really clear how the tendrils form an amniotic sack and what the interplay of birthing imagery in this film really amounts to. I don’t think the psychoanalytic structure of the film means it’s a film filled with great depth: what good is reiterating Freud, really? This is a film made more with the subconscious than with the conscious. Its beauty is in how perverse it all is in representing diseased consciousness. From the reproductive imagery of the tendrils, through the birthing imagery, and the anal father-son fisting imagery of the conclusion and the anti-oedipal implications of such, the film is just perverse in the story its images tell, whatever the cheesy plot may be.
The first shot of Scalps is of a hideous, aged Indian's face gazing angrily at us from the darkness. He leaps, showing a young man's body wearing blue jeans. Suddenly we see a man beheaded with gory detail of his hands catching at the gushing blood. We don't know the victim, at least not yet. The action and characters are totally abstract. It is a montage beginning in pure malice and ending in heinous violence.
Cut to a desert road over which rides a dusty old pick-up. We're now given a location for the abstract prologue: the desert. The next shot answers our suspicions: It shows a man in black robes with the head of a lion. We have no idea where he is in the desert, only that he is there and his rising is a response to the arrival of the truck. The score, consisting of long, droning synth chords is ominous and menacing. The shots of the truck suggest the driver, an old man, is being watched from all angles of the desert, and by the lion-headed man; but the oblivious driver drives on. The man parks, pulls out a shovel, and heads toward some chosen spot. The lion-headed man snarls. The man approaches a cave. We see him at the entrance from within, seeing him as an intruder. After puttering around at the cave mouth, he is overwhelmed with the urge to slit his own throat and does so, despite resistance. Only after this do we get the opening credits.
Some films have no prologues, some have one, but not many have a whole two prologues. Scalps is, needless to say, a very peculiar film. Unsurprisingly, it has never found much of an audience. Upon release, it was Siskel & Ebert's 'Dog of the Week' and maligned for its viciousness. The main audience for the film today, namely Fred Olen Ray fans, will be surprised to find none of the playfulness that characterizes his camp b-movies like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), Beverly Hills Vamp (1989), or Evil Toons (1992), with their abundant, contrived tits-'n'-ass and silly violence, or even less facetious efforts like Deep Space (1988). In contrast to the playfulness of his later films, Scalps is mean-spirited and nihilistic, its gore, unlike the rubber arms and transparent blood of Chainsaw Hookers, is intended to horrify. Perhaps standing out most, however, is the violence to women, which is fairly extreme in Scalps and which only features in Chainsaw Hookers in catfights; most of the violence in that and Ray's other films of the time is done to men, by women. Ray himself has said he didn't find Scalps fun and wouldn't want to make another film like it. Whatever audience the film might have left, such as those looking for a bodycount slasher will be frustrated by its atmospherics and such oddities as the unexplained, lion-headed man.
Part of the reason for Ray's distaste for his own film and its general oddness is the egregious distributor interference Ray alleges--and it's easy to believe him looking at the resultant film. The first prologue I noted contains footage from what is the penultimate death of the film and is therefore quite a spoiler. It also happens to be a spectacular beheading sequence, at least for 1983. If the distributor wished to catch the audience from the first few seconds and promise lots of horrifying stuff, that's a good way to start. The second prologue, probably Ray's own, contains the much tamer death of a nearly bloodless throat-slitting. The distributor clearly wanted to make what is a strangely atmospheric slasher less plodding, so they wouldn't have to give out any refunds to bored patrons. Even adding the gory first prologue didn't satisfy them, however. The shots of the lion-headed man are, Ray claims, mostly added by the distributor and were taken from test footage never intended for the final cut. Even the superimposition of the old Indian sorceror's head was added. In short, the bulk of the film's peculiarities are the results of extreme (unheard of to such a degree) interference from the distributors.
Ultimately, however, it really doesn't matter whether Fred Olen Ray or the distributor put the lion-headed man on screen; what matters is how the phenomena of the film affects me, or you, and understanding the film's effects. Scalps doesn't have any 'meaning', at least not in the traditional sense. But it does have a phenomenological process and both how that process functions and how affects us reveals something. So let's get back to the film.
After the two prologues, the first establishing an abstract malice and violent force, the second establishing the otherwordly inhospitableness of the desert, the narrative movement begins. After the oddness of the prologues, we now are placed in normality: normality of location, action, and narrative. A disorganized archaeology professor, we learn, is preparing a less-than-legal 'field trip' into the desert, where he and his graduate students will actually be digging in Indian territory. Unable to go himself yet, he sends the students--three males and three females--ahead. So we meet the characters, see them in their ordinary university environment, and begin what is a standard "dead teenager" plot in which we fully expect a maniac to slaughter most of the group.
The shot beginning the second act is of the students' car exiting a tunnel, with the camera mounted on the car. We, along with the students, are exiting the normality of the university and the modern, civilized world in which it's located and entering the mysterious vistas of the desert. The sole outpost of civilization, as in any horror film, is the gas station. This is the point where they will be warned not to go on and must decide whether or not to pay heed; of course, these are city folk and they pay cash, not heed. The more mystically-inclined of the group, lone-wolf D.J. looks down at an old, Indian man on the shop steps and is assaulted with a vision of the glowing-eyed old Indian sorceror from the second prologue. The old Indian later warns the group that the desert is a dangerous place and they must stay away from the place of the blackened wood. As he explains that it is the burial ground of many Indians who met violent ends, we see shots of nearly all the students' deaths from later in the film. The Warning Scene, in a horror movie, is supposed to suggest a choice to the protagonists. But by accompanying the Warning with flashforwards to the characters' deaths, we're being shown they have no choice; there is a certain inevitability to their deaths. They were dead the moment they exited that tunnel. So, apart from D.J., the group assumes the blackened woods is the place to go and off they head into the Other World of the desert.
Entry into the desert is greeted with the ominous music from the second prologue, the droning synth chords suggesting untold menace in spite of D.J.'s claims that the desert is beautiful. We see a shot of an Indian spirit wielding a bow. (In fact, it appears that this is a shot of the Indian sorceror-possessed body of one of the students from later in the film, taken out of the timeline. That he could be watching the students enter the desert is, therefore, particularly ominous and menacing, their deaths particularly inevitable.) The students drive past the abandoned truck of the man who died in the second prologue, left behind like the husk of a dead insect. As the camera pans left, we see what the students don't: the dessicated remains of the man, the skull's jaw wide open in an eternally silent scream. The students are going beyond this point, into a realm of death where the living have no business.
