SILVER SCREEN PSYCHO KILLERS

 Responding to remarks about the influence of Hitchcock's 1960 PSYCHO on the history of the psycho-killer subgenre...

I'm only aware of one year-by-year "psychofilmography" of this subgenre, and that's the one compiled by John McCarty in his 1993 MOVIE PSYCHOS AND MADMEN. I don't agree with a number of his inclusions, such as "Jekyll and Hyde" films and "evil mastermind" films like those of Fu Manchu and Doctor Mabuse. But he's generally good about focusing on killers who seem motivated less by gain than by some mad pleasure in killing, usually more than just one victim. His list suggests that, aside from Mister Hyde, supernaturally-endowed psycho-killers barely existed in any quantity before the 1980s, so that most of the malcontents on the list are either uncanny or naturalistic. 

According to McCarty, there's barely anything relevant in cinema's silent years, though Hitchcock's 1926 THE LODGER builds on the legend of Jack the Ripper. I don't consider the original LODGER a true psycho-killer film, though, because the evildoer is mainly important as a catalyst, causing an innocent man to be falsely accused.

Fritz Lang's M heads up the sound era, but it, like most of the other psycho killer films of the thirties, doesn't beget more of its own subgenre kindred. The strongest pattern I see are a series of one-offs on a theme I would call "the mad hobbyist." This means a character who's so obsessed about his hobby that he makes murder integral to his pursuits, thus taking in 1932's MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, 1935's THE RAVEN, and 1936's THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET. 

By contrast, the forties really develop the subgenre as cinema never had before. Many years during this decade can boast (according to McCarty's parameters) as many as four or more psycho-killer films each year. Was there an upsurge in the public's perception of psychology, particularly of the Freudian brand, so that ticket buyers took the subject more seriously as a way to explain deviant behavior? Es posible.

In 1944 we get the first psycho-killer film that spawns, not a sequel or remake, but a wholly different movie in the same idiom. John Brahm's THE LODGER is a wholly different film from Hitchcock's, for the psycho-killer is the focus of the story. The killer's mental makeup is described in much more detail than most thirties parallels, even more than in Lang's M. LODGER was successful enough that the studio got Brahm to do an idiom-sequel for 1945 release, adapting the novel HANGOVER SQUARE in such a way as to duplicate the appeal of LODGER.

A lot of crime-films started using crazed killers, too. Scarface and Little Caesar had their obsessions, but they didn't murder for pleasure like the psycho-crooks of BORN TO KILL, KISS OF DEATH, or Hitchcock's ROPE.

The fifties show roughly roughly the same pattern as the forties, though in this decade we get an idiom-sequel to a "mad hobbyist" flick, when the success of Vincent Price's 1953 remake of MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM leads to his appearance in 1954's THE MAD MAGICIAN. Toward the end of the fifties we're beginning to get a few films like 1958's SCREAMING MIMI and 1959's HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM, which might have encouraged (if not literally influenced) the provenance of not only PSYCHO, but the same-year PEEPING TOM by Michael Powell.

In terms of the history of psycho-killers, PSYCHO's biggest influence was that it provided a pattern that proved easy to follow. Instead of one or two idiom-knockoffs of a successful movie, the "hills" of the 1960s were alive with the sounds of psycho-killings. Going purely by McCarty, year 1966 is the only one that has as few as four such movies, and that's with me eliminating the irrelevant FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN. After 1970, McCarty's list, which concludes with Year 1992, shows almost every year with at least ten such films listed.

And to think-- it all started with a noisy shower.

A BIRD IN THE MIND

I hadn't watched Dario Argento's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE for a long time, and what I saw was probably the cut American release. I've now watched the full Italian-language version via Arrow's 2017 DVD, plus a plentiful helping of commentaries. And one of those commentaries, "Black Gloves and Screaming Mimis" by film-critic Kat Ellinger, brings me back to a topic I've frequently discussed here: the problems of subjecting all fiction to political agendas.

Ellinger's analysis of BIRD specifically and gialli generally is well-handled, and I don't dispute any of her individual points. However, I find myself at odds with what I consider a political interpretation of Argento, albeit one not nearly as toxic as, say, a site like the defunct HOODED UTILITARIAN.

