Guest Blogger: The other kind of pirate chest.

For the first anniversary of the wonderful Pauline's Pirates & Privateers blog, I was asked to do a guest post. The good captain was generous emough to let me get on in my standard long-winded manner: I got carried away and turned in a big ol' two-part meditation on naked breasts, pirate queens, gay pirate marriage, the economic logic of mono-gendered pirate crews, working class revolt, Eugène Delacroix, patriarchy, and the single most expensive porn film ever made. You can read the first part today and check out the second post tomorrow. While you're there, be sure to wish the blog a happy birthday.

Huzzah for Pauline!

Movies: Mermaid from the Black Lagoon?

Mermaid Heather, long-time ANTSS supporter and one of the folks who inspired this very blog you are reading, is celebrating her fifth year of blogging with guest posts about film favorites. She graciously invited me to join in so I sent in some thoughts on my personal fave: The Creature from the Black Lagoon. It starts a little something like this:

The Creature is, unabashedly, my favorite of all the old Universal monsters. This is why I've never actually written a review my favorite horror film, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, before. And, honestly, I don't think I can do it now. You can't review something you love. That would be like giving a clear-eyed critique of your lover's sexual chops while you're both still in the afterglow. (If you think that's a good idea, try it and see.) So this is less a review than a tribute - which is appropriate since this whole shebang is a tribute to another horror-centric amphibian: Mermaid Heather. So, with her kind permission and your patience, let's talk Creature.

Of all the classic marquee-grade monsters in Universal stable, two of them are notable in that they never receive a name. Though he's often erroneously called by his creator's name, Frankenstein's tormented creation is never named. The other nameless horror is the man fish creature at the center of the Black Lagoon franchise. Unlike Dracula or Larry Talbot or Imhotep, these two characters remain "the Monster" and "the Creature."

Curiously, these also happen to be the two monsters whose backstories are scientific rather than supernatural. Though there's a notable distinction between the two. The Monster, of course, is a product of Frankenstein's mad science. He's a freakish thing, an affront the natural order, a rip in the sense of the world brought into being through an act of supreme will and profound hubris. In this, Frankenstein's monster most resembles a work of art. He's a unique imposition of man's will onto the raw material of nature that, once created, takes on a life of its own.

The Creature, on the other hand, is unique in the Universal pantheon in that he (and everybody assumes the Creature is a he) is not a freak of nature. Richard Carlson, doing his heroic-square bit in the role of Dr. David Reed, repeatedly mentions that the Creature is a logical result of evolution. The isolated, Edenic lagoon of the title is, the good doctor tells us, "its natural habitat." When skeptical Dr. Thompson and the jovial, yet curiously sinister, guide Lucas express doubt as to the existence of the Creature - even after two other doctors on the expedition claim to have seen it - the nay-sayers are given a lecture by Kay, the expedition’s resident hottie and fashion plate, on the amazing diversity of amphibious life. The impossible, Kay suggests, is just the real we haven't discovered yet. The Creature is, in an odd way, the anti-uncanny. Instead of "what should never be," the strange and mysterious Creature is: He's as he should be, in his natural home.

The rest is o Heather's site. Go check it out.

House of Silent Scream: After midnight.

That the mind behind "When Is Evil Cool?" (the 2009 winner of the just now created "Best Blog Name Award) is both genuinely funny and genuinely interesting would be enough to recommend that fine blog to any and all folks who dig what I do here.

But wait, there's more! Have I mentioned Warrior Wednesdays: a post series dedicated to the single greatest film about tragic death of community organizer Cyrus, the One and Only, and the consequences thereof?

Now how much would expect to pay? Don't answer yet. Because you're a great crowd, wiec? is going to throw in an extra blog. That's right, a whole other blog, free, gratis, for nothing, just cause we like your face. When you dig on wiec?, you also get "Random Picture Day," a blog with twice the brilliance of your average blog, without all those pesky words!

Now how much would you expect to pay? $10.99? $56.23? $1.7 billion?

All this can be yours for the low, low price of reading the following guest post in our third anniversary Silent Scream Series. Boys and girls, I introduce wiec?

When I was a little kid we’d visit my grandma in New Jersey about every other month. The car ride was very long and so my dad would pull over to a deli called The WaWa and let me pick out some comic books from the rack to read on the long ride home. I’d usually grab a Green Lantern or an issue of Rom the Space Knight. They also had a magazine there in New Jersey that I could never find at home at the local five and dimes. The magazine was called Famous Monsters of Movieland. Whenever I saw it I definitely used to snatch it up.

For an 8 year old kid Famous Monsters was a treasure trove of black and white goodness. The pictures were from mostly black and white horror movies from yesteryear. It had articles about said movies but I usually just skimmed those. The best part, were all the photos. I used to cut them out of the magazine very carefully when I got home from Grandma’s and taped them to the wall. I had a huge collage going that went from the floor to the ceiling and practically covered an entire wall of my room. There were Frankensteins of all stripes. Draculas everywhere. Tons of creatures and ghouls great and small from movies I had never heard of. One of my favorites was this picture from a movie called London After Midnight.

It seems the writers and editors of Famous Monsters really liked Lon Chaney. They were especially fond of his portrayal of a vampire in London After Midnight. It’s easy to see why. The scraggly hair popping out from under the top hat really made him stand out. The wide unblinking eyes and the jagged teeth stuck in a perpetual smile made him seem cartoonishly ghoulish. Chaney’s vampire was one of the freakier looking portrayals of a vamp out there. 9 out of every 10 issues of Famous Monsters featured the vampire from London After Midnight in one form or another. And 9 out of 10 times that picture was cut out and taped to my wall.