After this slow, atmospheric drive through the desert, they arrive at a spot where they decide to park. One of the girls notices a buzzard in the sky and believes it's a buzzard they saw earlier that followed them the whole way. D.J. agrees that it is the same buzzard. Again, the suggestion is that they are already dead. Nature knows what they don't. The tensions suggested are between culture and nature, the land of the living and the land of the dead. As D.J. bangs some metal sticks together, making primitive, percussive music under the blaring sun (shot from a very low angle), shots of the hideous Indian from the first prologue and of more gory violence to the students are cut in. They are in a realm of relentless, powerful nature, reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); and a land where death, not life, holds sway.
From here, the tensions in the film's structure--between the malice and violence found in the first prologue and the ethereal, ominous sense of doom found in the second prologue--begin to conflict and the film is admittedly somewhat messy. On the one hand, the trappings of any Friday the 13th knock-off are present: a group camping in the wilderness, tents, attractive co-eds, sex (or at least the potential for it), and soon graphic violence. On the other hand, elements of the mysteriousness found in the second prologue still come through. In the dark, around the camp fire, the students notice a drumming. As they put their ears to the ground, they hear the traditional Indian music more clearly. This is unsettling as it is. They are in the middle of the desert where they saw and heard no-one, and yet there is this sudden music, as though a whole group are present nearby. One of the couples decide to look for the source of the music. They find a camp set up with a camp fire, but no-one is present in the camp. As the male student looks into the fire, the ghostly head of the Indian sorceror appears for a while, chanting with the drums; then the fire explodes in the student's face.
After the couple returns, the male of the couple is changed. He refuses to acknowledge the existence of the camp and is verbally abusive to his girlfriend. He has, with the explosion of the camp fire, been possessed by the sorceror. From this point onward the spirit of the first prologue begins to take dominance over that of the second. The man takes his girlfriend out for a walk, where hits her, rapes her, and ultimately slits her throat and scalps her. Her friends eventually grow concerned and find her in a search. While the others frantically plan out what to do, D.J. grows peculiarly resigned to their fates. More ominous music plays as D.J. tells the group the possessed friend gave her a talisman and said he'd return. (This is actually foreshadowing: when the first possessed student is killed, the Indian sorceror 'returns' by possessing D.J..)
Now the classic bodycount slasher is set up. There is a violent monster loose and it is going to inflict violent deaths on all the young adults. One of the remaining males heads to the abandoned truck seen earlier and is clubbed by the possessed student, now physically resembling the Indian face from the first prologue. There is an insert One of the remaining girls is shot full of arrows. Finally, the remaining male kills the possessed student, but is beheaded with a trowel by the newly-possessed D.J.. This beheading is the one seen in the first six shots of the film. So the destinies of the students have been completed. By journeying into the land of the dead, they have joined the dead.
The main action of the film over, we get an epilogue. The professor who sent them out into the desert comes to check in on them. He enters a tent and falls out with an arrow in his eye socket. We're taken into the tent where we find the possessed D.J. clanking her metal sticks together, shots of the gory, dead bodies accompanying each clank.
The living are no longer intruding into the land of the dead. Nature has swallowed up civilization and science, with its limited ways of seeing, of understanding what constitutes truth. Only D.J., who looked beyond the restricted worldview of the modern world, is preserved. And if we look beyond the approved ways of seeing a film, as I've tried to do in this analysis, we can see that Scalps is a unique and powerful film. If we bring a standard approach to viewing Scalps, as with many other unconventional films, we, as the excavators in the film, are destined to fail.
____ * - Please note that in Canada the term 'Indian' is used to refer to 'Native Americans', even on a legal level. The term 'native' carries connotations of primitivity that are more offensive than an ancient error of geography.
(This essay contains spoilers. Watch the films first.)
The Jeepers Creepers films concern a monster known as 'The Creeper.' The Creeper 'sleeps' for twenty-three year stretches, then emerges for twenty-three days to 'feed', namely upon humans. I really like The Creeper. He's easily one of the most interesting monsters in modern horror film cinema. If we delve into what makes him so interesting, we'll also discover what makes the Jeepers Creepers films more than just fun monster movies; they're also works of art.
The first thing notable about The Creeper--before we ever notice he's a monster--is that he drives a truck. This first point is curious enough. Very few, if any, horror film monsters proper (i.e. physical creatures of non-human nature) drive vehicles. They attack, push, turn over vehicles; but they don't drive them. Driving a vehicle is a learned human activity, involving developed skills and knowledge. Just how far The Creeper's skills and knowledge go is demonstrated in his ability to terrorize the brother-sister protagonists of the first film. The brother, Darry (Justin Long), comments that his assailant is driving some sort of 'souped-up' truck. And indeed, it does appear The Creeper has some knowledge of mechanics, enough to 'soup-up' his truck. But by far the most remarkable thing about his truck is the false vanity plate reading, 'BEATNGU.' That's "Be eating you!", perhaps a play on The Prisoner's "Be seeing you!", telegraphing to the victims he terrifies on the road that he'll be devouring them later. Not only is The Creeper a skilled driver and mechanic, but he also has a keenly perverse sense of humour.
This isn't simply an attempt to mislead the audience in the first half of the film. While it does lead the audience to expect a human villain, subsequent developments suggest a greater significance to The Creeper's humanoid traits. After their encounter with The Creeper on the road, the siblings turn back to the house, actually a church, where they saw The Creeper disposing of bodies down a pipe. When Darry enters the pipe, he finds an elegant, arched subterranean lair where the walls and ceiling are covered with patterns of wax-preserved, stitched-together corpses. At one point in the series, this is described as a horrific approximation of the Sistene Chapel. To be compared to Michelangelo is pretty high praise. However horrific and ghastly the creation, it is indeed very inventive and, in a perverse way, beautiful. This aspect of The Creeper's lair has its effects as far as horrifying the audience goes, but it also shows us The Creeper is an artist. The idea Salva is developing as the narrative reveals more about The Creeper is the monster-as-artist, the possibility for something Other to be capable of creation, not just destruction.