For one thing, Ellinger follows the lead of many modern critics in valuing artistic works when they take the form of a quasi-Marxist oppositionalism to anything smacking of the reigning hierarchy. For instance, Ellinger claims that the 1960s saw something of a breakdown in the "macho" roles exemplified by the beefcake actors of the Hercules films, a breakdown symbolized by an Italian character-type she calls "the inept." Though I'm sure the critic is aware that Italian cinema was full of comedians who, like most comedians elsewhere, often portrayed fools and klutzes, Ellinger attaches particular importance to the fact that one of the most famous "inepts" was found in the persona of sixties icon Marcello Masroannni. Ellinger makes much of the fact that Mastroanni played the part of an "inept" even though visually he shared the look of the standard male hero: square jaw, broad shoulders, et al. Parenthetically I'll agree with Ellinger on her interpretation of Mastroanni, for even when he does play a character who's supposed to be tough and wily, like Marcello Poletti in THE TENTH VICTIM, the actor often finds himself in more risible circumstances than any of the boulder-shouldered heroes of muscleman films.

Though Ellinger never invokes such worn-out boogiemen as "the patriarchy," I feel that she's backdooring some of these concepts when she praises Argento's film for some of its supposed oppositionalism to images that reinforce the dominant hierarchy. She brings up the Italian crime films that were contemporaneous with Argento's work, and mentions approvingly that, while the crime films would show pimps and gangsters who were manly and dashing, BIRD presents the viewer with a mousey guy whose charms are something less than obvious.

Similarly, Ellinger praises Argento for including, as many Italian directors of his time would not, images of homosexuals and non-standard types, like a cross-dresser seen in a police lineup. Now, I don't disagree with Ellinger in her saying that Argento does a good job in evoking humor and even a little pathos in these characters. However, I don't think that a work is good simply because it satisfies an aspect of what we now call "identity politics."

In summation, I tend to distrust critics who have become so politicized that they project a knee-jerk reaction against the very concept of normative masculinity. I touched on these matters somewhat in my 2011 essay WAPSTERS VS. FACTSTERS. Kat Ellinger's essay on Argento reminds me of the group of 1980s feminist critics I termed "Factsters," In that essay, I decided that the "Factsters" were much closer to sussing out the nature of art than the far more prickly "Wapsters," given that the former understood how pornography "could include sexual representations by and for women." Nevertheless, even the Factsters were not willing to validate "pornography for men," just as Ellinger approves of Argento because BIRD seems to be spotlighting both women and non-traditional sexuality over the idea of the Dominant Male Hero. This is a shame, because in fictional worlds like the medium of film, dominant men and women are both fantasies, rather than exhortations to "go thou and do likewise."

ANATOMY OF A PSYCHO KILLER NARRATIVE PT .4

End-thoughts on the Narrative--

In previous installments all of my examples of fictional psycho-killers have been singular. However, it's possible to have more than one psycho-killer in a given narrative. Again using films as an easy resource, "dual psychos" are a favorite device in the realm of the "fake psycho" narrative. For instance, 1964's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, which numerous critics deem the first of the Italian "giallo films," has two people donning the mask of the killer at different times during the story.

Thereafter, the dual-psycho film became common, ranging from 1971's BAY OF BLOOD to 1996's SCREAM. However, it's relatively rare to encounter two psycho-killers who are not initially associated with one another, and when this trope is used, it tends to yield comic results, as with the 1987 film PSYCHOS IN LOVE.

The comedy may stem from violating the "one gimme" premise associated with most films in the subgenre. However, this may tend to be more true of films in either the naturalistic or uncanny domains, given that FREDDY VS. JASON works as "straight" horror despite its use of assorted comic touches. 

However, marvelous psychos don't seem to lend themselves to the concept of the extended family. The most famous iteration of the "weird family" trope arises from the American "old dark house" film, implicitly named for the 1932 film THE OLD DARK HOUSE. 

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However, though the HOUSE is full of weirdos, only one of them is intentionally murderous, and his status as a "psycho killer" is debatable. 1965's SPIDER BABY is probably a better exemplar of a family of psycho killers.

Of course, the first two TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE films qualify, even though Leatherface remains the primary psycho. 

 Rustic environments seem to breed families or even whole societies of psychos. The 1972 DELIVERANCE presents a whole society of degenerative hillfolk, though the film remains firmly within the naturalistic domain, unlike the more overtly weird WRONG TURN "killbilly" franchise. However, the largest psycho-killer society is almost certainly the town of hostile Southerners described by H.G. Lewis's film-title, TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!

One last note on the psycho-killer narrative is that it has proved so popular as to spawn hybrids that don't quite conform to my model. The first four films in the LEPRECHAUN series are almost indistinguishable in tone from the ELM STREET series, in that both concern a hideous supernatural being who kills indiscriminately and makes many bad jokes. However, the Leprechaun is "outside horror," in that he has no psychological motives; he's just evil. 