The story to London After Midnight is a pretty silly one though. The movie is not a straight up vampire flick. At first it seems like it might be a sort of Twilight Zoney sort of Tales from the Crypty kind of affair but it quickly dissolves into a who done it and why with a bunch of over the top, unbelievable detective work that would have no place in either the Jessica Fletcher or the Colombo playbooks of detecting.

In other words the story is a bit hard to follow but I’ll do my best to explain it. It starts off with an old man who is found murdered in his home. A detective (played by Lon Chaney) from Scotland Yards is dispatched to investigate. It is apparent that it was suicide after a note is found. The detective is skeptical but life goes on and the investigation is called off. 5 years later the old mans house is empty and in a state of disrepair seeming to be all but abandoned. All of a sudden a creepy guy in a top hat (Chaney) and a pale woman dressed in a long robe are seen prancing around the old man’s yard.

I was going to spoil the rest of this movie for you (and I still am) but I’m going to avoid a play by play account of the events. Mostly, I’m not going to do this because the events of the movie make no sense. I mean, it is just such a silly story. Lon Chaney plays the detective sent to investigate this mysterious stranger (who is played by Chaney). All the suspects of the old man’s murder 5 years back all seem to live in a house next door to the house were the murder took place and were the stranger now lives (the movie shows that the stranger has bought the dead man’s house’s deed). Then it appears that the old man is still alive and living in his house and that stranger and his silent female partner are vampires. A bunch of talking between the suspects goes down (that all goes nowhere. Remember this is a silent movie after all). The detective hypnotizes all the suspects. The “vampire” skulks around with a lantern. The hypnotized suspect reenacts the murder and is caught red handed by Chaney’s detective. Case closed.

“Huh? “ you might be saying to yourself. None of that makes sense.

I’ll explain: Chaney’s detective figured the dead old man didn’t kill himself 5 years back. He was murdered. How does he know this? He just knew. He then waits 5 years and comes back dressed as the vampire stranger. Buys the dead old man’s house. Hires a guy who looks like the dead old man to live there. Hires a girl to play his vampire wife (just because) and the two of them do all their skulking about to make the suspects next door nervous. Because the suspects are nervous they hire Chaney’s detective character to investigate. He investigates and hypnotizes them all and then waits. Under hypnosis he figures which ever of the suspects originally murdered the old man will try it again with old man decoy he hired to live in the house. He figures right and arrives just in the nick of time. In other words, the stuff of nonsense.

You might be wondering what the point to this movie was. The story is pretty thread bare in the logic department and when it’s all said and done makes zero sense. The critics when it was originally released didn’t much like it and most audiences where left confused. However the movie is considered to be a minor silent movie classic. The reason why is it’s history and place in silent picture lore plus some of the weird events that surrounded it. Also the iconic make up gimmicks Chaney used to portray the vampire stranger made it a stand out and a favorite to silent era fans over the years.

Instead of trying to make sense of the actual story to London After Midnight let’s look at the story behind the story or film rather London after Midnight. Here are 5 things I uncovered…

1) London After Midnight is one of the silent era’s most important “lost” films. A lost film and there are plenty from the silent era, are movies that were lost or destroyed over time. Over the years studios would make movies that would disappear from their vaults due to theft or were sadly in hindsight junked by studios to make room in their vaults for newer films. Other lost films are gone because the nitrate in the actual film they used back in the silent era was very flammable. Fires in studio vaults would happen often and would wipe out tons of archived movies. Also the nitrate film they used back then was very unstable and if not stored at the right temperature the film could deteriorate quickly. Movies would literally rot inside their canisters.

Also London After Midnight was made before TV and video. Most studios didn’t see the point of keeping and archiving movies after their original theatrical run. The storing and archiving of old movies was expensive too. Sadly it is believed London After Midnight was destroyed in a fire at the MGM studios in the mid 1960’s. There are no surviving copies of it to be seen anywhere. Next to Erich von Stroheim’s 10 hr long film Greed, London after Midnight is considered one of the most sought after of the lost films.

2) The make up design for Chaney’s vampire stranger is considered by some to be an example of his best make up work. Lon Chaney was known as “the man of a 1,ooo faces.” He solidified his rep with the stuff he did to himself in Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre
Dame. Early works like his portrayal of a legless and abusive gangster in The Penalty and as an armless knife thrower (he used his feet) in The Unknown showed Chaney would put himself through anything to get a good performance out of himself.

The vampire stranger is one his best loved characters. The frightening look of the character was what fans of the movie really liked. Even though the character spends much of the movie skulking around hallways and doing very little else (in other words no murdering) the work Chaney did to himself to get the character out was quite stunning. Chaney made special thin wire circles (like lenseless monocles) that he fit into the inside of his eyelids to get the hypnotic googly eye effect and wore special wire attachments inside his mouth and the sharp teeth dentures that held his mouth in that perpetual fanged up grin. Both were said to be very painful for him. Also the way the vampire stranger walked was quite creepy. He had a sort of stooped over gait that made him look dangerous and sinister. Movie experts speculated that Groucho Marx famous walk was fashioned after Lon Chaney’s vampire stranger.

