Poe in Cinema/Poe as Cinema
Georges Rivière is haughty. Like he smelled something bad. The script?
Here, in 1964’s Castle of Blood, playing a penurious dandy silly enough to spend the night in a haunted castle on a bet, Rivière seems to think aloofness will be all the protection he needs. It won’t be! Indeed, only one thing can save the film’s leading man from the visual shibboleths of a dying genre, and that’s the cameraman.
Camera artisan Riccardo Pallottini, playing savior and tormentor, coaxes Rivière onward while punishing his progress. Nobody would be more surprised than the late Signore Pallottini himself hearing his cinematography praised as “experimental”. And yet, this is Gothic Horror’s greatest master shot — a case of push and pull, whose tension and elasticity continue to create rebounding space 114 years after its creator’s birth: so praise it I shall.
With ace cameramen, point-of-view becomes a more problematic concept, as when George O'Brien wanders glazed through F.W. Murnau’s swamp in Sunrise. There, the camera sometimes recedes from the hero’s advance, sometimes lets him pass and follows him, sometimes loses him altogether to rediscover him later. While Castle of Blood’s cliches would seem to be the thumpingly obvious point — a door’s creaking swing illuminates a wall bristling with harnesses and cartwheels… zoom in as a black kitten abandons its lair in a piece of spangly lacework… an organ wheezes as the hero’s sputtering candle casts the impossible shadow of itself on the crumbling masonry — those same hackneyed moments synthesize utterly unexpectedly into cinema pur.
It’s as if invisible tendrils were connecting Rivière’s body to Pallottini’s will.
The camera moves through and around apparent obstacles to our hero’s progress, seeming obstructions that justify the shot’s reason for existing. They make us conscious of the fact that we are spying on a man who thinks he’s alone, even if he fears he may not be. The dry ice fog, the wind machine, the spray-on cobwebs, the backlighting, and the reverberant footsteps all emerge from the same Gothic toy box (the one with the squeaky hinge), but Pallottini’s execution is exemplary, and the shamelessness total.
Since Cabiria, Italian films have utilized the camera to explore space, show off the sets, and to bring the environment to dimensional life. In horror cinema, this becomes an atmospheric duty: the prowling lens suggests a roving POV dislocated from anyone onscreen. The American camera eye is a stalker; the Italian a gawping tourist.
Once inside the titular castle, Rivière must fight for his place in the spotlight against the sinister hordes of furnishings to which the gliding camera grants a spurious, menacing animation, like the antic armchairs of Maupassant’s story Who Knows? Indeed, “props” are essential ingredients, visual axioms that define the Gothic Horror film. And nowhere is this more true than in 1960s Italy. So-called “stock characters” rise in the addled viewer’s mind. Seemingly minor adornments elbow the presumptive stars for more screen time, creating a previously unimaginable pecking order: Barbara Steele (Rivière will meet her soon enough!) presides over this atmosphere from within, an object among ineffable objects — dragooned into solidarity with funeral urns.
If time can be symbolized, Barbara Steele is its emblem. Her name evokes “stele,” neither clock nor calendar, but an ancient “book of stone” commemorating absoluteness. Realizing this, Italian directors foisted on the young actress a kind of Freudian overdetermination — period baubles and accouterments — coffins from which she’d rise and walk away, free to recite some obscure and darkened catechism. Steele slips par hazard into Gothic Horror, with its sumptuous visual salad of slapdash mullioned windows and chintzy Brilliantine heroes. Meanwhile her enduring power stems from more primal traditions — neglected gods, lost liturgies and funeral rites — palpable bona fides these epics sought, and often failed, to replicate on celluloid.