There are even a few serial killers who make pacts with the devil for their marvelous powers, such as the Cenobites of the HELLRAISER film-franchise. But in this and similar cases, it's understood that whether the modern-day killer calls upon Old Scratch or Leviathan, his powers are rooted in a tradition of folkloric magic outside the province of the cruder, but more normative, psycho-killer narrative.

ANATOMY OF A PSYCHO KILLER NARRATIVE PT .3

In Part 2, I attempted to better define the psycho-killer subgenre by contrasting two classes of monster: one whose roots are in psychological processes as modern culture understands them, and one in which the monster originates from processes allied with either archaic folklore and magic, or with innovations in science. However, it belatedly occurred to me that my distinction drew on one made by Stephen King in his 1981 essay-book DANSE MACABRE. Having realized this, I chose not to go back and reread the King passages on this subject, since it's probable that I'd deviate from his theory in any case. In this 2013 review of several CHILDREN OF THE CORN films, I said:

In his nonfiction work DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King made a distinction between "inside horror," dealing with the sort of horror stemming from human motivations, and "outside horror," dealing with horror stemming from the nonhuman.  

Without implicating Stephen King further in my own theorizing, suffice to say that for me, "outside horror"-- or any comparable fictional affect, for that matter-- is based on human perceptions of nonhuman forces or entities. These perceptions include discovering the nature of the nonhuman, which can only be comprehended through one of two cultural concepts. If it's something that seems to hearken back to the earliest times of humankind, it's "magic." If it's something that is better allied to the advance of current human knowledge, then it aligns with the cultural concept of "science." In fiction the concept of magic give rise to such forms as "high fantasy" and 'supernatural fiction," for which there is no handy portmanteau term, while the concept of science has given rise to two non-identical portmanteaus: "science fiction" and "speculative fiction."

Now, based on these brief descriptions, one might expect everything in the latter cultural concept, "science," to also align with the concept of modernity. However, in the history of literature both "fantasy" and "science fiction" have been traditionally rejected by critics who claimed to represent the spirit of modernity, ranging from Edmund Wilson to Theodor Adorno. My interpretation of this phenomenon is that the apostles of modernity emphasize the status quo of current existence to such an extent that anything that either "goes back" or "goes forward" is often rejected out of hand. Thus, even though the concept of science has proven vital in modernity's rejection of the concept of magic, the apostles must reject fiction about science that has not happened yet just as much as they reject fiction about magical forces and entities.

I mentioned in Part 2 that in the domain of cinema, the most common iteration of the psycho-killer monster is a human being whose evil stems from his psychological motivations. Further, I asserted that most films about such monsters generally pursued either a naturalistic or an uncanny phenomenality. However, there are a few monsters who have marvelous aspects, even though I find that these do not explain their evil, as Dracula's evil is explained by the folkloric tradition of vampirism. The most common form of the marvelous psycho-killer is usually a revenant of some kind. Freddy Krueger is the most famous ghostly killer, though sometimes one sees the body rather than the soul survive death, as with the Maniac Cop--

And "Uncle Sam" from the 1996 video of the same name.

And then there are also psycho-killers whose spirits become embodied in nonhuman objects, like the celebrated Chucky.

Occasionally marvelous psycho-killers don't technically die, but are possessed by unfathomable forces that make it impossible to kill them, as with Michael Myers--

While Jason Voorhees is noteworthy for starting out as an uncanny psycho-killer who graduated to marvelous status once his producers decided it was just too complicated to revive him the old way.

What all of these marvelous psychos have in common is that there's usually very little expatiation on the "rules" that make their existence possible, in contradistinction to the type of rule-based narratives one finds in fantasy and science fiction. Again, the aberrant psychology of the psycho-killer, the thing that makes him kill and kill again, is the main feature of these films. I would say this probably applies to psycho-killer fiction in general, but can't claim to be deeply read in the history of prose psychos.

It's also noteworthy that when ordinary humans have to battle marvelous psycho-killers, only rarely do they use any rule-based strategy. The Dream Warriors of the third Freddy Krueger film articulate some very vague rules about forming "dream bodies," but one simply doesn't see a strong emphasis on such abstractions.

Part 4 coming up next.