Historically, in monster movies, the monster is a particularly non-creative force. Nosferatu's/Dracula's advances on Lucy are only capable of adding her to the legions of the undead. The Mummy's only imagined union with his chosen woman is, similarly, eternity in living-death, not both alive but both mummies. Frankenstein's monster depends upon his creator, the baron, to make him a woman with whom to live in permanent non-productivity. Creativity is reserved for the living and the 'normal'. Anything monstrous can only destroy. King Kong never builds anything, but he destroys plenty. Dracula, the Mummy, and Frankenstein's monster all take lives. The same applies to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Romero's zombies, etc.. The rule in horror cinema is that the monstrous cannot create, but can only destroy. The body that conforms to the norm alone is capable of creation.(1)
Given such overwhelming consistency, one wonders why monsters are always represented as inherently destructive. One of the more interesting answers to this question comes from Linda Williams. In her famous essay "When the Woman Looks," she argues that "the monster's power is one of sexual difference from the normal male...the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality..." Williams argued that the monster and the female were bound together in their shared otherness from male, phallic sexual power. Since only phallic power can beget, then the monsters are inherently non-creative. However, most of the monsters are male. King Kong, Dracula, the Mummy, the Creature, and Frankenstein's Monster all wanted women, and they wanted, presumably, to fuck those women. That doesn't seem to be a very different sexuality from mine at all! I, too, would have wanted to fuck Fay Wray and Zita Johan in their prime. The sexual difference between the monster and a heterosexual adult male's is that his would be productive and the monster's would not. The monsters, as I pointed out above, consummate their sexuality not in the creation of new life, but in death or violence of some form. So what we can conclude, tweaking Williams's ideas, is that monsters are monstrous not in their sexual difference but in their sexual sterility. (This is more consonant with James Whales's ideas anyway, particularly as presented in The Old Dark House, in which the insane family occupying the house is distinct from their guests in their totally non-productive family form.) They seek relationships that are inherently non-productive and, in the conservative mind, non-productivity is equal to non-creativity.
What Victor Salva does with The Creeper, while he is solidly within the history of traditional horror film monsters, is acknowledge that non-productivity does not preclude creativity. The Creeper is a monster that bears no offspring and is a cause of death and destruction, but he's also an artist. He's such an active artist that one wonders when he takes the time to create his art. If he only has twenty-three days awake to do his artwork on top of all the killing he has to do, then he's a very fast craftsman. Perhaps his twenty-three years of sleep gives him a lot of time for creative thought.
The second film in the series, in which The Creeper targets a busload of high school football players, elaborates further on The Creeper's artistic nature. His weapons are all carved from bone, wrapped with skin, and inlaid with teeth. The Creeper's eye for detail is such that he purposely chose the tattooed skin on Darry's abdomen for the centre of his shuriken. We also see a knife with elaborate scenes carved into the bone handle. But by far the most interesting aspect of The Creeper elaborated in the sequel is his method of feeding, which is itself creative.
The Creeper's 'feeding' isn't performed for the same biological purpose as animal feeding. The Creeper terrifies his victims, smells some odor given off from them while afraid, and by doing so determines which of his victims have particularly choice body parts. When he captures and kills his victims, he doesn't consume the body part and absorb its nutrients as animals would; rather, he assimilaltes the body part whole. In the sequel, The Creeper removes one boy's head and transforms it into his own. He does the same with Darry's eyes in the first film. What's interesting to me about this behaviour is that The Creeper is not just creative, but self-creative. He's able to be an artist of himself by composing his own body out of body parts he finds the most attractive (for reasons unknown to us). The only unchanging body parts are the arachnid-like structure on the back of his head, resembling a face-hugger from the Alien franchise, and his wings. The arachnid creature is, presumably, the 'naked' Creeper, which assembles its body from choice parts. What The Creeper does in this assembly is create its own identity, its way of representing itself to others. Its identity comes not from the point-of-view of others defining it by its difference or monstrosity, but from its own positive self-defining meeting the point-of-view of others.
Jeepers Creepers is not the first of Salva's films to contain this theme. Salva's first feature, Clownhouse, is also concerned with monstrous creativity of a sort. Clownhouse concerns a group of psychopaths who escape from confinement, put on clown costumes, and terrorize a group of children, one of whom is particularly afraid of clowns. We scarcely get to see the escaped psychopaths as themselves. What we see is them invading the clown tent at the circus and applying cosmetics, creating their own identity, as it were. They use creativity to create their identity as scary clowns. They also take a twistedly creative approach toward terrorizing the film's children. Jeepers Creepers just expands and deepens the theme, transforming the psychopaths to a genuine monster and the craftlike creativity to artistry.
It is difficult to take this discussion further without bringing in biographical details on writer-director Victor Salva. Ordinarily biography is best left out of criticism, either because it's speculation read into the film or it's simply not enlightening. In the case of Salva, I think it is both significant and enlightening. Salva, while making Clownhouse, sexually abused the twelve-year-old star and videotaped it. He was reported, tried, and served his jail time. Ten years after Clownhouse, he finally got to make another feature. He even got to make a film for Disney, Powder. This film was boycotted and resulted in protests instigated primarily by the victim, by then an adult, and his family. Each film he's made since has met with some protests by people who believe a convicted pedophile should never be allowed to work again.
That's as much as need be said for our purposes. What we see is that Salva is what is often referred to in our society as a 'monster.' Anyone who abuses a child is 'monstrous'. Perhaps, however, his alternative and distinctly non-productive sexuality (homosexual and pedophilic) is part of what suggests a 'monster' to our society. While I have heard Roman Polanski called a monster very rarely, I have heard it frequently used for Salva. Polanski, despite sexually abusing a twelve-year-old girl, has had wives and has two children with his present wife. Salva, who also sexually abused a twelve-year-old, has never been married and has no children. The difference is one of productivity.