Because of Castle of Blood’s status as an unlikely masterpiece, the film’s provenance is of special concern. According to horror savant and Video Watchdog founder Tim Lucas, Antonio Margheriti’s credit as the director raises serious doubts about its truth. “This is far and away Margheriti’s best work, and it has always confounded me because it doesn’t feel like his other work; it has more taste.” The (normally) self-evident division of labor between director and director of photography buckles, giving way to seamless expression of the kind cinephiles generally attribute to their favorite auteurs. Is Margheriti capable of such piercing visual thrall? Sergio Corbucci — father of spaghetti western sadism with Django — is a much better bet. Or so Lucas implies: “Corbucci shot the first week before Margheriti replaced him, but who really knows to what extent Margheriti replaced him? He agreed to be listed as director to help the film get completed, and surely he was on the set (he has a cameo in the tavern scene), but that doesn’t mean he necessarily directed so much as ‘stood guard’.”
Castle of Blood begins with the old chestnut of a hale and hearty chap induced to spend the night in a haunted castle as a wager. It also throws in Edgar Allan Poe, and uses subsequent apparitions as a kind of time travel device, allowing the penurious hero to glimpse the demise of those who have gone before him. One of these is Steele, once again up to Lady Chatterley antics with the muscle-bound gardener in the stables. And then everyone turns out to be a vampire, though the origins of the bloodsucking plague are never established.
Corbucci serves up a murky travelogue of the Gothic mind, wafting down draughty corridors for minutes on end while a musical saw whines eerily on the soundtrack. Steele is already enmeshed in an undead love quadrangle (husband/lover/lesbian stalker) when the hero crashes in to complicate her existence, shagging her as the camera pans to the fire, and only afterwards noticing her lack of a heartbeat. Steele is a good/bad girl, whose motivation and true nature remain undecided until the last few minutes, which manage to toss fragments of Lost Horizon and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow into the stew. The appallingly cynical conclusion (Poe worries that nobody’s going to believe this one) confirms the hero’s earlier observation: it’s the living you really have to watch out for.
“Italians make visually gorgeous but incoherent movies,” quipped Pauline Kael.
I’ll allow Kael her pronouncement in this particular case — glib though it be. She never would have condescended to address Italian genre horror, but I like to imagine the late hero of American film criticism thrilling to this B-grade masterpiece, in which the camera eye extends, wraith-like, from a personal source. This illusory sense of one-point perspective gliding alongside the actors, and inside their strangely integrated collective mind-frame, creates a funny feeling; as if the viewer were in the audience watching his own spectral image glower back into the darkened theatre. Tim Lucas provides more context, this time regarding Castle of Blood’s self-fractionating storylines and their shared Italian wellspring.
I also think we find a certain kind of forebears in the Italian anthology films, which would tell numerous stories — usually romantic or tragic — that took place over a period of time at the same location, like the movie Villa Borghese, for example. But Castle of Blood opens a door to a whole subgenre in which a modern person enters an antiquated villa and goes back in time, revealed to be a kind of hero/heroine in an Eternal Return scenario – in essence, a tragedy they have lived through must be lived through again, as a circle of Hell or karmic lesson. It can also be triggered by the introduction of the twin of a lost love, as in I Vampiri, The Third Eye, and Black Sunday.
Italian horror film manages to be both lushly baroque and cheap as chips: a degree of expense could be lavished on the sets and lighting because the director could then spend ten minutes at a time wandering aimlessly about, all in the name of atmosphere, narrative as a second thought, dialogue excessive surplus to essentials, no acting required. So precisely how does Castle of Blood, despite the film’s formulas and cliches, play so lyrically? Well, Edgar Allan Poe was famous for theorizing a workable formula to produce the effects he desired, and then he carried it out according to Gothic conventions and expectations. Like a storyboard, Poe’s theory would allow him to test the effect of his tropes and prosody before he even began to write a word.
Cobwebbed passages and wax-encrusted candelabra, dungeons festooned with wrist manacles, an iron maiden in every niche, carpets of dry ice fog, dead twig forests, painted hilltop castles, secret doorways through fireplaces or behind beds (both portals of hot passion), crypts, gloomy servants, cracking thunder and flashes of lightning, inexplicably tinted light sources, candles impossibly casting their own shadows, rubber bats on wires, grand staircases, long dining tables, huge doors with prodigiously pendulous knockers to rival anything in Hollywood, all by Poe’s time already well-worn imagery of the Gothic.