ANATOMY OF A PSYCHO KILLER NARRATIVE PT .2

In addition to the other names given the "psycho killer" subgenre that I mentioned in Part 1, "serial killer" is often used to designate the subgenre in film. It's true that in this sense "serial killer" and "psycho killer" mean almost the same thing, and the former even implies that "the killer must kill again," to borrow the title of a 1975 giallo film.

However, "psycho killer" is a better term in another respect. Unlike other types of murderous monsters, the psycho killer is separated by being the creation of psychological forces, which in turn stem from his place within the cultural concept of monsters: the sense of *modernity.*

If one dates horror fiction from the rise of the Gothics in the 18th century, then most of the classic monsters are linked to their predecessors in archaic folklore: vampires, werewolves, and demons. Even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Monster, despite serving as a prototype for the later science-fiction genre, owes some inspiration to the writings of alchemists like Albertus Magnus. Early cinema was a little more devoted to killers who didn't owe that much to archaic lore, such as the 1925 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, adapted from Leroux's 1910 novel. But even in films, the best known names in horror either sprang from archaic ideas about magic, like Dracula and the Golem, or from an opposite strain: that of proto science fictional concepts like Frankenstein, Doctor Jekyll and Doctor Moreau.

Technically, any of these monstrous menaces might be deemed "serial killers" insofar as they kill a lot of people during their exploits. But vampires, werewolves and the results of mad science don't kill first and foremost out of their psychological maladjustment. Such monsters are the products of magic or mad science, not of bad parenting or broken homes.

The modern idea of "psychology" stems from the late 19th century, and over time provided a new model for motivation. The aforementioned Phantom, of course, pursues a goal of romantic fulfillment in compensation for the physical disfigurement that makes normal life impossible for him. To be sure, the Phantom doesn't actually kill many people in the original novel, but cinematic adaptations have tended to ramp up his kill-count.

Thus I favor "psycho killer" over "serial killer" because the former already implies seriality, and it also implies that the *character* of the killer: that he/she is either a "true psycho" or a "fake psycho." The latter category, of course, would not be conceivable unless audiences could credit the idea of a serial-murdering psycho as a real threat.

Now, in real life "psychos" are considered to be the results of an entirely naturalistic process, However, in fiction, it's possible to have a psycho-killer who conforms to the tropes of the naturalistic, the uncanny or the marvelous. The one common factor they all share is the idea of *modernity.*

Now, whether one is talking about a "modernity" taking place in modern times or in earlier, post-industrial eras, it's as easy to see an uncanny psycho-killer operating with the same basic modus operandi as a naturalistic one, as I pointed out in PENALTY FOR THRESHOLDING. However, what sort of psycho-killer can be both modern and marvelous?

And the answer is "a gho-gho-gho-GHOST!"-- albeit only a very recent revenant.

Thus Freddy Krueger qualifies as a marvelous psycho-killer--

However, the Headless Horseman, were he a real specter, would not, since he's become a thing of legend over the course of years. The same applies to the gigantic spectral helmet that kills a victim at the beginning of THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO.

More examples in Part 3.

ANATOMY OF A PSYCHO KILLER NARRATIVE PT .1

I'm as guilty as anyone of using fuzzy terms like "psycho films" and "slashers" to describe works of art-- usually, though not exclusively, theatrical films-- that are really about a subgenre which would be most accurately termed "the psycho killer subgenre."

The "slasher" cognomen came into common usage in reaction to America's psycho-killer films of the 1980s, since many of these featured killers who brutally slashed up their victims. Naturally, the idea of a "slasher killer" was considerably older, dating back at least to Jack the Ripper. Throughout the 20th century, a number of serial killers were given a "slasher" nickname, as with the "Windsor Slasher," who committed his crimes in 1945 Ontario. Still, it should be obvious that the term doesn't capture the essence of the psycho-killer subgenre, since many fictional psycho-killers may rely on acts of strangling or bludgeoning.

The pejorative term "psycho" probably originated as a shortened form of either "psychotic" or "psychopath." However, the slang was never meant to be precise, and colloquially people use "psycho" just as easily for anyone who displays psychological problems, not just a violent psychotic. Thus a film like SECRET CEREMONY, in which Mia Farrow's character is weird but not dangerous to anyone, might be called a "psycho film" but not a "psycho killer film." 