So, like The Creeper and so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is non-productive. But like The Creeper and unlike so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is highly creative. In an interview, he refers to his films as his children. (2) This is very important, because creativity for Salva is allowed to substitute--perhaps very satisfactorily--for productivity; this is true both in his life and in his films. So with The Creeper, Salva is representing a very interesting aspect of who he is: a (social) monster who is also creative, a monster who is an artist, creating darkly beautiful art and creating himself in the process. Seeing the monster-as-artist in the film means seeing the possibility of artistic creation as a substitute for biological creation, artistic creation as a means of recreating oneself: in his films, Salva creates himself insofar as he shows us he is not a monster, but a creator of a different order.
As an amusing turn-of-the-tables, the denouement of Jeepers Creepers II shows the film's major protagonist, a father (Ray Wise) whose child was taken by The Creeper, charging kids to view the sleeping Creeper nailed to a wall of his barn. What's interesting about this is the total lack of creativity in the father's sideshow moneymaking. He's productive enough: he had two children and still has one. But he can only display the Creeper, a self-made work of art, rather than make his own art. Why should biological creation without artistic creation be any less monstrous than artistic creation without biological creation?
But I promised that delving into biography and how Salva reflects himself, the creator of perverse art, in The Creeper would be enlightening. Finally, I want to address this. What seeing the film's relationship to Salva himself makes us ask is just what the protestors of Powder never asked themselves: why can't the monster's art be accepted, even if we don't accept the monster? The Creeper, of course, has to kill to make his art. The Creeper is biologically a monster. But Salva doesn't and isn't. His 'monstrosity' is social only and in creating his art he can also recreate himself. He kills no-one in the process and as I've argued, and am clearly convinced of myself, Salva's films have merit as works of art. There is a possibility of separating moral concerns about the creator from the aesthetic concerns of the created art. Perhaps some are afraid that accepting the monster-as-artist means failing to see him as a monster any longer, failing to see a non-procreative creativity as monstrous.
The Jeepers Creepers films are not masterpieces. They succeed very well as entertaining monster movies, the first being particularly skillful in audience manipulation and the second containing some fantastic monster-slaying action. As penetrating works of art, they are occasionally vapid or confused. The homophobia subtext of the second film is particularly striking as such. It is in the character of The Creeper, a character into which Salva has clearly invested much of himself, that the films show great depth and insight about human concerns of monstrosity and art, and their possible co-existence. (3)
(1) There are, of course, apparent exceptions. Science-fiction horror films tend to rely, in fact, upon the horrible productivity of the monster. The Alien films in particular feature the horrific chestbursters, alien young bursting from the human bodies in which they've been implanted. Inseminoid, as the title implies, is about nothing other than an alien force that impregnates human women. There is, too, a large body of cinema--both animated and live-action--in Japan in which demons and/or aliens capture, rape, and impregnate busty human women. The most fruitful argument to deal with this objection is that in these films the very productivity of the aliens itself, which uses rather than complements human creativity itself is destructive and repulsive. It's production through destruction rather than creation. But that argument must wait for another essay.
The very first shot of Incubus, over which the opening credits appear, begins in total black; the camera pulls out gradually revealing that we are looking into the iris of a brown eye; the eye blinks twice. Why are we beginning a film about a sex-demon in an eye? Perhaps we are being promised that we will see, in what follows, what this eye has seen; but that would only be a valuable promise if we could detect that the eye had seen something horrible. Since the eye could be said to look entranced or in love just as well as horrified, something else must be communicated in this choice. Other films use similar techniques: Blue Velvet (1986), after a brief prologue, takes us into the severed ear for a devious nightmare until we emerge from the protagonist's ear at the coda. In Blue Velvet, we understand we are being taken into the mind for a cinematic nightmare. In Incubus, rather than entering an eye in the first shot, we are in fact emerging from the eye. Only in the final shot do we re-enter the eye. The procession isn't into a subjective realm and back into an objective one, but rather a projection of the interior, subjective onto the exterior, objective world. What we witness in this film, the first and final shots seem to tell us, is a drama of projection: what happens when minds project their dreams onto the real world. Let's see if this interpretation bears out.
The plot of Incubus concerns a young man named Tim who has begun to have nightmares about a woman being tortured by hooded men in a dungeon demanding 'Tell us!' He screams, "Leave her alone!" and awakes in a sweat. Each time he has one of these dreams, a local girl or woman is brutally raped, sometimes to death, and any man interfering is murdered. Tim gradually begins to worry that he's responsible for the deaths, though he doesn't know how. His mysterious grandmother (Helen Hughes) seems to suspect him as well. Meanwhile, a recently-moved surgeon, Sam (John Cassavetes), tries to protect his 18-year-old daughter, Tim's girlfriend, from the menace and work with the sheriff (John Ireland) to find the culprit.
The first, and most obvious, case of 'projectionism' in this plot description is Tim's dreams. His dreams are of a sadomasochistic nature. Later in the film he describes the procedure as a 'battle of wills', with the tortured woman laughing and the torturers amping it up to break her. Both parties involved are taking some sort of pleasure from the proceedings. The full nature of Tim's dreams remains nebulous throughout the film, however. At times he seems to see the victims in his dreams, but later the 'players' of the dream are identified as his grandmother's family and his mother; at other times the dreams seem to be unrelated to the victims other than always occurring in conjunction with a rape. Whatever the case, the cruel and slightly incestuous sexuality of Tim's dreams are projected onto real people in the real world through the incubus.
The brutality of the rapes is exceptional: each woman's uterus is ruptured by the force of the rape and (it is implied, though not stated) the size of the creature's penis; one woman's windpipe is split, suggesting she was both vaginally and orally raped; and in some cases the woman are filled with what Cassavetes calls an "incredible" amount of semen, so much "even the hemorrhaging couldn’t get rid of it"; and nearly all of the women die as a result of the rape alone. Though we never see any actual rape, the shots of the women screaming, in one case rendered in a relishing slow motion, along with Cassavetes's solemn descriptions of ruptured uteruses and gallons of sperm, are disturbing enough.