Here was the precise moment — and it was nothing if not inevitable — when the darkness of horror film, both visible and inherent, joined up with a no less disconcerting array of color. The best, brightest, sweetest, and most dazzling red-blooded palette any journeyman Italian cinematographer could coax from those tired cameras. Color, both its commercial necessity as well as all it promised the eye, would hereafter re-imagine the genre’s possibilities, in Italy and, gradually, everywhere else.
When color hit the Italian Gothic cycle, a truly new vision was born. In Hammer films and other UK horror productions, the cheapness of Eastmancolor made it possible for blood to be red. Indeed, very red. And, while we shouldn’t underestimate the startling impact this had, it was a fairly literal use of the medium. In the Italian movies, and to a large extent in Roger Corman’s Poe cycle, color was an unlikely vehicle to further dismantle realism rather than to assert it. Overrun with tinted lights and filters, none of which added to the film’s realistic qualities, the movies became delirious. In Corman's Masque of the Red Death, we learn of an experiment that uses color to drive a man insane. Filmmakers like Corman and Mario Bava were themselves playing the very same trick on their audiences.
The application of candy-wrapper hues to a haunted castle flick like The Whip and the Body adds a pop art vibe at odds with the genre. By the time you get to something like Kill, Baby…Kill! the Gothic trappings are barely able to mask a distinctly modern sensibility, so much so that Fellini could plunder its phantasmal elements for Toby Dammit, fitting them perfectly into his sixties Roman nightmare.
Blood and Black Lace brings the saturated lighting and Gothic fillips into the twentieth century — a sign creaking in a gale is the first image, translated from Frankensteinland to the exterior of a contemporary fashion house. A literal faceless killer disposes of six women in diabolical ways. The sour-puss detective remains several deaths back on the killer’s trail because the movie knows the desire of its audience, knows that it has zero interest in detection, character, motivation — though it’s all inertly there as a pretext for sadism. Set-pieces of partially-clad women being hacked up dot the film like musical numbers, or the action sequences might appear in a different genre.
Since the 19th-century audience for literary Gothic Horror was comprised of far fewer men than women, would it be fair to ask whether or not Giallo’s birth might act as an instrument of brutal violence, even revenge, against “feminine” preoccupations? Consider, once again, 1964’s Castle of Blood, the film’s amorous vibes finding their ultimate source in that deathless screen goddess named Barbara Steele, whose marble white flesh photographs like a classical Greek sculpture startled into unwanted Keatsian fever. Her presence practically demands that we ask ourselves: “Who is this wraith howling at a paper moon?” In other words, is it a coincidence that Steele’s “Elizabeth Blackwood” — a revenant temptress and undead sex symbol — hits screens the very same year as Giallo, which would transform Italian cinema into a decades-long death mill for women?
The name “giallo”, meaning yellow, derives from the crime paperbacks issued by Italian publisher Mondadori. The eye-catching covers, featuring a circular illustration of some act of infamy embedded in a yellow panel, became utterly associated with the genre of literature. These books were likely to be by Edgar Wallace, the most popular author in the western world, or Agatha Christie: cardboard characters sliding through the most mechanical of plots; or classier local equivalents, like Francesco Mastriani or Carolina Invernizio. The founding principles laid down concerned elaborate deceptions concealed by their authors, traps for the unwary reader, and the use of a distinctive design motif. The tendency of the characterization to lapse into sub-comic-book cliché, the figures incapable of expressing or inspiring real sympathy, was, perhaps, an unintended side-effect of the focus on narrative sleight-of-hand.