London After Midnight also briefly showed Lon Chaney’s famous make up kit. The kit was a treasure trove of simple gadgets and makeup that he used to pull off some his beloved characters through the years. It is shown briefly when Chaney’s character explains to the folks in the movie how he dressed up like a vampire. Chaney’s make up kit now resides in The Los Angeles County Museum where it was donated for safe keeping after his passing. Many consider it to be the central artifact in the history of film makeup effects.

3) London After Midnight was written and directed by early horror and thriller director Tod Browning. Tod Browning made several silent pictures with Lon Chaney and later went on to direct early talkies such as Freaks and Dracula with Bela Lugosi. While Chaney and Browning made much better films together in the years before London After Midnight it turns out Midnight was their most successful. It raked in $500,000 at the box office when it was released in 1927. Most reviewers (and me) thought it was not some of their best work. With some major changes to the plot, years later Browning remade Midnight into a talkie called Mark of the Vampire. Mark of the Vampire starred Lionel Barrymore as the detective and Bela Lugosi was cast as the vampire stranger.

4) London After Midnight was used as part of the defense for a man accused of murder in Hyde Park London in 1928. He saw the movie at his local theatre and claimed Chaney’s vampire stranger’s performance was so scary he temporarily lost his sanity and strangled a woman in the Park. His plea of temporary insanity was later rejected and he was found guilty and convicted and jailed for the crime.

5) If there are no existing copies of the movie out there how did I see it? How can you see London After Midnight if you are so inclined? In 2002, Turner Classic Movies commissioned famed film restoration producer Rick Schmidlin to produce a 45 minute long reconstruction of the film using only still photographs and production photos. Working from Browning’s script it was well received by horror fans. Most people who had seen the original theatrical version felt it was an adequate adaptation of the confusing film they saw back in 1927 and film historians praised Schmidlin for his efforts. He won a Rondo Award later that year for his work. It can be seen late at night around Halloween on AMC.

I saw Schmidlin’s piece when I rented The Lon Chaney Collection from Netflix, It’s a box set of some of Chaney’s best loved and lesser known films. On the same disc as London after Midnight is one of his lesser works The Unknown. That’s the one where Chaney plays a man pretending to be an armless knife thrower. He actually has his arms (and a hand with two thumbs. Oops spoiler alert.) who’s wanted in connection to some murders he may or may not have commited and is well worth checking out. Also on the same disc is a documentary of Lon Chaney career in movies and is narrated by Kenneth Branagh. The documentary is very through and is straight up excellent.

Thanks for reading my exhausting account of London After Midnight. And thanks to CRwM for letting me blather on about it. Good Night everyone.

House of Silent Scream: "The Original Vamps: Silent but Deadly"

Tove is the coolest person I know.

She writes articles on fashion history and culture on her own blog, Thread for Thought, but is just as comfortable discussing what makes the sleazy Brit serial killer pic "10 Rillington Place" so pleasingly cynical. She's just as insightful about the 1936 Soviet anti-American propaganda comedy musical "Circus" as she is about the work of John Waters.

Plus, she allegedly made out with a one-legged French sailor once. Allegedly.

All this meant that, when I decided I was going to look for voices outside the horror blog world to include in this series, she was immediately on the short list of people to ask. I'm very happy she could contribute and very excited to introduce her on ANTSS.

Occasionally fancying myself an exotic woman of mystery too, I have a special place in my heart for that early 20th century icon, The Vamp. When my friend suggested I write about them, I welcomed the opportunity to revisit some silent films when this aesthetic was solidified in concept and look.

THEDA BARA & THE LURE OF THE EXOTIC

Though Theda Bara (1890 – 1955) enshrouded her adult life in mystery, she was born plain old Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, OH. Hollywood producers gave her the anagram of “Arab death,” on the one hand cultivating her image of smoky, exotic sensualism -- claiming she lit incense on her sets and swathed herself in tiger pelts -- and on the other hand, hyping the macabre and frightening side of her.

The vamp image, incorporating the requisite sex and death themes.

Most recognize the term "vamp" to mean a femme fatale -- an irresistible woman who leads to the destruction of those who surround her, typically men. But the term was initially coined only after the success of Theda Bara's single surviving film, A Fool There Was (1915), in which her gleefully man-destroying character is listed in the credits simply as “The Vampire.” Based on Rudyard Kipling's poem “The Vampire” (1897) and Sir Edward Burne-Jones' painting of the same name (1897); the visual inspiration is obvious:

Sir Edward Burne-Jones's "The Vampire"

In A Fool There Was, The Vampire is seen in her nightgown several times, casting a spectral quality over her. Opaque and voluminous, they are not lingerie we are accustomed to today, but were risqué for the time, obviously derived from Burne-Jones's sex-laden picture.

The Vampire grinning over her dead lover.

When wearing outerwear, The Vampire wore the amusingly impractical (and thankfully short-lived) hobble skirt, topped with exotic turbans and heavily kohled eyes. To seduce her victim she drops a flower and lifts her skirt to reveal her ankle -- she is unashamed to show blatantly erotic skin.

What differentiated Theda from other actresses of her time was her other-worldliness, which she cultivated with her Oriental aesthetics. The horror genre is filled with tales of distant or remote lands; the audience's presumed unfamiliarity with the locale makes the fantastic tales slightly more plausible; the storyteller prays on the public's inherent mistrust and simultaneous attraction to the exotic, The Other. Though the most exotic location in A Fool There Was was Italy (puzzingly portrayed as a palm tree paradise more suggestive of the Far East), The Vampire produces a non-specific and highly erotic exoticism. Not a tremendous actor, it was largely Theda's unusual costumes and makeup on and off-screen that enshrouded her in Oriental mystique and secured her notoriety.