Even when the psycho is dangerous only to him/herself-- as with the 2010 BLACK SWAN-- one might choose to deem that psycho-narrative to fall within the "psycho killer subgenre/"  However, I would venture to say that when most persons hear the term "psycho killer," they think of someone who is a danger not to himself but to other people, often many other people, for reasons akin to, though not always identical to, the motivations of the "serial killer." In my essay ESCALATION PROCLAMATION I stated that the authorial practice of continually escalating violence within a narrative has long been a tried-and-true method of keeping audience interest:

 A single violent act, such the sort of unsolved killing that initiates most murder-mysteries—including two of Poe’s three efforts in that genre—merely serves to incite the average reader’s curiosity.  What incites that reader’s deeper identification is the repetition of violence.  Through repetition of violence, the reader’s potential fears for the story’s characters are escalated.  Which character may die next? Can the hero save the next victim from the villain’s machinations?

So, even though technically a "psycho killer" narrative could be about a psycho who kills just one victim, or even is a danger to him/herself, the dominant *expectation* of the audience is that the psycho killer is going to be dangerous to many people.

Now, there are many films in which a killer kills many people, but the killer is not "psycho" in any recognizable way. Crime films are a pertinent example, where it's usually evident that the murderer is simply murdering his way to prosperity, in an immoral yet essentially rational manner. Yet one also cannot be a total literalist about defining psycho-killer narratives, because by weight of tradition, the subgenre includes two types of psycho:

(1) The "true psycho," who actually has some psychological breakdown that tied in to his/her depredations,

(2) The "fake psycho," who is rational but has assumed the appearance of a psychopath in order to commit his crimes. This tradition dates back at least to Edgar Wallace thrillers of the 1920s like THE BLUE HAND (which gave rise to a 1967 film). One "fake psycho" film even fakes the deaths the killer supposedly commits-- though the effect on audiences is identical up to the point that the deception is revealed.

More in Part 2.

LUNATIC LAWMEN

While messing around in Merriam-Webster's online thesaurus in search of a title for this essay, I was surprised that a search for synonyms for "heroic" included the following:

crazy, foolish, half-witted, insane, lunatic, mad, nutty

I think this connotation of "heroic" occurs only under specialized circumstances, as when someone of faint heart thinks that a hero is "crazy" for attempting some heroic act. Yet it's a fortuitous cross-comparison, because I gave some thought today on the significance of "crazy heroes" for my NUM formula.

As I've noted on many occasions, there are certain works which just barely seem to cross the threshold of the naturalistic into the uncanny. In this 2012 essay, I gave three examples of thriller-films that had a very "naturalistic" look overall, though I asserted that one of them, EYES OF A STRANGER, registered as "uncanny" thanks to certain diegetic factors:

EYES debuted in theaters at a time when psycho-slasher films were still in ascendance, but this film's killer has little in common with the more colorful fiends of the period: he isn't deformed, wears no distinctive mask or clothing, and uses no special gimmicks or bizarre methods to commit his murders-- all in spite of the fact that one of the writers credited with the EYES screenplay also worked on the seminal 1980 FRIDAY THE 13TH.  Nevertheless, for all the naturalistic touches here, the script does give the villain a larger-than-life quality that confers a sense of dread to the proceedings.  For one thing, though the psycho-rapist never earns a distinctive nom du crime, on occasion the heroine, news reporter Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes), dubs him "the Phone Freak" because he preys on women after tormenting them with lascivious phone calls. 

I mentioned the example of "the Phone Freak" earlier on this blog in my more recent essay ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4, as one of a handful of examples of "psycho killers" who attained a "larger-than-life" quality that I subsumed under the term "artifice."

But this conception returns me to the line of thought expressed in my "Power and Potency" series, where I drew a comparison between G. Wilson Knight's thoughts on Shakespeare's character Hamlet and the general idea of the "perilous psycho."

G. Wilson Knight's essay on HAMLET implies this opposition between body and non-body when, as I showed in Part 1, Knight imputed to the moody Prince of Denmark a power that was not a literal power, saying that "the poison of [Hamlet's] mental essence spreads outward among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal."  When he wrote this, Knight was not being at all literal, as his use of the acid simile demonstrates. Hamlet has no more physical power than any other human being, but because he has "held converse with death," he *SEEMS LIKE* he has become something more than human. But the "seeming" takes place purely upon the mental/spiritual/"non-body" plane of being.
Until reading Knight, I had always classified HAMLET and most of its film adaptations as instances of the trope I call "phantasmal figuration." However, Knight's description makes Hamlet sound very much like the type of uncanny-or-naturalistic figure of another trope: "the perilous psycho."  In terms of the play proper, one may argue back and forth whether or not Hamlet, in feigning madness, may have actually gone mad. But whether the Danish prince is mad or merely infected with a pestilential cynicism, his attitude has given him a special "potency," even though he has no special power-- just like all of the "psycho" characters I've studied.