When Italian filmmakers sought to translate sensational literature to the screen, they looked to other filmic influences: American film noir, influenced by German expressionism and often made by German emigrés (Lang, Siodmak, Dieterle, Ulmer); and the popular krimi cycle being produced in West Germany, mostly based on Edgar Wallace’s leaden “shockers.” These deployed stock characters, bizarre methods of murder, deceptive plotting, and exuberant use of chiaroscuro, the stylistic palette of noir intensified by more fog, more shafts of light, more inky shadows. They provided a certain amount of entertainment, but different from the approaching bloodbath, mainly because Wallace, despite fascistic tendencies, is rather anodyne and anaemic by comparison. No open misogyny, no sadism not sublimated in story, with a touching faith in Scotland Yard and the class system. In the Giallo, Wallace’s more sensational aspects are adopted but made to serve a sensibility quite alien to the stodgy Englander: people are generally rotten, the system stinks, and crime becomes a lurid spectator sport served up to a viewer who is simultaneously thrilled and appalled.
Giallo fetishizes murder. Indeed, it fetishizes everything in sight. Every object, every half-filled wine glass and pastel-colored telephone, is photographed with obsessive, product-shot enthusiasm. And yet, for the directors who rode the Giallo wave most dexterously, homicide was something one did to women. Indulging in equal-opportunity lechery was merely an excuse to explore, other more violent outlets for their misogyny. Exhibit one: the demented enthusiasm for woman-killing evinced by Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, et al. — whatever trifling token massacres of men one might exhume from their respective oeuvres are rather incidental, wholly inconsequential. Argento’s provocative defense, “I love women, so I would rather see a beautiful woman killed than an ugly man,” should not satisfy us, and hardly seems designed to (also bear in mind Poe’s assertion that the death of a beautiful young woman was the most poetic of all subjects).
Poe essentially owns motion pictures via ongoing necrophilic obsession, since celluloid preserves the dead better than any embalming fluid. Like amber preserved holograms, they flit in and out of its parameters, reciting their own epitaphs in pantomime; revenant moths trapped in perpetual motion. Film is bona fide illumination — as opposed to religion’s metaphorical kind — representing the supremacy of alchemy and necromancy over sackcloth and ashes. The inmates, emboldened under the spell of Klieg lights, were not only running the asylum, but re-shaping the world in their own image. Both Church and State with their blunt instruments of repression proved impotent against the anarchy of this freshly liberated ghetto.
All hail the magic mirrors! Celestial mandalas! Giant eggs and butterfly women! Segundo de Chomón’s The Red Spectre (1907) ruthlessly assaults our eyes with a wraith-magician dissolving through his coffin lid in a red, hand-tinted, flame-flickering hell. His presence, caped, skull-masked, was to herald a new thespic truth, that from this moment forward the art of acting would be reduced to how you respond to light, and how light responds to you. The Specter of Chomon’s dark bauble is in every element Poe’s Red Death — japing and performing tricks for us, his adoring fans and welcome guests, before announcing our doom — literary metaphor slammed against a literal backdrop of amber stalactites, pellucid as an ossuary.
That was a long time ago, in the first decades of the 20th century, before artifice and studios and the commercial paradigm of stardom finally swallowed cinema in one ravenous bite. It was a period when one could see, if one paid close attention, the dreariness of ordinary life at the centre and around the edges of every motion picture brought forth. It lived onscreen in film’s early days, exposing the pretense, however fitful, of opulence or period as simply that: pretense, a fundamental desire to escape reality. But this “escapism” had always been erroneously attributed to the audience’s needs, when in fact it was rather those bankrolling the nascent medium not yet sufficiently in control of itself to impose any order.
The censors were on to something, even if they could never fully articulate what precise blasphemies were being committed. Filmmakers like Argento have no interest in sex per se. Suffering seems inessential, whereas terror and death are fundamental, photographed with the same clinical absorption and aesthetic gloss as Giallo-maestros habitually applied to their interior designs. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring – each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. That’s one important subtlety often lost amid Giallo’s vast antisocial hemorrhage.
Like the rivers of blood, homophobia, in its literal meaning of fear rather than hatred, runs through the genre. Lesbians are sinister while gay men barely exist. As we try to work out what in hell the Giallo is really up to, little dabs of dime-store Freudianism seem sufficient.
