Broken Dolls Still Have Eyes

Georges Franju‘s Les Yeux Sans Visage or Eyes Without a Face is a poetry of images, disturbing images, yes, but also beautiful images. Eyes, of course are everywhere.

 

Obsesses eyes, frightened eyes, hopeful eyes, wary eyes, longing eyes, searching eyes, blank eyes, dead eyes, wondering eyes. Edith Scob‘s eyes are the most impressive and expressive because for most of the movie that is all she has to emote with as Christiane Génessier the faceless woman behind the mask.

  

Carol Clover points out that, like folk-tales, horror films have a predictable cast of characters, namely the victim, the monster, and the hero (12), but in modern horror films, enabled by the rise of feminism, often the victim and hero combine together to form what Clover calls “the female victim-hero” (4). Clover also discusses the story of Carrie White from the film Carrie based on the novel by Stephen King in which, throughout the story, Carrie takes on all three roles. I suggest that Christiane does the same in this film.

 In the beginning of the movie Christiane is presented as a victim trapped in her ivory tower by her controlling father and his over-loyal assistant. She is treated more like a doll than a person, and she resembles a doll as well. Her mannerisms come across as very doll-like. When the mask is on, she does not speak throughout the first part of the movie. When she sneaks out of her room and hides in the garage watching her father and his assistant come out of the hidden passageway, the audience wonders what she will discover and what she will do about it.

 

However, her actions upon finding the girl strapped to the operating table reveal that she was aware of the room and it’s purpose all along, framing her as, if not accessory to the actions taken there, at least complacent in them, revealing a monstrous nature along with her monstrous face. The mask takes on a more sinister feel reminding one of other silent, masked monsters.

After the new skin graft does not take, and she returns to her mask, she once again takes on the role of victim asking the assistant to kill her using the drugs that her father uses to put down the dogs that he experiments on. Finally, she turns into “a monstrous hero” (4) when she kills the assistant and sets free the next girl scheduled for mutilation as well as the dogs, who ironically tear off the face of the doctor.

            

 But as she wanders off into the night, one wonders what she will become next.

Ghosts of the Twenty-first Century

I love John Carpenter. Well, I love his work. I’ve never actually met the man. I saw Halloween in the theater as a young teenager and I was hooked (yeah I know I’m giving away my age). There is just something about the edgy music and visual effects that get my skin tingling, and those combined with a great storyline keeps his movies jumping around my head for days and sometimes years later. For a long time, Escape from New York was my favorite of his movies followed by The Thing.Of course it could have had something to do with the fact that I have had a crush on Kurt Russell ever since his The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes days (once again showing my age), but a few years ago Ghosts of Mars trumped Russell to be come my new favorite Carpenter movie, although I knew it was my favorite, I couldn’t quite say why.

Brigid Cherry says “the point of analysis here is to ask what the film has to say about the world it reflects” (210). While reading about “Horror and the Cultural Moment” (167) and the samples that Cherry provides, I had to ask myself, what does this film say about the new century that we are creating? Cherry talks about the “changing roles of women” and how “the heroine becomes increasingly self-sufficient and the male characters more ineffectual” (174), but Ghosts of Mars does not end with a final girl fighting off the monster on her own.

The changing roles of women can be seen in the political structure of the human colony on mars, a matriarchal government where even the police force is run by women. However, the final survivors have even more to say about the structure of relationships in the twenty-first century. One man and one woman working together, watching each other’s back, represent the more collaborative nature of relationships, or perhaps society’s acceptance of masculine and feminine unity within the self. One black person and one white person represent changing race relationships and perhaps the acceptance of inter-racial couples.

The monsters in the show are aliens, but they are the original inhabitants of the planet. This could represent the terroristic threat from countries that have been affected by imperialistic practices of the Western nations of power. The monsters are also invisible until they invade and take over the body they enter, transforming it through mutilation. This could represent the fear of threat from the inside such as sleeper cells, home-grown terrorist, and radical political movements.