The "psycho" usually takes the persona of either a monster or a demihero, but I began thinking: is it possible to view any mostly naturalistic "heroes" as being uncanny purely because they're, well, somewhat crazy?

Often I've put forth examples of heroes who are uncanny in terms of their appearance. In this essay, I asserted that the oater-hero the Durango Kid was one such uncanny hero, even thought there was absolutely nothing to separate one of his adventures from a Roy Rogers western except for the Kid's uncanny garb.

I've also defined some heroes as being in an uncanny phenomenality due to the monsters they oppose, as I did in my review of 1984's FEAR CITY, wherein traumatized boxer Matt Rossi makes it his business to take down a weird serial-killer.

But to be a direct parallel to the example of EYES OF A STRANGER, my hypothetical "lunatic lawman" would have to have nothing special about his appearance, his resources, or his antagonists.

Now, as it happens, vigilante lawmen are frequently figures of terror to criminals in a manner analogous to the way serial killers terrorize ordinary citizens. But since I've said that the Phone Freak invokes "dread" rather than just simple "fear," as my 2012 essay argues in detail, a mostly naturalistic hero would have to do the same thing. This is less common for heroes than for monsters, since heroes are usually pretty flamboyant about who they are and what they do.

One possible example of a "crazy hero" type might be the ex-'Nam vigilante hero. This hero-type was largely initiated by the incredible popularity of the paperback hero The Executioner, who in 1969 began his run of over 400 novels and almost certainly influenced Marvel Comics' Punisher. I've read only one of these novels and so could not make any determinations about the series without much more research. However, according to my system, the only way that such a hero could be uncanny would be if his acts were so crazy that they went beyond the basics of the heroic type. For instance, here's a description by blogger Joe Kenney of a particularly horrific execution pulled off by one of the Executioner-imitators, the Penetrator:

The battles are mostly one-sided, with the goons no match for Hardin's skills. Regardless the action sequences are all well staged and expertly rendered, particularly a great scene where Hardin gets a small army of mobsters stuck in a canyon and lobs white phosphorous down upon them. This is probably the most brutal treatment I've ever seen delivered to the mob in a men's adventure novel! 

Having read few works in this genre, I probably can't do more than make general hypothetical statements. However, another possible example of a "crazy hero" might be seen in 1984's RED DAWN. I judged this film as uncanny largely because of it's "what if" situation of showing a Russian invasion of the United States. But the heroes of the film, Jed Eckert and his "Wolverines," have taken a certain uncanny potency by virtue of following in the footsteps of aboriginal Americans. Thus Eckert may be the "crazy hero" who offers the best contrast to the almost naturalistic "crazy monster."

FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE PT. 3

The other two FINAGLING essays, here and here, have concerned the ways in which focal presences may include illusory phantasms that have been conjured up out of a character's mind, whether for the purpose of deceiving someone else, as with Washington Irving's story SLEEPY HOLLOW, or as a by-product of the character's strong identification with someone else, as with Mario Bava's film THE WHIP AND THE BODY. Some qualifications of this general rule are necessary, though.

In Part Two I mentioned that the character of Nevenka had become subsumed in her idea of her ex-lover Kurt, to the extent that she believed she had become Kurt and was killing as he would have killed people-- though he was already dead by Nevenka's hand before her serial-killing career begins. I also remarked that Nevenka was "no Norman Bates," by which I meant that Norman was a more well-rounded character, both in the novel and the 1960 film. But it also applies to the degree to which Norman's character is subsumed by the character of his mother, Norma Bates. The pattern may be the same, but Norma does not take over the narrative of PSYCHO the way Kurt takes over the narrative of WHIP & BODY. Not until 2013, with the premiere of the BATES MOTEL teleseries, did some raconteur develop the Norma character. Yet although Norma overrides Norman's character in the story proper, extrinsically Norman is still more important than Norma, even in BATES MOTEL.

Something similar to Norman Bates's transcendence of his role model appears in the 1964 film STRAIT-JACKET As I state in the review, this film was a case of scripter Bloch aping his own PSYCHO-success. This time, however, the situation is somewhere between that of SLEEPY HOLLOW and WHIP AND BODY. Years before the main story, Lucy Harbin has committed the axe-murder of her husband and her husband's lover, but though her legend gives her a repute along the lines of Lizzie Borden, Lucy doesn't get away with giving her victims "forty whacks," and she goes away to an asylum for twenty years. The main story opens as Lucy, rehabilitated at last, is released to rejoin normal society, and to re-connect with her daughter Carol. Carol, three years old at the time of the murders, witnessed the killings but now, twenty years later, seems entirely normal-- which ought to suggest to any viewers the most likely suspect when some new axe-murders commence.