The filmmakers’ misogyny could be suspect, a sign of compromised masculinity. They need fictional avatars in which to cloak their own feverish hatred of women. The subterfuge is clumsy at best, the desultory deceit embarrassingly macho. Giallo’s visual force, powerful enough to divorce the eye from the mind, is another matter, leaving us demoralized and ethically destitute; our hearts beating with all the righteous indignation of three dead shrubs (and maybe a half-eaten sandwich).
The Giallo is founded on an unstated premise: the modern world gives birth to monsters. Jack the Ripper, an aberration in his day, now waits around every corner, behind every piece of modular furniture, every diving helmet lamp. Previously, disturbing events arose from what Ambrose Bierce called The Suitable Surroundings, or what the mad architect in Fritz Lang's The Secret Beyond the Door termed, with sly and sinister euphemism, “propitious rooms.” There’s the glorious line in Withnail and I: “That’s the sort of window faces appear at.” But now, in the modern world, evil occurs in the nicest of places, and tonal consistency died in a welter of cheerful stage blood. One no longer needed to enter an especially Bad Place to meet one’s worst nightmare because the whole bright world qualified as a properly bad place. Imagine the pages of an interior design magazine invaded by anonymous psychopaths intent on painting the gleaming walls red.
Though the victims are overwhelmingly female and their killers male (Argento typically photographed his own leather-gloved hands to stand in for his assassin’s), when the violence becomes over-the-top in its sexualized woman-hating (like the crotch-stabbing in What Have You Done to Solange?), it’s usually a clue that the movie’s murderer will turn out to be female: a simple case of projection. Only Lucio Fulci, the most twisted of the bunch, trained as a doctor and experienced as an art critic, not only presents a straight male killer (The New York Ripper) but he also plays the killer in A Cat in the Brain. In yet another self-protecting twist of narrative, all psychological explanations in Gialli constitute evasions, always. Criminology and clinical psychology remain largely ignored, while Argento has a clear preference for outdated theories like the extra chromosome signal of psychopathy (Cat O’Nine Tails). Did anybody use phrenology, or Lombroso’s crackpot physiognomic theories, as plot device?
A tradition of the Giallo is that the characters all tend to be dislikable, something Argento at least resisted in Cat O’ Nine Tails and Deep Red. With disposable characters, each of whom might be the killer and each of whose violent demise is served up as a set-piece, this distancing and contempt might best be considered a byproduct of the form rather than a principle or ethos. If it has any interest, it’s in the degree it to which it mitigates the misogyny with a wash of misanthropy. A Unified Field Theory of Gialli would find a more deep-seated reason for the obnoxious characters as well as the stylized snuff and the glamorous presentation. What urge is being satisfied, and why here, now, in this manner?
Class war? Though prostitute-ripping is encouraged in the Giallo, most victims are wealthy, slashed to ribbons amid opulent interiors. Urbane characters who might previously have graced the sleek “white telephone” films of forties Italian cinema were briefly edged out by neo-realism’s concentration on the working class. Now these exquisite mannequins are trundled back onscreen to be ritually slaughtered for our viewing pleasure.
Victims must always be enviable: either beautiful and sexy or rich and elegant, or all of the above, so the average moviegoer can rejoice in their dismemberment with a clear conscience. Mario Bava bloodily birthed the genre in Blood and Black Lace (1964), brutally offing fashion models in a variety of Sade-approved ways, the killer a literally faceless assassin into whom the (presumed male) audience could pour their own animosities without ever having to admit it, the female killer finally unmasked to provide exculpatory relief.
If narrative formulas absolve the straight male viewer, compositions have a way of ensnaring him. Beyond that omnivorous indulgence of sensation for its own lurid sake one finds in Giallo, there is a more gilded emphasis placed on Beauty (in the Catholic sense), so that only women get to be mounted upon its pedestal. That these avatars of beauty are meant to be savored, ravaged, and brutalized — in that order — is what concerns us here. Neither the sex nor the suffering that captivates most sadists is what registers, but rather the instance of death, the terror that afflicts the dying woman’s face. That resonates! Once again, physical interiors become negative forms of emotional territory, rooms amplified for the sole purpose of grisly annihilations; a kind of heretical, strictly anti-Catholic transcendence through amoral delight in what otherwise falls under the trivial headings of “the visuals” or “color palette” — neither of which touch the essential nerve endings of Giallo.
