Possessed By the Demon of Torture and Death

When Spanish horror director Jess Franco died this past April at the age of 83, I have to confess that I was a bit surprised by the emotional outpouring that greeted this news. Traveling in the circles I do, the goodwill directed Franco's way was generated by his films, and for many years, fueled by very little actual experience of his work, it had been my impression that Franco was essentially a sleaze merchant. So I thought "Well now, come on." I knew the extent of my own ignorance quite well, yet for a brief period I was intent on clinging to my early impressions. That faded pretty quickly, though, and soon I acknowledged that some kind of study of Franco's massive filmography was in order. Over the past weekend, I took my first steps in this direction.

Whether you care to know or not, I'm going to tell you anyway (tell you again, in some cases) that European horror of a certain vintage is a field I regard with some ambivalence. It's not necessary to go through the rolodex of filmmakers and films I'm thinking about, but, suffice it, maybe, to say that I can't help but look at the Dario Argento with something of a doubtful eye (I really like Suspiria, though, you guys). Most days, I'd rather not look at Lucio Fulci at all. Plus directors from countries other than Italy, and so forth. And it never seemed to me that Franco was the guy to turn me around on this, although it's turned out in the past year I didn't need Franco for any such thing as Jean Rollin had already accomplished it, or had already begun the process. I've written quite a bit about Rollin in that time, covering the highs (Fascination) and lows (Schoolgirl Hitchhikers) of my experiences with his work, the upshot of it all being that Rollin made the kind of horror film I always thought I'd be getting from, say, Mario Bava, a filmmaker I admire but who nevertheless has yet to knock me cold the way Rollin at his best has done. In the course of all this, I realized that I've created a roadblock for myself. Rollin makes the films I've been chasing after, and so my brain tells me that, as I finally turn toward Franco, maybe Franco will be like Rollin, only Spanish. This isn't fair to Franco, or any other filmmaker from this very general swath I might apply it to, not least because Franco was not Rollin, and so therefore wouldn't have made Jean Rollin films. This is the kind of thing I see critics do a whole bunch, and I hate it, so it's not something I want to do myself. Even if Rollin is my standard, that standard must be thrown out when I'm watching a film by Jess Franco. The standard for a Jess Franco film must be the best that Franco was capable of.

So. And by the way, from none of this should you infer that my goal is to force myself to like the films of Jess Franco. Indeed, if that's the idea, I still, even after this weekend, have my work cut out for me. The goal is just to look at him squarely. Anyway, as I was saying, the catalyst for all this was the announcement by Kino Lorber that they would be releasing on Blu-ray three Franco films -- Nightmares Come at Night, A Virgin Among the Living Dead (or more specifically, Christina, Princess of Eroticism, about all of which more in a minute), and The Awful Dr. Orlof -- on August 20. That's tomorrow, just so's you know. And so I figured here's my chance, and I have the films here, and so off we go.

Nightmares Come at Night - This 1970 film stars Diana Lorys as Anna, a stripper whose life just at the moment is inexorably bound up in the lives of two other people: Cynthia (Colette Giacobine), a shapely blonde woman who Anna met at her club, after Cynthia gave her a pretty serious once over; Anna now lives, and has sex, with Cynthia; and Paul Lucas (Paul Muller), a psychiatrist apparently hired to help Anna get past a series of violent dreams she's been having, in which she murders a man over and over, and which have rather nastily bled over into her real life. Maybe. There's also missing jewels, and jewel thieves.

Nightmares Come at Night did not strike me as particularly successful, and in fact came close to doubling down on the kind of things that drive me up the wall about so many of these films. At one point, Anna is telling Lucas about the day she met Cynthia. She's narrating a flashback, basically, and she talks about seeing Cynthia in the strip club while she, Anna, was performing, and her act was designed to be very, very slow, so as to ramp up the seduction, and her striptease is, in fact, very, very slow, and we see just about every second of it. It very quickly becomes both boring and absurd, and never achieves the hypnotic effect that cinematic slowness sometimes can. Diana Lorys is gorgeous and everything, but by this point in the film this has been well established. The whole film plays like this, even when pacing isn't the specific thing being toyed with. It's not the worst I've seen from Franco (if there's worse than what little I've seen of Snakewoman, I don't think I want to know about it), but the dreaminess being aimed for translates into a kind of monotonous hum.