Carol commits the new murders to frame her mother, whom she despises, and so in many regards she's doing the same Brom Bones (probably) did in SLEEPY HOLLOW: creating the illusion of a mad killer. At the same time, the film's conclusion suggests that she's more than a little nuts, which allies her more with Nevenka of WHIP AND BODY. Still, the focal presence of STRAIT-JACKET is not the illusion of Lucy Harbin Axe-Murderer. Rather, Carol is the imaginative center of the movie; the new psycho-bitch in town.

Age plays a role in this shift in the film's focal presence, for although Lucy briefly tries to camouflage her true age-- star Joan Crawford was roughly sixty-four at the time-- it's plain to the viewer that she no longer possesses the "mojo" to be an axe-murderer.

And yet, age can also lend a given character greater gravity. The Classic Trek episode "The Conscience of the King" is, like all such episodes, focused on the adventures of Captain Kirk and his ensemble. However, it occurred to me to ask: if the story had focused only upon the opposition-characters, who would have been the focal presence? Like Lucy Harbin, the actor Karidian is guilty of murders committed long ago. However, within the sphere of the existing narrative the persona of the killer, "Kodos the Executioner," has been overwritten by Karidian, the same way Lucy-the-murderer has been usurped by Lucy-the-penitent.. However, although Karidian's daughter Lenore has lost her mind due to finding out about her father's past, and has sought to kill off all witnesses to Kodos' crime, I would say that Lenore, unlike Carol Harbin, never has a shot at being the focal presence. She exists to provide Karidian with yet another torment in his life of regrets, and so a retelling of the story, sans the Trek-regulars, would have been focused upon the tragic figure of the aged criminal.

PENALTY FOR THRESHOLDING

I reviewed both the 1987 STEPFATHER and the 1993 PRAYING MANTIS  in the same month in 2017, but it only recently occurred to me that the later film exemplifies what I said at the end of the first review:

While there's no question in my mind that Jerry is a "perilous psycho" in the uncanny mode, I had to think whether or not STEPFATHER also made use of the uncanny version of the "bizarre crime." Certainly Jerry's not an artful psycho: he clubs one victim to death with a board. But I finally decided that his motif of moving from family to family in pursuit of his twisted ideal qualified as a bizarre crime in itself-- though of course, like any uncanny facet of a narrative, it can be reconfigured to take on a purely naturalistic phenomenality, as one indeed sees in some of STEPFATHER's imitators.

I don't think that PRAYING MANTIS was an intentional copy of STEPFATHER, foi the later movie just doesn't seem to "quote" the earlier one the way a true knock-off emulates its original. It's interesting, though, that the movie to which MANTIS has been most often compared (on IMDB) is also from the year 1987: the Theresa Russell vehicle BLACK WIDOW.  In any case, here are the similarities and differences:

(1) Both narratives deal with a psycho who repeatedly moves from family to family, killing as he or she goes. However, Jerry Blake kills all the members of the family into which he marries, while Linda Crandell kills only the man whom she marries.

(2) In both films, the cops assigned to the case assert that the unknown killer must have a major trauma in his or her background. In both films, the trauma is never revealed to the audience.

(3) Both psychos are artless killers who display no more particular creativity in their methods of murder. Blake uses blunt objects or edged weapons, while Crandell uses poison.

(4) In both films, young members of the family into which the psycho marries are largely responsible for exposing each evildoer, though the initial person to suspect Crandell is the sister-in-law of the first wife of Crandell's intended victim.

(5) In my critical opinion, neither film does much of anything with the psychological potential of their scenarios.

Given that I've stated that there's no single element about the uncanny film that couldn't have appeared in a naturalistic film, it behooves me to ask then: what makes Jerry Blake an uncanny psycho, while Crandell's only naturalistic? I've alluded to at least part of the answer in saying that the "twisted ideal" Blake pursues gives his "bizarre crime" the tonality of the uncanny. In contrast, Crandell really doesn't have an ideal as such: she's merely compensating for her past trauma by trying to find someone who won't betray her, possibly in the form of a father-substitute. This would also accord with what I've written about the nature of all naturalistic fictions: that they must always seem to be "logical extrapolations from [the author's] observations of experience."