Theda Bara in hobble skirt and turban ensemble

Promises of harem girls with all the connotations of master / slave dynamics and orgies have been irrevocably linked to soft, sheer, feminine fabrics that simultaneously cover and reveal forbidden flesh (see my post on Innerwear as Outerwear on this subject). Seemingly anticipating the Egyptian madness that occurred after the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, the Far East captivated the imagination of the Western world. Designer Paul Poiret (1879 - 1944) made his mark on the fashion world by morphing the 19^th century S-shape silhouette into un-corseted, athletic figures, and he incorporated many lose-fitting, Oriental-inspired designs to this end including harem pants, “formal” silk pajamas, and turbans. Poiret designed extravagant costumes for stage productions, hosted legendary Arabian-themed costume parties, his fondness for theatrical-scale dress-up evident in the fashions he produced for general consumption.

Paul Poiret, harem ensemble, 1911

Even earlier was Emilienne d’Alençon (1869 – 1946) who performed at the Folies Bergères in the 1890s (with trained rabbits!) and was just as famous a courtesan, who wore an Art Nouveau inspired Salome costumes:

The Ballet Russes' performance of “Schéhérazade” in 1910 was enormously successful, due in large part to the extravagant costumes of vague eastern inspiration:

Ida Rubinstein in Ballet Russe "Scheherazade," 1910

Erte, who worked with Poiret and with whom I am obsessed, was yet another costume designer who marketed sensual Oriental decadence for lavish stage productions.

Erte Fashion Sketch with turban and harem pants

Mata Hari (1876 – 1917), the exotic Orientalist dancer of Dutch descent who posed as princess from Java while acting as courtesan and spy, was executed by firing squad just 2 years after A Fool There Was. Rumor has it that she blew a kiss to her executioners.

Mata Hari

Similar to our Theda Bara, non?

Theda Bara publicity shot for Cleopatra (1917)

Theda tapped into a cultural obsession with styles of the Far East, while exploiting the unease and xenophobia that often accompanies our regard of The Other, rolling it all into a destructive, man-eating "vampire" character. The Vamp concept was to evolve, though never to shake the ruinous qualities Theda imbued in her.

LOUISE BROOKS & MODERN ADVANCEMENTS

As Theda's star waned, a new Vamp talent stepped up: Louise Brooks (1906 - 1985). If Theda was the vaguely ancient, exotic vamp, Louise was her modern flapper vamp successor. As women's rights gained momentum in America, a powerful new woman emerged, wearing visible makeup as she walked to the voting polls, smoking and drinking and dancing in shift dresses that bared shins! Even as many women embraced this freedom, societal concerns of propriety remained and moralist detractors prophesized of hedonistic anarchy. Dress also changed radically in the nineteen-teens, with fewer layers that a woman could slip into (and out of!), exposing more skin than ever. And so Louise Brooks was a very different looking vamp from Theda, even while her characters carried the torch of man destroyer.

Louise Brooks, 1928

Pandora's Box (1929) was adapted from 2 erotic plays written in the 1890s by Frank Wedekind, but updated to modern times. As many young women cut their cumbersome long hair, Brooks as the Lulu character sports her own iconic, modern bob and wears clothes un-constrictive enough that she can do light gymnastics (like swing from a strongman's biceps), hinting at the newly acceptable athleticism for women (see my post on Athletic Aesthetics). The erotic zones had shifted and multiplied since Theda Bara’s time, moving from the ankle to the shoulders, back, legs, and breasts which were often displayed braless.

Lulu appears practically naked in this Y backstrap dress.

Having become a somewhat accidental murderess, Lulu goes into hiding and curls the famous hair, sweeping it off her forehead. Ridiculous as it sounds, Brooks' hairstyle was so recognizable that this shoddy disguise actually succeeds in confusing the audience a little, though Lulu is discovered anyway.

Lulu is a dangerous vamp not because she's dark, controlling and malicious, but because she's a beautiful young woman whose very power is derived from her lack of pretension and seeming ignorance of her own sexual potency, her delicious un-self-conciousness. One-upping Bara's Vampire, Lulu was a double threat desired by both men and women, so potent was her sexual power. The Pandora of the Greek myth was not an inherently evil woman, just one whose curiosity got the better of her, with unfortunately dire consequences. Lulu is not even interested in money or advancing her social status -- she shows equal preference for newspaper moguls and paupers, all of whom are trying to exploit her. However, she shares with other vamps her unrepentantance for acts that inconvenience or even destroy others and herself -- they are all animalistic, with no regrets.

She’s an unusual vamp fatale because she doesn’t have malicious intent. “Money, they all want money!” she complains of her blackmailers and suiters alike. She's not a gold-digger, she's simply a careless and carefree pleasure-seeker -- exactly what conservatives feared about real-life flappers and, by extension, the women's movement.

RESURRECTION OF THE VAMP

Since these early 20^th century beginnings, the vamp has been resurrected in film and fashion many times. Blood sucking, literal and figurative, has unavoidably sexual connotations, and fetish gear has both influenced and been influenced by vamp(ire) lore. Fashion photographer Helmut Newton channels the sexy and macabre themes of bondage and female sexual power regularly. Even as women expose themselves in his photos, they seem to retain absolute authority over their settings:

Helmut Newton photo, c. 1990s

Impulse control is often explored in times of economic or political turmoil. True to point, there has been a rash of vampire productions recently including Twilight and the True Blood HBO series, but truth be told, I much prefer the original vamps!