The Awful Dr. Orlof - Probably the most purely enjoyable of these three film is this one, from 1962. Because this is also the most straightforward of this group, it's probably worth mentioning that The Awful Dr. Orlof reveals a certain significant weakness, at least at this time and as it pertains to this kind of film, in Franco the writer. For example, there's a scene shortly after the villainous Dr. Orlof (Howard Vernon) has been introduced, where he and Arle (Perla Cristal) basically run through their history together and with Orlof's deformed, mute henchman Morpho (Ricardo Vale), not for their own benefit, obviously, but for ours. It's exposition as comedy sketch, almost, if only that had been its purpose. But Franco's interests lay elsewhere, evidently, and while that may be cold comfort to the viewer at that particular moment, films by people like Franco or Bava (also not a man possessed of the keenest ear for human speech) are often a curious jumble of what they were good at and what they were bad at, often in equal measure. Watching these films, I've found, is a constant process of wading through it all. As a for instance, there's a shot from inside a carriage, which is rattling along the street at night, in the rain, of the stormswept carriage driver -- it's both striking an almost complete throwaway. It almost feels like a waste, but why should that be? It fits the film, it looks great, and however insignificant it may be, it therefore cannot be insignificant. That's about as clear as I can make it.

And then of course, interestingly, the story of The Awful Dr. Orlof, while not being strikingly original, necessarily, is still engaging in its perverse Gothic twistedness. The gist is, Orlof has been kidnapping beautiful young women and killing them in his lab, with the hope of mining them for skin grafts to repair his horribly scarred daughter Melissa (Diana Lorys, who plays a dual role her, though "Melissa" doesn't require much effort, and having Lorys play her comes close to being a plot requirement). There's a policeman (Conrado San Martin) on his trail, and actually the procedural element, which is not without its pleasures, often dominates. This fed into what interested me most about the whole thing, which is the vague nods toward Jack the Ripper lore. The action takes place in 1912, rather than 1888, and Orlof's motivations are quite different from what we can assume drove Jack the Ripper, but the historical era, despite any upheavals and such that had taken place in that twenty-four-year gap, is visually not hugely different, and Orlof dresses in the classically mythical way of the Ripper. He's a doctor, which fits that same myth, has an assistant, whisks his victims away via carriage, and so forth. It's an engaging setting and approach, compelling almost by definition, but only until you see some version of it that doesn't work. Nothing in storytelling is fool-proof, and Franco was no fool.

Christina, Princess of Eroticism - The Kino disc for this 1973 film comes titled as A Virgin Among the Living Dead, this being the title it's better known by, but as Franco expert Tim Lucas says in his commentary, the cut of the film that carries that title is not exactly the film Franco set out to make. Much closer to this pure state is Christina, Princess of Eroticism, another cut, shorter by ten minutes, also included on the Kino disc. And first thing's first, Lucas points out, much to my relief, that purer cut or no, Franco hated that title, as well he should, since it's both terrible and inaccurate. In truth, A Virgin Among the Living Dead is somewhat closer to the truth of the film, so perhaps some adjustments could have been made in that regard, but anyway, here we are. The film stars Christina von Blanc as Christina, a young woman who travels to her family's remote and forboding castle. Her father has recently committed suicide, and his will is going to be read. At the castle, we meet several strange people, many of them family, some not, but all sinister. Ultimately, the film is oblique, cryptic, and surreal in the way that much of Rollin's work is, not to drag him into this again, though it can seem merely incoherent if you're not engaged as you should be. It's good to have Lucas around, at least it was good for me, because in his commentary he assures first time viewers that the film doesn't really take on a life of its own until you've seen it a second time. This might sound like he's making excuses, but having seen the film, I could see what he was talking about. Certain key moments in a film like this, something that is not only as fleeting but as portentous as Christina's attitude towards a woman seated at a desk as she, Christina, passes through a room, could be forgotten, or just missed, as Franco piles on the strangeness and, of course, the almost endless nudity (no point in being coy, I guess, although this alone isn't enough to make Christina the Princess of Eroticism).