Of course, none of these things explain why I find the movie so appealing that I can watch it over and over again, but they do say a lot about the “cultural moment” of the movie.

The Horrors of War

I recently watched Peter Berg‘s Lone Survivor (2013) based on the book written by the survivor of the incident the movie represents. As I sat in the darkened theater I found myself experiencing feelings of fear, anxiety, revulsion, and the gut clenching visceral reactions to images of spewing and oozing blood, gore, broken bones protruding from mangled limbs, and the neurological pain of association as I watched bodies striking rocks and stones while falling off cliffs. I realized that these were the same emotional responses that are usually associated with horror films. According to Cherry, “it is the emotional or physiological responses that are as (if not more) important than any specific narrative or thematic characteristic of the genre” (37). Lone Survivor would be classified as a war movie, but it clearly evokes many of the same physiological responses that horror movies strive to create. Cherry points out that horror cinema is “a set of subgenres within shifting boundaries” (15), boundaries that have expanded greatly over the years to keep audiences interested and scared. War movies used to be a relatively safe genre with good guys and bad guys, glorious heroes and antiseptic deaths, but starting with Saving Private Ryan in 1998 (or maybe even earlier with Apocalypse Now) war movies’ search for realism has blurred the lines between genres. After all, what is Predator but a war movie with an alien enemy?

Something’s Wrong with Tom

According to Laura Mulvey, “The cinema offers a number of pleasures. One is scopohilia” (2). In Michael Powell‘s Peeping Tom deals directly with the issue of scopophilia in the case of Mark Lewis, a young man who was abused as a child by a controlling father preoccupied with “the reaction of the nervous system to fear.” Although Mark’s scopophilia seems to be less about sex and more about his desire to please his dead father, Mulvey’s article can be useful in analysing many elements of this movie. Mulvey talks about the “traditional exhibitionist role” of women (4) and the male’s unconscious desire to punish her because she represents castration by her lack of penis (5). She also discusses the controlling male gaze (2) and women as property (5). These point are relevant in several ways. First, Mark controls the gaze of the audience when he takes control of the camera and we see what he sees. Second, the three women that he chooses to film are all performers (exhibitionists) of a sort. Third, by filming these women he takes possession of them and by killing them he seals that possession as permanent, literally catching their last moments of life. Forth, the method of death, the torment at the time of death, can be seen as a punishment for attracting his gaze to begin with.

I don’t particularly agree with this analysis. I think Mark’s story is more about missed love. First from his father and then from the girl downstairs that he discovered just a little too late. And it would seem that the director agrees with me. According to Carol Clover, Micheal Powell is quoted as saying that the movie was “a film of compassion, of observation, and of memory…a very tender film” (177).

The Monstrous-Feminine Walks as a Zombie

In Jacques Tourneur‘s I Walked with a Zombie the monstrous-feminine is represented by a female zombie. The lovely Christine Gordon plays a brain-dead vegetable who can walk about and follow simple commands. When her live-in nurse, played by Frances Dee, takes her patient to a local voodoo gathering in hopes to cure her the local descendants of the slaves that were brought over to work the sugar plantations believe the woman to be a zombie and desire her to return to the gathering to be purified. Durring the corse of the movie, the audience discovers that the woman had planned to leave her husband and run off with his brother before her illness. In Horror, Brigid Cherry explains Barbara Creed’s argument that the monstrous-feminine in horror movies “represents the failure of sexual repression to contain women” (112) and says that many horror films represent “abjection in the form of bodies without stable boundaries” (113). In this case the woman’s body is neither living nor dead. She represents abjection and the monsterous-feminine. Cherry also explains that Creed seems to favor “purification of the abject” (120), which is echoed in the voodoo worshiper’s desire to purify the woman they se as abject. According to Cherry, “Creed lists three ways in which horror films foreground abjection: with images of abjection, boundary crossing in the construction of the monster, and the construction of the maternal figure as abject” (115). This movie accomplishes all three objectives. The third occurs near the end of the movie when we discover that the mother of the two brothers, played by Edith Barrett,  is not only working with the voodoo priest, but she actually had the woman killed and turned into a zombie because she did not like the way the woman was tearing apart her family.  