Further Reading:

• Fashion, Desire and Anxiety, Rebecca Arnold
• Fashion Fetishism, David Kunzle
• Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power, Valerie Steele
• Seduction: A Celebration of Sensual Style, Caroline Cox
• “The Girl in the Black Helmut,” Kenneth Tynan

House of Silent Scream: "Watching silent movies as if they were other people's dreams."

Denis, the international man of mystery behind the punctuation enhanced "The Horror!?" blog, was, until very recently, the best kept secret in the genre blog biz. Smart, insightful write-ups on a mind-boggling array of films. He's to horror blogging what Elvis Costello is to music: He's doing great work all over the map. Lucha flicks, kung fu horror, Euro-trash exploiters, Bollywood slashers, chance's are the Denis has been there and written it up.

Talent, like blood, will out and Denis is now also posting work at the excellent "WTF-Film" site - schooling an ever broader audience on the topics such as "the wild man of the toilet" from 2004's "Oh My Zombie Mermaid."

Special thanks to Denis for taking the time to contribute to the anniversary celebrations. Screamers and Screamettes, dig hard babies!

I find writing about silent movies - much more so than actually watching them - exceedingly difficult. While I usually don't even flinch when confronted with differences in style or filmic language, silent movies always seem to come from more than just a different time or place and to deserve a more scholarly treatment than I am capable of.

The problem is amplified even further when a film has been as heavily analyzed as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens. There is probably not much to say about it that hasn't already been said. Fortunately, the nice thing about blogging is that one's personal lack of knowledge does not always need to keep one away from trying to wring out a few words about a film.

Even better - I'm not all that interested in talking facts about movies anyway, especially not about films like Nosferatu which invite one to be read as dreams rather than narratives.
This method of watching silent movies as if they were other people's dreams, forgoing the need for logic, plot and other unnecessary ballast is the best way to derive pleasure from them for me and makes it easier to watch European films of the silent era than the often slicker American ones which on paper keep much closer to our modern sensibilities.

The German filmmakers of the Weimar Republic were a very peculiar mix of the commercial filmmaker of today and the mad scientist of future movies, giving their better films a mood that I find quite close to that of other films better understood as dreams than as narratives - the European exploitation movies of much later periods. Yes, I propose to watch Murnau films as if they were made by Jess Franco.

The commercial interests of Nosferatu are obvious. Taking the basic plot of a novel like Stoker's Dracula (of course without paying the author's estate) as the base for your film is as commercially minded as anything Roger Corman ever did, although Corman would never have been so obvious about it that you could have sued him.

But I don't think that the interesting parts of Nosferatu are those close to the book. It is much more important which parts of the book Murnau and his scriptwriter Henrik Galeen choose to ignore.

I see the original Dracula as a modernization of Gothic tropes for the contemporary British audience of the 1890s and have a lot of sympathy for interpretations of Dracula as standing in for venereal disease and/or the fear of the other. Murnau's film, though, isn't interested in syphilis or modernization of tropes at all (which doesn't mean that he has nothing to say about/to his contemporary world - that part comes automatically). On the contrary, Nosferatu is full of the medieval attacking a present that seems already too much in thrall of the past anyway. Isn't that very German of it?

For me, as someone who finds parts of it still downright terrifying, this is the point from which the film derives most of its strength: Max Schreck's Nosferatu is an ancient, ancient thing come to eat up the future and drag the present back into his past of rats and plague, not so much a corrupting influence as Dracula is, but a regressive one. Nosferatu's horror is the horror of a past that has never been laid to rest and so just keeps shambling on, smothering the young and preventing a future that's worth living.

Seen from this angle, the end of the film itself starts to look horrifying. Even though the past is laid to rest, Ellen Hutter's youth and innocence have to be sacrificed and she herself has to become something exceptionally medieval herself - a saint. And where I stand, there is nothing more horrifying than a saint when you are trying to cope with the present.

House of Silent Scream: The extension of horror.

Today's House of Silent Scream is a real treat.

Here's an odd little factoid about Zoe, mistress of the beautiful and brilliant Zoe in Wonderland bog. Today's installment of the House of Silent Scream will be the second time Zoe's been a guest blogger here. That's not the factoid. Here's the factoid: Zoe's first post, a collection of gas-mask themed art work is one of the most popular posts ever featured on this blog. Not only was a big hit when it posted, but it remains a popular entry point for the blog and regularly ranks as the third or fourth most visited post in the entire history of the blog. Seriously. She could do this blog without me!

So, without further ado, here's Zoe and her partner in crime Gabriel - CRwM


"We crossed long, high-vaulted corridors; the wavering light borne by Franz threw a strange brilliance in the thickness of the gloom. The vague forms of the colored capitals, pillars and arches seemed suspended here and there in the air. Our shadows moved forward at our side like grim giants and on the walls the fantastic images over which they slipped trembled and flickered..." --ETA Hoffmann, Das Majorat



The 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari found in the Expressionism of post-war Germany a perfect stylistic match for its tale of madness and murder. The art movement preceding Expressionism was Art Nouveau: flowers and natural ornament, wild curls of hair, free-flowing imagery. As people went into and then came out of the "Great War," the art world morphed into one of Expressionism, which focused more on vicious angles and dark, cavernous, claustrophobic, unbalanced settings. There had been a general loss of faith in man's ability to be "alive" in any real sense of the word; people felt that their souls had been sapped out, they felt there was a real evil to humanity that had before seemed impossible. Even nature became suspect, no longer the bountiful and embracing world of Art Nouveau, but abstract, sharp, aggressive, made up of sinister trees and dark caves...