Even for a first-timer, though, there's strangeness enough to latch on to, such as the quite disturbing scene involving the two nude women and a pair of scissors (what's most disturbing about this scene, to me anyway, is maybe not what you think), or, more interestingly, the eventual appearance of Christina's father. The man is dead, there is no question of that, but when he appears, still hanging from the noose by which he strung himself up, he's neither a ghost nor a zombie. He's dead, and he speaks. There's no attempt by Franco, because he's not interested in doing so, to slot the horror of Christina, Princess of Eroticism (such an awful title...) into an ancient tradition, or a subgenre. In fact, it's my understanding that A Virgin Among the Living Dead is padded out with zombie scenes filmed by Rollin (so I guess I can drag him into this, which is a relief), which, it seems to me, achieves the exact opposite effect that Franco was, consciously or unconsciously, going for. Since I've broken that seal, I'll note that this is not at all unlike Rollin's best films, many of which, while filled ostensibly with vampires, have very little to do with vampires, if you get me. Watch Two Orphan Vampires and tell me that's a vampire movie. Well I'm interested in that sort of thing, anyway. What I'm getting at is that while there's a certain clumsiness here, or maybe "inelegance" is a better word, always assuming there's a difference, there's also an approach to horror that is both thoughtful and skewed. This leaves me optimistic.

The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 11 - And Hell Itself Breathes Out Contagion to This World

There is an interesting subgenre of horror fiction that deals with film culture. I'm not necessarily talking about fiction that is about films and filmmaking (although that's part of it, and I talked a little about it here), and I'm definitely not talking about fiction that has been inspired primarily by the horror films of the 1970s and 80s (which seems to be most of it, these days). No, I'm talking about horror fiction that deals with our relationship to films, and how films affect us.

The grandaddy of this subgenre is Theodore Roszak's Flicker, a dense, fascinating and brilliant book that is a kind of metaphysical horror novel about the secret history, and intentions, of movies. That novel came out in 1991. In 1994, Tim Lucas -- a film critic, blogger, and horror film expert -- published a novel called Throat Sprockets. There are some rather striking similarities between Flicker and Lucas's novel, but Throat Sprockets began as a graphic novel, published in sections in a magazine called "Taboo", in 1987. And since the graphic novel was never completed, it has to be assumed that Roszak and Lucas were working pretty much ignorant of each other's plans, and just happened to extrapolate a similar danger connected to our collective obsession with movies.

Lucas's novel is about a man, our narrator (guess what his name is? Yep, he doesn't have one), who works for a small but succesful advertising firm in Ohio. He's married to a woman named Paige, whom he loves. And we gather that, at one time in his life, he was in love with movies. Unfortunately for him, that love has turned basically to disgust, or at least to an intense dislike. He still goes to movies almost every day, either during lunch or after work, but he always goes to the same theater, the Eros, whose name should give you a pretty good idea of what kind of films they show. Our narrator explains...:

I should explain that adult movies...have never particularly aroused me. On the contrary, I found myself drawn to them because of my disenchantment with mainstream films; I was fed up and growing weak on a steady diet of movies made by money and interested only in attracting more money. American films had become an art form with the agent as auteur; their lack of serious adult concerns was enforced by an outmoded and unrealistic ratings system that refused free expression to works of original or unpopular thought. I was driven by my attitude to the hard-core circuit, where the odds of being satisfied by a mature story line were slightly more in my favore -- even if those odds were one in a thousand, at least the chance existed.

I have to say, I don't quite follow the logic here. If there's any segment of the film industry that is primarily focused on making money, it's porn. And there is no part of the industry less interested in auteurs -- in art -- than porn. What movies is our narrator hoping to see, what "one in a thousand" adult film is he seeking? From my limited understanding, the heyday of adult films, the time when there might actually have been a slim chance in seeing a "good" adult film, was the 1970s, not the 1980s or 1990s. And if our narrator is hoping to see one of those older adult films, why not instead seek out their mainstream contemporaries? Isn't the 1970s considered the second Golden Age of American Film?