The key to Tim's projectionism, and perhaps to the whole film, is, of course, his relationship to the incubus. The incubus never does, and perhaps isn't even capable, of attacking until Tim has one of his dreams. The dreams themselves come upon Tim uninvited, leaving open the question (as far as the narrative goes) of who is having the greater influence over who. Either way, Tim's conscious participation in the world must cease before the incubus can begin its rapes. While Tim is conscious, the incubus is an earnest newspaper editor named Laura Kincaide. She seems to be entirely unaware that she is the incubus and is capable of leading a fairly normal life. Tim's consciousness keeps her in balance, as it were; he's like a superego operating on an id. When he is overtaken by his dreams, the intelligent and thoughtful woman becomes a demonic rapist: pure, uninhibited desire is set loose. If consciousness is participating in the world as it is, without imposing our fantasies upon it, then when Tim becomes unconscious, he loses his grasp between his dream world and the real world and the incubus is free to enact his masochistic dreams/desires upon the world--particularly upon women, as they are the locus of his erotic urges. Therefore, the template this relationship between Tim and Laura sets up is one of latent, perverse desires becoming active without limit.
What we want to see now is whether this template has any repetition amongst the film's characters. I think it does. There is a shot during the first rape-murder scene where a young man goes to his truck. We see on his front bumper a sign reading, "Galen: 150 years of boredom." Galen is the name of the small town. Apparently its occupants view the town as very uneventful. What's curious and important about this silly bumper sticker is what it reveals about the distinction between the surface and what's hidden. Everyone in Galen has secrets. Again, much like in Blue Velvet, beneath the pleasant surface of the small town are hideous perversions and secrets we normally never acknowledge. Every character we spend significant time with is shown to have some secret. Tim has his dreams. Agatha Galen (Tim's grandmother) has both the secret of Tim's origin and her family history. Her family, the Galen's, were witch-hunters and when they went a-hunting during the last slew of incubus attacks, they killed a supposed witch who give birth to Tim. She also give birth to a girl, Laura, who was sent out for adoption elsewhere. Laura's big secret is, of course, being the incubus. Even the sheriff is hiding the unsolved slew of incubus attacks and that the source of his appointment as sheriff is Agatha.
The biggest surprise, however, is the secret harbored by Sam and his daughter Jenny. Sam hints, though never confesses, that he murdered his last girlfriend, Julie. After his wife died, he got an 18-year-old girlfriend and began neglecting his daughter. When he caught Julie cheating on him, he fought with her. He said she 'managed' to get away, so he chased her down and feels guilty over it. He never states the results, but we get teasing flashbacks of a woman lying on the ground in the rain, covered in blood. He later tells Laura that Julie is dead. Presumably he murdered the girl, then moved to a small town in hiding. That Sam murdered a young woman would be bad enough, but there is also a creepily incestuous tone to his relationship with Jenny. The very first scene in which we meet Sam, not knowing who he is, he is entering his home, going upstairs, and looking at a woman exiting a shower totally naked. We realize only later that the girl he looked at is actually his daughter. He doesn't want her to have a boyfriend. She promises to never leave him. They kiss on the lips. This doesn't mean he's ever molested his daughter; it just means that, like Tim's dreams, Sam has this perversion in his hidden life.
Everyone in Galen does have a perverse hidden life. 'Galen' is, in fact, Swedish for 'crazy'. And in the Freudian sense, this is correct: everyone in Galen is crazy. To be perverse is to veer from normality, to be crazy to some degree. Ordinarily we moderate our perversions, inhibit which of them we allow to enter into the world. What this all amounts to is a sort of vision of the world (with Galen standing in for the whole world) as perverse. Everyone is a pervert. There is no-one alive who does not have perverse desires of one sort or another--whether incestuous, masochistic, sadistic, or anything else--usually beneath the surface. We inhibit them out of a sense of dignity, propriety, morality, spirituality, or any number of other values.
Complementing this vision is the moral: what happens if we uncheck those perversions, let them reign uninhibited? It is through and in the character of the incubus that hidden, perverse desires become revealed and even actualized in the world of the film. And through the incubus, we find sex, cruelty, and death inextricably bound. The distinction between eros and thanatos, as it were, depends upon the distinction between our fantasy life (which may be as perverse as we like) and our real lives (which must be inhibited). Sex without limitation consumes its participants; infinite sex is death. Sexuality has its creative power when limited, ordered by form.
The most powerful moment in Incubus, the finale, illustrates this point very well. Sam has Laura, Jenny, and Tim in his house. He's preparing to induce Tim's dream in order to interrogate him and learn its secrets. Before starting, Jenny approaches him and tells him she's going to get some rest. Here director John Hough gives us an important and intricate shot: as Jenny heads to her room upstairs, the camera tracks and pans to follow her progress up to and into her room at the top of the stairs; the camera then pans to Sam and tracks back toward him; Sam looks toward the kitchen, leading the camera to pan toward the kitchen in time to see Laura emerge with a trey of coffee; Laura enters a doorway near the kitchen and the camera pans to look past Sam into the living room; Laura meets the camera's focus in the living room and exits the doorway Sam is looking through to talk to Sam; Sam tells her he would like her to go upstairs to see Jenny and she agrees to do so. This could have been handled much more easily with editing. Hough chose to choreograph the shot for a reason, namely, to link Jenny's and Laura's destinations. Both are going to end up in her room. Laura is sent to Jenny's room by Jenny's father. He has a desire to protect her, yes. But he also has that subtly incestuous relationship with Jenny. It is the tension between the surface desire (protective father) and perverse desire (sexual interest) that leads to the film's great tragedy.
As Sam interrogates Tim, he urges Tim to "Bring it through the door. Let it come through the door." This suggestion of penetration coincides with the incubus's penetration of its final victim. Tim sees the victim in his dream, finally; instead of his mother's face, he sees Jenny's. Tim rushes upstairs with a knife Agatha gave him and tries to kill Laura, but Sam interferes and Tim stabs himself. Laura hugs Sam, asking him to never leave her. As they embrace, he sees over her shoulder Jenny's body lying in bed, bleeding profusely from between her legs. Laura, the incubus, raped her as he was interrogating Tim. He sent Laura to the room; he induced Tim's dream; he's responsible for his daughter's death.
Sam's hidden desire to fuck his daughter was brought into the real world by the incubus. Despite all his conscious efforts to protect his daughter from all harm and, for that matter, sex, his activities resulted in her being raped to death. The tragedy is of Greek proportions, with bodies littering the stage, piercing dramatic irony, and disturbing sexuality haunting the spectator long after.