"Prager Street"
Otto Dix
(note the focus on destroyed bodies, begging and militarism, with sharp angles expressing severe physical pain. Also the "stacking" effect: instead of showing the audience the distance covered by the street in perspective, the artist has piled everything on top of itself.)

"In the months between Armistice Day and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, an estimated 700,000 Germans died of hunger. "The German people," Count Harry Kessler, the eloquent chronicler of post-WWI Berlin, wrote in his journals, "starving and dying by the hundred thousand, were reeling deliriously between blank despair, frenzied revelry and revolution. Berlin had become a nightmare, a carnival of jazz bands and machine guns." " (GreenCine)

Though several considerations (such as limited resources) went into the decision to make the 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in an Expressionist style, it cannot be denied that this style served the film exceptionally well. It strikes me that Expressionism, especially German Expressionism, is a natural fit for the horror genre. This is all the more true in a silent film, where the audience cannot hear blood-curdling screams, or the menacing sounds of approaching danger. Horror films found in Expressionism a kindred spirit, a visual manifestation of the alienation, menace and danger which is their subject (theme). In the Expressionist set, there are no open spaces free of the shadows which conceal threats. Even interior spaces provide no relief, composed as they are of "absurd geometries."
The twisty, threatening trees and the narrow, suffocating hallways, heightened in their strangeness by the sharp contrast of light and dark are then matched by the pallor of the somnambulist's face and the dark rings under his black eyes, or the bizarre streaks in Caligari's hair and gloves. Caligari's total control over the somnambulist, his patients and his audience is shown by his almost constant placement over them, on stage or at the top of a long flight of stairs. The madness of that total control can be seen clearly in the over-wide shiftiness of his eyes.



Caligari
(From the MoMA collection)


Cesare climbing up with Jane's body

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is, as we see it, the tale of a madman, giving life to his illogical and paranoiac fears about the very man who aims to cure him. He imagines his doctor, in reality a kind and determined healer and a thoughtful scientist, really has the intention of wreaking his own personal vengeance using the the poor souls trapped in his realm as his tools. He tells a story of the Doctor traveling with a carnival along with a somnambulist, a man whose mind has been taken from him, who has no control over his own actions. The somnambulist, Cesare, is presented as having the ability to tell the members of the audience their futures, including the hour of their deaths. At night, the Doctor sends Cesare out to enact that final hour--for anyone who has annoyed him during the day.

In the original story by Janowitz and Mayer, the Doctor, representing not only Mayer's own former psychiatrist and nemesis, but also "the madness inherent in authority," (From Caligari to Hitler) was discovered at the end of the movie to be the evil controller of the somnambulist, as he was in the madman's rendition. Overwhelmed by his desire to document and analyze, to study certain habits and certain effects (read: to contribute to the advancement of science), he directed an evil and senseless violence, destroying both the soul of the somnambulist and the lives of his victims. Janowitz and Mayer were voicing a highly stylized and creative complaint against the authority that had led their country into WWI and society's unquestioning acceptance of the cold, violent march that industrialization and scientific advancement were leading them on.

All around them, the artistic world was heaving with this complaint:



"Explosion"
George Grosz
(Note the main contrast of black and red, the lack of shading, the angles and twisted trees, the sensation of things piled on top of each other)




"Bourgeois values, cold logic and unattainable beauty were tossed out the window; their art would be as raw, violent and dark as the world they lived in, driven by furious emotion toward a set of aesthetic characteristics that would later roughly define what we talk about when we talk about "Expressionism." " (GreenCine)

Janowitz and Mayer were furious with the decision of the director and the film company to add a frame to the story which exposed the narrator as a madman in an asylum and the story itself as no more than his odd, paranoiac ramblings. "A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one--following the much-used pattern of declaring some normal but troublesome individual insane and sending him to a lunatic asylum" (From Caligari to Hitler).
But here's what's key about the artwork in this film. Even though Wiene ended the film with the scene which allowed us all to breathe a sigh of relief, realizing it was all just a paranoiac fantasy whose dreamer/creator was safely locked away, the visual aspect of that final scene is the same as it had been during the entire subjective telling of the story. That pressurized, constricted, violently shadowed and angular experience of madness and treachery was not simply in the madman's mind, because when we are brought out of his mind, in the end, to "reality," the world still looks the same: evil, terrifying, off-balance. As Caligari makes his diagnosis of the "mania" of the narrator, in the final seconds of the movie, he flips his hair arrogantly, and as the blackness comes into a circle around his face to mark the end of the film, the expression on his face is absolutely frightening. "I think I know how to cure him," he says. Behind him, the first steps in the cure are clear: the narrator is strapped tightly in a straight-jacket, lying on a bed (where Caligari had begun his diagnosis looking down on him from above), isolated not only from society by his commitment to the asylum, but even from the other members of the asylum.
The only "real" setting, in fact, is the gently curved wall on a garden path with actual, normal trees, where the narrator tells the story--that act of storytelling, then, is the one honest and sane thing that happens in the entire film. So in the end, it seems Wiene subverted his own subversion of the original film. He put the narrator in the nuthouse, yes, but isn't that what happens to those who protest too much against the evils of total authority? So that they don't disturb the general populous...

"You fools! This man is plotting our doom! We die at dawn!"