Since the physical phenomena in STEPFATHER and in MANTIS are essentially identical, the only thing that can possibly separate them is that the former is far more invested in the tropes of story-telling-- that is, in the principle of artifice-- as opposed to that of experience, a.k.a. verisimilitude.

"Affective freedom," rather, stems from the author's intention to privilege the tropes from the domain of literary artifice over tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude...-- ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4.

But once again, I stress that I can only make such a judgment by imaging a *threshold* that separates the limitations of "affective freedom" in a naturalistic work from its more intense expression in an uncanny one. It's a subjective judgment that STEPFATHER just barely manages to step over that threshold, despite all of its similarities to PRAYING MANTIS; that STEPFATHER is more a figure of uncanny artifice akin to the much more outrageous-looking Jason Voorhees (in his early incarnation, that is). But I still favor this approach over a "recipe" mentality, in which, say, the presence of any psycho of any kind automatically crossed into the greater category of the metaphenomenal.

ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4

The long-term applicability of the concept of the artifice-mode is that it finally allows me to formulate a solid rationale for all of my declarations that such-and-such a character was "larger than life," like this one from my review of EYES OF A STRANGER:

EYES debuted in theaters at a time when psycho-slasher films were still in ascendance, but this film's killer has little in common with the more colorful fiends of the period: he isn't deformed, wears no distinctive mask or clothing, and uses no special gimmicks or bizarre methods to commit his murders-- all in spite of the fact that one of the writers credited with the EYES screenplay also worked on the seminal 1980 FRIDAY THE 13TH.  Nevertheless, for all the naturalistic touches here, the script does give the villain a larger-than-life quality that confers a sense of dread to the proceedings.

I later contrasted this psycho-film with NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY, where I said of the killer-- who does have a minor "gimmick" in his ability to disguise himself--

Gill proves a far more more consummate actor than Kate, for his gimmick is to assume various disguises in order to get the older women to let him into their apartments, whereupon he kills them. Yet, despite this disguise-skill, Gill never inspires the "dread" that I look for in uncanny psychos, even of the mundane sort that appears in EYES OF A STRANGER. Everything about Gill, as well as his functional double Brummer, is easily explained by Freud's emphasis upon "physiological concepts," as Jung termed them.

But "physiological concepts" are just a specific example of the 1968 film's adherence to pure verisimilitude, of its attempt to minimize the role of "artifice" in fictionalizing the real story of the Boston Strangler. I described this tendency in Part 1:

an author's focus upon verisimilitude means that he automatically seeks to limit the potential "affective freedom" of his work, in favor of a "cognitive restraint" based in his own acceptance, and that of his potential audience, of all the rules of consensual reality.

I may have on occasion connected "affective freedom" with the author's ability to generate discourses of symbolic complexity, but if I have done so, this would be a mistake. "Affective freedom," rather, stems from the author's intention to privilege the tropes from the domain of literary artifice over tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude, and that freedom can be found in any uncanny or marvelous work, regardless of its symbolic complexity, a.k.a. "mythicity." Indeed, I have rated both EYES OF A STRANGER and NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY as "poor" in terms of their mythicity, but the former is uncanny specifically because its author(s) show a greater appreciation for the inherited tropes of slasher-fiction, while the authors of LADY do not.

Sometimes that appreciation does not even take the form of any single trope that can be definitely nailed down. I recently labeled the 1987 film THE STEPFATHER as uncanny, and this psycho in this movie is, like the one in LADY, a chameleon who changes his appearance in order to ingratiate himself with his future victims. I also rated STEPFATHER as poor in relation to mythicity, but although there's a little more of an attempt to psycho-analyze the killer than one sees in EYES OF A STRANGER, there's also a sense that the Stepfather's madness is something outside the boundaries of a reasonable world. Neither Christopher Gill nor Jerry Blake wear any truly bizarre disguises a la Norman Bates, and their methods of murder are fairly mundane. But Blake's madness is "larger than life" because his creators, unlike those of Gill, seem far less preoccupied with proving that the killer's madness is typical for madmen of his type. Thus Blake's creators privilege "affective freedom" over "cognitive restraint."

In short, when in future I use the term "larger-than-life," it will be applied to narrative entities and situations that *seem like* (see POWER AND POTENCY 2) they are greater than life, even though they are not greater in a cognitive sense. Such things become "anti-intelligible" because at the core they are more aligned with the domain of artifice--the home of both stereotypes and archetypes-- than with the domain of verisimilitude.