The final shot is a zoom into Sam's eye. He blinks twice, then the camera zooms into the black of his iris until we see nothing but black: the black of our hidden, perverse desires. The vision the film expresses is a moralistic one, viewing unrestrained sexuality is inherently deadly. We may all be perverts, but we have fantasies for a reason and they should remain fantasies. In the sexual free-for-all of the early '80s, these notions would have seemed very reactionary; it's not surprising the film was loathed by critics upon release. A case of bad timing, I suppose: had Incubus been released when the AIDS epidemic gained enormous attention in the mid-'80s, it may have struck the same critics as an insightful critique of uninhibited sexuality. AIDS, after all, did much as the incubus did insofar as equating limitless sex with death.
Just because Incubus has a strong vision underlying its artistic choices does not mean its a perfect film, of course. Some of the film's creative decisions are questionable. Particularly the repetitive, cruel rapes. The first rape shows only the result: a traumatized girl. The second rape doesn't just show, but dwells upon the terror and agony of the rape victim, a 40-something museum curator with children. The point, by now, is already made. The third rape is at least dramatically justified, as Hough constructs the film so as to make the audience believe Tim is the incubus. (He's always running out of a scene just before a rape.) However, the fourth rape is unnecessary and, being so near the climax, only interferes with the film's pacing. Perhaps realizing this, Hough tries some virtuosity with the final rape setpiece to make it more exciting. Particularly, he amps up the gore. But there's also a stylish shot in which the camera is attached to the bottom of a wheelchair, so we see a body through the gap of a bathroom door before the girl in the wheelchair does. I have a suspicion that Hough was influenced by Argento's gialli films, where stylish murders punctuate the detective action. But in those films, the murders can continue throughout the film because the characters murdered are related to the plot. These rape-murder scenes are of previously unknown characters. They add horror to the film, but never suspense. We have no idea who the rape victims are. A couple playing around a lake, a museum curator, some girl visiting a Bruce Dickinson concert in town (!), and finally a man and his two daughters at a farmhouse.
Still, one could argue that the final rape of a girl in a wheelchair is an act of particular perversion. One could also argue that each rape victim had someone who desired to rape her. The first victim was called a 'bitch' by her boyfriend before the rape. The second victim had a wimpy husband. The third victim was at a metal concert; the stage performance was an enactment of Samson and Delilah with a song about a 'two-timing' woman. And the fourth victims were, like Sam and Jenny, daughters with a single father. Though the rapes might not be dramatically ideal, they can be seen as adding to the picture of a perverse Galen.
Overall, whether one agrees with the main thrust of the vision in Incubus, the film's vision is certainly consistent and interesting. Hough, whose horror films are generally underrated, has made a fascinating work of art with this film, magically managing both very sleazy subject matter with a very serous, diginified tone.
As I am ordinarily committed to the serious appraisal of films rarely taken seriously, one may wonder what purpose is served by analysing a sequence from Rosemary's Baby, a canonical film that has been analysed frequently in the journals. I often emphasize the feeling films create, one's emotional relationship to the film. I have argued elsewhere that our emotional relationship to a film is as much truth as what one can demonstrate intellectually, 'objectively.' Much more than with literature, meaning in cinema is created through the emotional impact the image conveys. What is told in words in a novel must, in film, be created within the real space of the frame and within the viewer. A novelist can tell you of a sinister atmosphere, but an adjective in the image must be shown; a metaphor must be created through the concatenation of what is said, seen, and conjoined. A master stylist like Polanski can manipulate how we feel with his images through the use of framing, movement, colour, contrasts; and from this he can convey much more information than we would ordinarily recognize. This is all obvious to the student of cinema: it's called film language and Polanski is a recognized master of it. Yet I've been challenged for writing too much of the feeling films create and evading hard evidence in film language. This analysis, a close-reading I ordinarily simplify for my readers, shows a master constructing our feelings from the raw elements of the image and from these feelings revealing to us the essence of the film.
While the hallucinogenic dream sequence that immediately follows the romantic dinner sequence of Rosemary's Baby gets more attention, the telling twenty shots that comprise the romantic dinner sequence are very densely packed with visual information about Guy's personality, the nature of the Woodhouse marriage, and the effects Guy's deal with Roman has upon it. Though there are doubtless several important themes in Rosemary's Baby, not the least of which the issue of ownership of one's body, a major theme often neglected is Polanski's cynicism about love and romance. The way he manipulates our sympathies in the romantic dinner sequence reveals a central conflict between Guy's pragmatism and Rosemary's idealism and with that the conclusion that both are mistaken extremes.
(1) The first shot begins with red roses coming into focus. As Rosemary enters, the camera tracks slightly to the right, giving us a clear look at Rosemary who, startled and curious by the flowers, approaches them. Polanski purposely makes the flowers the subject of the shot before Rosemary. She is, as it were, the afterthought. The next shot explains the first.
(2) We see more flowers in the kitchen. Again, Rosemary walks into the shot and approaches the flowers, the flowers being the subject first. The camera then pushes in toward Rosemary, pans and reveals Guy, in the shadows, at the end of the hall, the visual answer to the question in her mind and our minds: Who put the flowers there? At this point in the film we aren't aware of Guy's involvement with the Castavets, other than his having spent some time with Roman. Yet there is an effect created here. By placing the roses in the frame before Rosemary, we get the sense of the flowers coming before her. The flowers, of course, are trivial, but what they mean is not. They are the instruments by which Guy initiates the conception of their child. Guy is putting his interest in the child before Rosemary. Of course, that might not be especially sinister or even a valid distinction had the shot not continued to make an important point.
As Guy walks down the hallway to meet Rosemary, still in the same shot, he says, "I've been a creep" and explains how he's been hoping his fellow actor, whose blindness resulted in Guy getting an important role, remains blind. We expect Guy to say he's been a creep for neglecting Rosemary, but instead he reveals this perverse desire. What's important is that he reveals this in the same shot that began with the flowers. The flowers, symbolizing the couple's romance, the conception of their child, and thus their hopes for the future, is linked to Guy's acting career and how it has come to flourish. Once again, we're not, at this point, aware that Guy is conceiving the child in order to further his career, but Polanski's direction subtly implies it for us long before we know.