A Monster’s Search for Understanding

Brigid Cherry explains that creatures in horror films are often refered to as “Monsters from the Id” (99).  Considering that the Id is often refered to as the child-like portion of the subconscious James Whale‘s Frankenstein creates the quintessential “Monster from the Id.” The creature, played by  Boris Karloff, is innocent and eager to learn. This search for understanding is exemplified when Dr. Frankenstein first exposes the creature to light and he reaches towards it instead of shying away. The scene with the little girl also shows the creature’s innocence, playing gently with flowers, and his desire to learn, testing to see if the girl will also float. This time with tragic results.

At one point in the movie, Dr. Frankenstein explains his reason for creating the creature as his own search for understanding. “Have you never wanted to do something dangerous? Where should we be if no one tried to find out what lies beyond? Have you never wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars, or to know what causes the trees to bud and what changes the darkness into light?”

As with children, the creature learned violence from those around him, the jealous taunting by  Fritz and bloodthirsty revenge sought by the torch-bearing mob. The creature was also rejected by the one who created him, leaving him alone and defenseless, or to his own defenses without any guidance on social behavior, mistreated and misunderstood. Such actions by parents have created numerous monsters  in our society.

 

A ghostless ghost story

It is the ghost story, that moves Diabolique into the realm of horror movie. What starts out as a drama about two women planning the murder of their common abuser turns to a psychological thriller when the dead man’s body disappears. Brigid Cherry in Horror says that in psychological films “modes of effect can be created through suggestion, the use of lighting, sound effects and music” (80). In Diabolique,  Henri-Georges Clouzot  uses these techniques to create uncertainty and uneasiness in his audience. 

Is Michel really dead? He sure looked dead, but then what happened to the body? Is someone setting the girls up for blackmail? Is someone just messing with them? About the time when the girls union falls apart and Nicole leaves the school, I had figured it out. I know I have seen a similar movie, but can’t remember now what it was.  It is something worthy of Hitchcock. If I had not caught on to the betrayal I would have felt more of the emotions that Clouzot was trying to evoke from his audience. I understand why he added the warning not to give away the secret to others who had not seen the movie and so for the sake of anyone reading this that has not seen it, I will not give it away here. The ghostly twist at the end I did not see coming.

Horror conventions in Freaks

In Horror Brigid Cherry says that the function of horror is “to scare, shock, revolt, or otherwise horrify the viewer” (4). In 1932 Tod Browning’s was already using some of the standard horror conventions to scare and horrify his viewers. In the beginning of the movie the “freaks” are represented not as monsters but as “children,” sweet and innocent, unjustly teased and rejected by others, even other circus people. In fact, the two main little people have facial features similar to children, but Browning gives a warning early in the film which sets up a more ominous tone; “Offend one and you offend them all.”

The turning point in the movie happens at the wedding dinner when the “freaks” choose to accept Cleopatra as “one of us,” but she rejects them en masse, and the audience is forced to ask itself “who’s the real monster?” After this event the entire tone of the move switches. The “freaks” are set in more sinister lighting, peering out from the shadows, through windows, and from under stairs. Cherry points out that this lighting change is “a comment on the state of the world or the psyche of the individual,” (62) or in this case individuals.

This turn of intent on the part of the “freaks” is highlighted in the chase scene when they are represented creeping along relentlessly, crawling through the mud under wagons to get at the woman who rejected their acceptance, finally turning her physically into one of them.

The image of them pulling themselves along the ground reminded me of many monster movies I have seen and set the movie clearly in the horror genre.