Anyway. This is really just a plot point, because, of course, the narrator does eventually find what he's looking for at the Eros in a film called Throat Sprockets. This is a film without plot, and without characters as we think of them, and without, by the way, any hardcore sex scenes. The eroticism stems from the filmmaker's apparent fetish for female throats. Every scene -- almost every shot, it would seem -- focuses either directly or indirectly on women's necks.

As I said, there is no plot to this film. It seems to consist of a series of scenes that, in one way or another, build towards a kind of "money shot". These individual scenes can involve no dialogue -- just a series of shots of necks -- or long scenes of dialogue in which one woman (the main character, of sorts, in that she appears throughout the film) describes to her psychiatrist her difficult time dealing with the death (via rough sex, not incidently) of a co-worker. The other main character would be a man who functions as the audience's point of view (at least, the male portion of the audience). His scenes are viewed from his eyes, and our narrator comes to refer to him as The Glover, due to the gloves he wears, and the fact that -- although this is never stated -- the name evokes a kind of threatening presence.

The film concludes with The Glover finally achieving what he's been building towards the whole film, which is the biting of a woman's neck, to the point of drawing -- and drinking -- blood (some of which spills, significantly, onto a page of The Completed Works of William Shakespeare). This is the ultimate sexual point of the film. To each his own, I guess, but it works on our narrator, who immediatley becomes obsessed with the film, to the point where he goes to see it almost every night. Eventually, his desire to act out what he's seen on-screen -- to engage in "sprocketing", as it comes to be called, based on the resemblance of the resulting neck wounds on the holes -- sprockets -- seen on the edges of film -- destroys his marriage. He doesn't just try to engage his wife in the activity, but tries to do so in a frenzy, which he later doesn't remember clearly. When his head clears afterwards, Paige has left him (and the novel).

Despondent, and still obsessed, our narrator continues to see Throat Sprockets as often as he can, and is able to channel his emotions into his advertising work. Consequently, his career takes off, and he lands one big account after another, to the point where he is being sent on business trips to meet with clients. One trip takes him to Chicago, where he finds Throat Sprockets playing under a different title (Transylvania Mon Amour). He also meets a woman in the theater who wants to try "sprocketing" with him. Although their encounter turns into an embarrassing failure, it is at this point that Lucas begins to really make clear that there is an underground culture building throughout, at least, America, around this film, and the practice of "sprocketing".

One of the most interesting things about this novel is how gradually Lucas brings that element into the novel. The narrator eventually meets a woman -- the novel's love interest, for lack of a better term -- named Emma, who knows the film, but the fact that these two, strangers to each other, have seen this obscure movie doesn't come as a surprise to either. Also, Throat Sprockets comes out on video (via a Japanese company). Shadier hotels provide kits to facilitate safer "sprocketing". There are magazine articles written about the film. Young, virgin hookers provide unique services. And so on. The question of who made this film becomes important only in about the last third of the book, but by that time the narrator's relationship with Emma has threatened to more deeply explore the most unsettling extremes of their shared fetish, and the narrator's psyche is not sure it can handle it.

References to specific, real films and filmmakers are surprisingly sparse, until, again, the last third or so, when Emma, for example, talks about why she at one point believed Throat Sprockets was made by Akira Kurosawa (as a long-time admirer of Kurosawa, I wasn't able to follow either the reason behind that belief, or the reason for her eventual dismissal of it, which seems to be solely due to the fact that there's no rain in Throat Sprockets, and Kurosawa liked himself some rain. Okay, but...), or when the narrator reflects on the fact that Truffaut had to explore his own relationship with filmmaking by directing Day for Night, after which he become colder and more "death obsessed".