The shot goes on, following Guy to the calendar as he points to two dates he has circled in red: he's 'figured out' the dates they must conceive by, he explains. We can surmise, from the rest of the film, that he's been directed to impregnate Rosemary at a certain time. The use of red to circle the dates and the red of the flowers informs us of this, initially on a subconscious level: the first real glimpse of red we get in the film is Roman's smoking jacket during the scene in which they first meet. Rosemary's colours are yellow and white; only after meeting the Castavets do reds start to bleed into the Woodhouse household, starting with the red flowers. The red of the flowers indicates the Faustian nature of their romance, insofar as it is now stamped by Roman, the red of the dates how Guy's been directed by Roman: he's sold the soul of their relationship for his career.
(3) Polanski cuts to an insert of the gramophone playing some romantic, instrumental music. The object is the paraphernalia of romance, manufacturing the mood. Guy is an actor and is skilled in the use of props to create emotions. Insofar as Guy must disguise his motives from Rosemary and create a particular mood for her, this is a performance for Guy: this is the performance, in fact, that will make his career.
There is a perverse irony in how Polanski depicts Guy's career-making performance as not on stage, but in his very life. The more I watch the film, the more I find myself feeling some sympathy for Guy. His very pragmatic and unromantic thought-process has been, 'She carries the baby; we tell her it died; get over the grief; and, with my new career, I'll be in a place to have the family we dream of.' Guy is not evil. He perhaps believes he has Rosemary's interests in some sense at heart, that he is making this sacrifice for his family. Unfortunately, he doesn't get his family's permission first and therein is Guy's major fault: he sells Rosemary's womb as though he owns it.
The cynical depiction of Guy stands in for the married couple in general, at least the urban married couple. Polanski seems to be depicting modern marriage as a stage upon which people perform roles for the good of the marriage. The conception of children is not, for Polanski, done out of True Love, but for practical motives; the couple merely represents their motives to themselves as ideal and romantic. Polanski seems skeptical about the possibility of true romance unpolluted by pragmatic calculations. In this sense, perhaps it's Rosemary and not Guy who has the problem.
(4) After the record starts, we're shown Guy lighting a fire in the fireplace. In another subtle indication of Guy's sacrifice, then, we see the paraphernalia of romance followed immediately by the paraphernalia of hell. Lighting a fire can be a romantic act, but Cassavetes's/Guy's performance in lighting the fire is vaguely sinister and also shows signs of discomfort, his head tilted slightly downward, gazing from under his brow with a nervous smile.
(5) Polanski now gives us a shot of the living room, Rosemary seated to the left and Guy at the fireplace in the center. What stands out most is that Rosemary is now wearing a red dress, her whole body covered in red satin. Until now Rosemary's colours have been light, usually yellow like her hair. The only time she wears red is during the romantic dinner, after which she is raped by her husband/the devil. My claim is not that red is symbolic of any particular concept, but rather that its placement has an effect and Polanski uses this. Red is a warm and yet dangerous colour. When we first see it on Roman, we're put on alert, despite his gentlemanly ways. The red flowers were linked to Roman for this reason. Now the red dress links Rosemary to Roman; seeing it, we feel something is off, that the romantic evening is tainted and Rosemary is in danger. Rosemary's body has been sold out to Roman's interests.
After lighting the fire, Guy approaches Rosemary at the coffee table, decapitated by the frame. Rosemary suddenly becomes alarmed over the smoke from the fireplace. Guy has forgotten to open the flue, risking the white paint. The white paint Rosemary has used to decorate the home in which she wants to build their life together conveys her hopes for the purity of their future together, a purity she wants to preserve. Rosemary believes in True Romance, even if Guy and Polanski don't. That the smoke enters the frame as Guy's head exits is important. The only sight of smoke in the film prior to that moment is during dinner at the Castevets. While Rosemary and Minnie talk, Rosemary glances into the den where Guy and Roman are speaking, seeing only smoke wafting from around the corner. Here, again, Guy is (partially) out of frame when the smoke begins, linking, like Rosemary's dress, this moment and Guy's intentions to the satanic influence of Roman Castevet and particularly to the deal Guy and Roman were presumably making. The smoke that can ruin the white paint is the influence of Roman that threatens to sully their innocence and happiness. If my analysis of Guy is correct, that satanic influence in the narrative is representative of pragmatism in life.
Rosemary and Guy both sit on the floor, Rosemary on the left and Guy on the right, the fire between them as the camera slowly pushes in. In another context, that fire could easily be read as the passion between this young couple; but in this context, the fire seems somewhat hollow, the prop in an act.
(6) Polanski cuts to the candlelight dinner. Rosemary is again on the left, Guy on the right, the table and two yellow candles between them. There are a few dinner scenes in Rosemary's Baby. The first is the dinner with Hutch, during which he relates the twisted history of their new building, including baby-eating witches. The second is the dinner with the Castevets, during which the unseen deal between Guy and Roman takes place. The third is this dinner between Rosemary and Guy alone. This context is important. The discussion during the first dinner informs us of the building's history naturally prepares us for the sinister tone of the second, the Castevets taking the place of the baby-eating witches. During this dinner, Guy is seduced to the building's dark history. The third dinner is Guy seducing Rosemary to the same, in an inverse of Adam and Eve.
As they eat and drink, the doorbell rings. Guy feigns annoyance and hurries to answer the door. For a man who, later in the scene, is quite content to leave Rosemary do all the housework, his readiness to answer the door is suspicious. The camera pushes in on Rosemary, listening intently. She hears Minnie's voice; "Not tonight," she says. The sense Polanski communicates is that Minnie is an invasive force diametrically opposed to romance and love.