A small gift to CrWM, in thanks: "Stormtroops Advancing Under Gas," an expressionist etching and aquatint of faceless, soulless authority by the German Otto Dix, 1924.




--zoe and gabriel

House of Silent Scream: Just a hunch.

While it is always a pleasure to introduce a guest blogger, this one is special for me. There wouldn't be an ANTSS is it wasn't for her. Literally. It was Heather's Mermaid Heather horror blog that convinced me - for better or for worse - that I should try my hand at horror blogging.

So, you see, she's the one to blame!

When my first post went up in September of 2006, her blog was one just three links on the ANTSS sidebar. She's been an inspiration to and supporter of this blog from its earliest days. And for that, I thank her.

Screamers and Screamettes, Boils and Ghouls, here's Heather!

Around a month ago I got this email from CRwM telling me that his fourth year anniversary as a blogger was coming up. He also asked if I could help him out, by reviewing a silent era film as part of his silent film reviews. As you all know, he visits these films every time his blog anniversary roles around. CRwM has told me that my blog happens to be one of those that inspired his own, so how could I refuse helping him out? Even though CRwM has outdone me in every way: a better writer (in my opinion anyway), with more posts, and more followers, and the list goes on. Wait, why am I doing this again? One simple reason really. CRwM is a great guy, and one I am proud to call a friend.

When CRwM asked me to review a silent film, I had no clue which film to watch. This is a genre, if that is the correct term, that I have rarely visited myself. If I'm not mistaken, this could very well be my first review of a silent film actually. It took me a while to figure out which film to watch, which I think worried CRwM just a bit. After some research, and some debate with myself, I narrowed it down to two films. Needing to get my mind off things for a while, I decided to watch The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1923). Even though it isn't listed as a horror film, I always come across it on lists for silent horror films.

In 15th century Paris , times are ripe for a revolt. King Louie XI is running things with an iron hand, and the peasents are getting tired of being treated like mere sheep. Clopin (Ernest Torrence) is something of a king to the poor people of Paris . His foster daughter, Esmeralda (Patsy Ruth Miller), is a woman that seemingly every man wants. Jehan (Brandon Hurst) is a brother of an archdeacon, who is trying to get Clopin to revolt against King Louie, and Jehan is also very interested in having Esmeralda. Then there is the newly appointed Captain of the guards, Phoebus de Chateaupers (Norman Kerry), who is also attracted to Esmeralda. However, Phoebus represents everything that Clopin hates about the upper class. Even though Esmeralda wants to be with Phoebus, she knows that it could never happen. In the mix with all this is Quasimodo (Lon Chaney Sr.).

Quasimodo is the deformed hunchback of the title. He is half blind, deaf, and has a hump on his back. Because of this, he is treated worse than poor people. The church has taken pity on him though, and allows him to do small duties around the church. Quasimodo's greatest joy though is to ring the grand bell, since he can feel the vibrations from it. He is also attracted to Esmeralda, but knows he doesn't stand a chance. Jehan tricks Quasimodo into kidnapping Esmeralda for him, but it doesn't go as planned. Quasimodo is arrested for the crime, while Jehan slinks off into the shadows. After Quasimodo is punished, Esmeralda is the only person to give him water and be kind to him. When Esmeralda gets into trouble later, Quasimodo takes it upon himself to come to her rescue. With a revolt about ready to boil over, can even Quasimodo save Esmeralda?

One of the things I noticed right away while watching The Hunchback Of Notre Dame is that it gives you the feel of actually being filmed in Paris . It isn't like the film takes us on a tour of Paris , but because of the massive church, it still feels like Paris . In truth, it was all filmed on sets. The cathedral set remained standing until a fire in 1967 destroyed it. It grossed over $3 million dollars at the time, or roughly $23 million today I think. Lon Chaney was a well known actor already, but this film is said to have made him a star in the eyes of Hollywood . When it was filmed, it was one of the biggest movies as far as extras being used. In some of the opening scenes, you can see just how many extras were being used for the film.

One of the problems I have with silent films is that there seems to be a lot of talking going on, but they only give you the readers digest version of what is being said at times. With The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, I sometimes felt I was missing something. For example, they make Phoebus out to be a womanizer at the start of the film. Esmeralda likes him from the start, but the film makes it clear that Phoebus has no real feelings for her. Then at some point in the film, with no real explanation, Phoebus and Esmeralda have promised to be married. I thought I had missed something at some point, but that may not have been the case after all. It wasn't the only time I felt a little confused by the events in the film. As it turns out, two reels were dropped from the film once it was released for home rental. It is said that 10-15 minutes of film is still missing. Maybe this helps explain some of the gaps that I felt were there.

Lon Chaney's makeup for this film was supposed to be his most extreme yet. To me this is one of the things that holds up well in this film. Even better than his makeup though, was how well Chaney sells the character of the hunchback. I can understand how he became a popular actor in silent films. Chaney seems to throw everything he has into his character, and then some. Patsy Ruth Miller and Norman Kerry also do a wonderful job, but it is truly Lon Chaney's film.

Even though this was the first time I have watched this film, there were scenes I remembered from it. Either they were used in other films, or in a documentary somewhere. The Hunchback Of Notre Dame ends up being a longer film than I thought it would be. Most of the older films I have watched run a little over an hour, but this one came in around the same time a film from today usually runs. I enjoyed watching it, even if I did feel like it dragged just a little. But I have a very hard time calling it a classic horror film. It is much more the drama film that it claims to be. Still, I want to thank CRwM for inviting me to review a film for his blog. I truly hope we see many more years of blogging from you.