The relative absence of this kind of talk in a novel so soaked in the idea of film points up, I think, an understated but important theme of the novel, which is the topic of extreme, underground films. I'm talking about the kind of film that is both notorious for, and largely unavailable to the public because of, scenes of extreme sex, violence and cruelty, films like Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox, The Men Behind the Sun, Guinea Pig and so forth. These films are often considered to be part of the horror genre, whether or not their ostensible subject matter obviously supports that, because their entire reason for being is to disgust and offend the viewer to the point that they wish they'd never started watching the film in the first place. These days, some of these films are readily available to the public, but many are not; still, some film fans make a point of seeing them anyway, whether to test their psychic constitutions, or because they've gotten to a point, like our narrator, where they find themselves more and more unmoved by standard cinematic fair.

Throat Sprockets, the film, is clearly nowhere near as extreme as these films, but the effect it has on our narrator, and the subculture that grows up around it, feels like Lucas trying to make a connection. At one point, before the narrator is able to get an official commercial video of the film, he spends $500 on a bootleg, which is the way films like The Men Behind the Sun tend to be seen. The man who sells it to him says that he also has a film featuring a one-time TV actress engaged in highly disturbing intercourse with a man whose back is to the camera. At the end of the film, the man turns towards the camera, and reveals himself to be Satan. The bootlegger says he sold this film to a man in Lubbock, TX, who was found, after watching the tape, with his eyes burned from their sockets. When the narrator receives his copy of Throat Sprockets from the bootlegger, he finds that a copy of this other tape has been included. After battling temptation and curiosity, he throws this second tape into an incenerator.

And I have to believe that Tim Lucas has seen his fair share of the kind of extreme films I'm talking about. I don't know this, but his specialty as a film critic is the horror genre, and he particularly specializes in what mass audiences would consider obscure horror films, like those made by Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and (especially, in Lucas's case) Mario Bava. Now, while I know that the sort of films made by those filmmakers can be pretty rough-sledding, as far as the sex and violence goes (well, maybe not so much in Bava), I'm also aware that they don't even come close to scraping the surface of what is offered up by something like Guinea Pig. But I think Lucas is making a connection, all the same. I think it would be a very rare horror critic with access -- due to professionald and personal reputation -- to anything the genre had to offer who didn't let curiosity get the better of him, and succumb to a viewing of one of these underground bootlegs, movies that are so realistically grotesque that they've been mistaken for genuine snuff films (this has happened to at least Cannibal Holocaust and Guinea Pig).

At one point, our narrator discusses his deteriorating emotional and psychological state with a priest. He even tells the priest about his obsession with "sprocketing". The priest says that he thinks that people of the narrator's generation -- his age is 30 for most of the novel, and most of the novel takes place in the early 1990s -- find themselves drawn to this kind of extreme activity because they've never lived through a war, the kind of war that up-ends an entire nation, and is has been through warfare that past generations have been able to shake off the primitive blood- and death-lust every human has burned into their genes. I don't know if I agree with Monsignor Freud (Jung?) on that one, but it's further evidence that with this novel -- which I feel can be considered a horror novel almost entirely due to the fact that I don't know what else to call it -- Lucas is struggling to understand his own attraction to horror, and the extreme violence and abberant sexuality that, since the late 1960s, has increasingly become its bread and butter. If I'm correct about this, I should say that, while I haven't seen any of the real extreme films I've made reference to, I also share this confusion about my own connection to horror. Why would I want to watch and read some of the stuff I watch and read? I don't know. And I don't fully buy what Lucas is selling here, but I admire the attempt.

I actually have a quite a few quibbles with this novel -- for instance, Lucas has a baffling fondness for terrible puns -- but I feel like trying to double back and get into that would be a waste of time. At the moment, I'm just struck with the sheer ambition of this novel, and how it and Roszak's Flicker (the two novel's endings are extraordinarily similar, while still retaining their individuality) seem to stand alone, at least in my experience, as horror novels in which the source of horror can almost be described as the genre itself, and why we're drawn to it. There is a denseness of themes and ideas in Throat Sprockets that I really have barely touched on. Some are successful, some aren't, but I'll leave the rest of the novel for other people to tackle. In the meantime, I have a feeling what I have taken away from Lucas's novel will probably at least subliminally color everything else I read this month.