(7) Guy returns with desserts, jokingly explaining them as Minnie's "ESP." Polanski pushes in to Rosemary and we see she's too relieved to be suspicious. (8) Guy, sitting at the table, does an impression of Minnie, setting Rosemary's and, to some extent our, worries at ease. (The way Guy makes fun of Minnie's pronunciation of "mousse" as "mouse" returns, in fact, in Rosemary's dream sequence, when Rosemary claims to have suffered a mouse-bite. This is also a humourous reference to Minnie as the Disney character, Minnie Mouse.) (9) Rosemary takes their dinner plates into the kitchen, disappearing into the white for a moment, perhaps indicating her security in their relationship, then returns to the table, Polanski's camera staying on her the whole time. (10) Guy starts eating the dessert, chocolate mousse. (11) Rosemary starts eating as well, but complains of a 'chalky undertaste.' At the very moment Rosemary tastes the chocolate and recoils at the undertaste, the record of romantic music reaches its end. Guy has sold out their romance by giving her the drugged dessert. The 'undertaste', moreover, parallels the sense we get throughout this whole romantic dinner sequence, the feeling, created by Polanski's mise-en-scene, that something is off. We are wholly allied with Rosemary throughout this scene and experience the unsettling undertones with her. (12, 13, 14) Strangely, Guy, who has just been mocking Minnie, becomes annoyed by Rosemary's complaints, eventually telling her, "Eat it!" Although the table is positioned evenly between them, the shots of Rosemary in this back-and-forth contain a yellow candle, whereas there is only the black void out the window for Guy. The step of giving Rosemary the mousse is the giving up of his soul; Guy is committed to fulfilling his deal with the devil. (15) Rosemary gives in and once again begins eating the mousse. She's putting on a performance that she enjoys it, yet the performance is clearly a performance, unlike Guy's. She asks Guy to change the record and while he's away dumps most of the mousse. He returns to loom behind her, hands on her shoulders, his head cut off by the frame again. Polanski uses the technique of framing-to-obscure throughout the film, most famously when Minnie is blocked by the doorframe while on the telephone. (Preview audiences literally craned their necks to try see around the doorframe.) He used it, as I noted, when Guy and Roman are speaking together. Putting someone partially out of frame makes us feel the missing information, our need to know drawing our attention not to what's in frame but to what's not in the frame; we sense that the character is hiding something and indeed has something to hide, in this case his guilt over feeding Rosemary a drugged dessert.
(16) Polanski cuts from the dinner to Guy sitting alone, back to us, in the dark den. He's watching the televised appearance of the Pope at Yankee stadium. (17) Rosemary is busy in the bright, white kitchen cleaning up, without Guy's help. The shot is not initially of Rosemary's face, however, but of the trashcan into which she's emptying the mousse, leaving behind a stain resembling dried blood on the white cloth. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the image to say it conveys a sense of desecrated virginity; yet the visual contrast of the brown and the white is established earlier in the film, as Rosemary repaints the dark brown apartment white and pale yellow. It's as though the old colour, or character, of the building is coming through in their lives.
"Christ, what a mob," Guy says from out of frame. We tilt up to see Rosemary feeling ill. This is the drug taking effect. Yet Polanski's linking of the Pope ("Christ, what a mob") to her sudden dizziness reminds us that she was raised a Catholic, amongst strict nuns. Earlier in the film she dreams of a nun and apologizes for 'telling about the window.' In her second dream, during which she dreams she's raped by the devil, she explains to the Pope that the "mouse bite" kept her from coming to see him. She obviously suffers some anxiety over her abandonment of religion, her absence from the "mob".
(18) Guy is still watching the Pope. Not the least bit interested in the Pope, he states this would be a great place for his Yamaha commercial (the ad he starred in). Guy, again, subordinates higher values to his career. Guy's rejection of ideals is, as the events are linked within the shots, a cause of Rosemary's dizziness. (19) As Guy laughs, Polanski cuts to Rosemary stumbling from the white kitchen toward the dark livingroom, where Guy has been sitting. (This contrast of light and dark can be found throughout the film, most obviously in Rosemary's redecoration of the apartment.) She knocks over a chair along the way, intimating chaos entering the domestic order. She falls into Guy's arms and simultaneously into total dark, her (and his) features no longer visible against the background of the bright kitchen. (20) Guy escorts Rosemary down the hallway, blaming the alcohol for her dizziness. After she falls, he carries her the rest of the way to their bedroom, leading into the dream sequence and the rape. Now that, as the sequence of shots up to this point has established, Rosemary's defenses have been broken down and the colours of Roman and the building have begun invading the Wodehouse world as much as callous practicality has invaded Guy's heart, she can be led off for the rape, the real nail in the coffin for the couple's romance.
I've been referring to the attitude toward relationships in Rosemary's Baby as 'cynical.' However, I would like to qualify that statement. In Foucault's terms, the current discourse is that our liberal age has allowed relationships to be based on love whereas they used to be based on practical concerns, such as wealth and power. A relationship based upon money or any practicality today is denigrated. Like all discourse for Foucault, its truth is questionable. In reality, relationships in the past were often based upon a mixture of emotional and practical concerns and the truth is they are still based upon a mixture of emotional and practical concerns. When choosing a man, women do consider how financially stable he is. This is a practical concern. We're to believe, of course, that this is a "requirement for love"; but that claim is no more accurate today than it was for Elizabethan England. Seeing the modern, urban family as partially motivated by practical concerns is realistic, not cynical.
Rosemary buys into the discourse of our time and desires a family based upon pure love. So Guy, more pragmatic, must play the part for her--and he's good at it. As Rosemary detects the 'chalky undertaste,' as it were, in his performance, she begins to imagine a Faustian conspiracy. Polanski never gives the viewer indisputable evidence that Rosemary's suspicions are true. The final revelatory scene is, like her dream sequences, slightly out of sync. Moreover, the eyes she sees as she looks at the child are exactly the eyes she sees during the rape dream sequence. Possibly Rosemary's inability to accept the unreality of her fairytale idea of love leads her to villainize Guy's practicality as downright satanic. That is, of course, completely speculation. The film is purposely ambiguous. There may indeed be a Faustian conspiracy. At the very least, the viewer is led to strongly sympathize with Rosemary and to share her perception; and from her perception, Guy has indeed sold their hopes and dreams for his career.
Nazi Sharks! Nazi Sharks! If you like sharks, evil Nazi scum, sexy babes in bikinis, big boobs, stupid shark movies, sexy babes not in bikinis, Kevin Costner, synchronized swimming, and/or SyFy movies, it belongs in your e-reader or brain. Delve Deeper
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