Guest Blogger: Zoe on gas mask art.

Screamers and Screamettes, I've asked blogger Zoe Blue, surrealism guru and art fancier, to curate this month's gas mask display. Enjoy.

Gas masks in Art





Delirium:
A disoriented
condition with
clouded consciousness,
often accompanied
by hallucinations,
illusions,
misinterpretations
of events and
a generally confused
quality with reduced capacity to
sustain attention.
(from Victor Koen's Funny Farm alphabet)

From gas masks

"Delirium," by Victor Koen


"The obsession with the "perfect baby" and children who would be progressively more intelligent and fit than the last generation, is an ancient one. Today through genetic technologies, social engineering and developmental psychology we believe we control previously inaccessible natural workings that strongly influence the way children are born, learn and grow...From extreme authoritarian rhetoric to schooling systems of total autonomy. The revolution in reproductive science has come to add yet another dimension to the issue, and blurred the borders between fact and fiction. 'Tasks & Games, portraits of the never young' is a series of 24 portraits, depicting children caught in the middle of the pursuit of perfection before and after their birth....Dramatically lit and staged in traditional photography studio settings, in front of bizarre backdrops or locations that some times overtake their little bodies, or what's left of them, the children are posed with their favorite toys or objects, in their Sunday best. A closer look will reveal signs of severe pain. We get to observe visual renditions of the nightmares they live in, and through them, maybe we face some of our own. They have obviously taken their toll on the kids even if most of them are smiling or smirking. ...The majority of the raw photographic materials originate from the early nineteen hundreds. The children are ...are fused with contemporary objects and environments that seem to consume them. The images are titled after traditional tasks and games. A sharp juxtaposition between the pure nature of old fashioned children activities with scientific methods and their results."

From gas masks

This one is called "Dusting." Victor Koen

From gas masks

"Vanity Study #39" Victor Koen


Another Fine Artist who has some exceptionally creepy images of gas masks is Chris Anthony. He is most famous for his award-winning 2007 series of photographs entitled "Victims and Avengers," which caught women and children at the moment of violently overcoming their abusers. A more recent series, called Venice is, as he describes it, "a metaphor for a sinking city, deserving of nature's wrath, leaving its citizens to tread water and explore new ways to sustain life on aquatic earth." In keeping with his apparent leaning towards--or at least readiness for--apocalyptic moments of reckoning and punishment:

From chris anthony

by Chris Anthony

From chris anthony

by Chris Anthony

I think these are also gas masks, though I'm not an expert...

From gas masks

by Chris Anthony


Fred Einaudi also seems to enjoy apocalyptic themes. He likes to place images of innocence together with images of death and dissolution, and gas masks help express his ideas quite clearly:

From gas masks

"The Button Maker" Fred Einaudi

From gas masks

"Chocolate Donut" Fred Einaudi


Chet Zar has tons of them in his paintings, often with the mask merging into actual flesh, as in an evolutionary mutation. Here's Clown of Doom, and Uncle Sam, and It's All Good:

From gas masks

From gas masks

From gas masks

Moving into more political territory, we have street graffiti artists. A minor amount of wandering on the web gave me all kinds of commentary on why gas masks are so popular in this art form: graffiti artists often have to be very quick, so rapidly understood symbolism is a must, and the gas mask is easily seen as representative of government oppression (riot police-- so also as a symbol of preparedness for engagement with them), the effects of social violence but also environmental violence, and general dehumanization (facelessness). Greg Nog says, "It's a perfect symbol for anyone fearing the impending decay of civilization." A comment which would also fit nicely next to the Chris Anthony photos or the Fred Einaudi paintings.

From gas masks

Cellist with gas mask: a photo by smiling bag production from stenciled graffiti in Tel Aviv. There's a whole series here: http://www.bigartmob.com/meta/artist/Smiling%20Bag%20Production/ .

From gas masks

Bansky

Here, Nicole Dolly made her own, gothic, version of a gas mask, I assume for clubbing (or maybe just so when the day comes, you can maintain your style):

From gas masks

And onward into full-blown sculpture, here is "Dystopian Art by Yanobe Kenji: Mickey the Knight:"

From gas masks

This was actually a commissioned work, commissioned for Disneyland's 50th anniversary celebration in 2005. Strangely, they didn't actually end up displaying it. Yanobe Kenji has several other sort of terrifying child-centered sculptures which use gas masks. You can see his work here:
http://www.yanobe.com/works.html
Apparently, though, he actually got the idea for this sculpture by reading his history books. According to a gasmasklexikon article written by Major Robert D. Walk:

"The Mickey Mouse Gas Mask was produced as part of the war production program. The Sun Rubber Company produced approximately 1,000 Mickey Mouse gas masks and earned an Army-Navy ‘E’ for excellence in wartime production in 1944. Overall, production of the Noncombatant Gas Masks (and in fact, all gas masks) was one of the most successful production programs of the war. In fact, production had to be curtailed early due to the vast quantity produced."
More on this creepiness is available here:
http://www.gasmasklexikon.com/Page/USA-Mil-Mikey.htm

From gas masks

In case the mask itself isn't enough for you, I'll leave you with this extended version:

From gas masks

Sweet dreams!

--zoe

Zoe's own mind-warpingly beautiful blog, Zoe in Wonderland is worth checking out. Go forth and dig hard, my friends.