Swaddled inside an otherwise hyper-masculine castle lies a windowless chamber with feminine décor bordering the psychotic. Before “Lord Alan Cunningham” (fresh from his sojourn in the asylum) tortures and stabs her to death, he brings his first victim to this pageant of off-gassing plastic furniture, the single most obnoxious vision ever imposed on gothic environs. Risibly overblown ’70s chic dominates The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave with nods to Edgar Allan Poe, as the modish Lord juggles sports cars and medieval persecution. Laughs escape the viewer’s throat in dry heaves when each new MacGuffin devours itself without warning. Take “Aunt Agatha” (easily two decades younger than her middle-aged nephews) suddenly rising from her motorized wheelchair, clobbered from behind seconds later, her body dragged into a cage where foxes promptly munch her entrails. Nothing comes of this. The phony paralysis, the aunt’s role in a half-dozen mysteries, which include a battalion of sexy maids in miniskirts and blonde Harpo Marx wigs — all gulped, swallowed.
About the only thing we know for certain is that “Aunt Agatha” is gorgeous. Though, in the end, she’s another casualty of the same nihilism that crashes Giallo aesthetics headlong into Poe country. That is into “Lord Alan” and his gaudy room crowded with designer goods to be catalogued in a horror vacui of visual intrusiveness — a trashy shrine to his late wife, the titular Evelyn. If lapses of good taste define The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, they also reflect Giallo’s abiding obsession with real estate. After all, this Mod hypnagogia has to dazzle somewhere. Why not bang in the middle of a castle? Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher features a wealthy aristocrat burying his twin sister alive, thereby entombing his own femininity, the source of all his latent shame.
Evelyn represents both Usher’s primary theme of the divided self and the obdurate refusal to learn from it. “Alan,” who emerges a moral hero in the end (after his shrink aids and abets his murder spree), remains just as ornery, alienated, and vainglorious as Giallo itself. We’re never told precisely what the film’s fetish objects might be trying to communicate. And since the camera seizes upon each one with existential grimness, we’re left with a visual style that begs its own questions.
In such cases, function follows form into the abyss. One Ophelia after another dies to satisfy our cruel delectation, even as will-o’-the-wisp light, taken from the bogs and neglected cemeteries of Gothic Horror, finds itself transformed into a crimson-dripping stiletto. Evelyn stands in for all Gialli, a genre which redefines film itself on the narrow front of visual impact: stainless steel cutlery and candy-colored light enact a sentient agenda as instruments of hyperbolic misogyny that fills the eye to overflowing.
As with certain other Italian genres, notably the peplum, smart characterization, solid performances and decent dialogue seem not only unnecessary to the Giallo but unwelcome (the spaghetti western, conversely, in which many of the same directors dabbled, seemed to demand a steady stream of good, cold-blooded wise-cracks). Argento, in pursuit of that “non-Cartesian” quality he admired in Poe, took this to extremes, stringing non-sequiturs together to form absurdist cut-ups, torching his stars’ credibility merely by forcing them to utter such nonsense. And this wasn’t nearly enough: from Suspiria (1977) on, the psychological thriller (of which the Giallo is a sub-genre; its psychology deliberately nonsensical) was increasingly replaced by the supernatural. So that the laws of nature could be suspended along with the laws of coherent motivation. Poe’s world is nothing if not infused with the supernatural.
In Suspiria and its 1980 quasi-sequel Inferno, the traditional knifings get interspersed with more uncanny events, as when a stone eagle comes to life and mysteriously makes a seeing-eye dog kill his owner. There are many additional grotesque incidents without any relation to the story: a shower of maggots, or an attack by voracious rats in Central Park. The Giallo’s quest for a resolution, inspired as it was by the old-school whodunits, gets abandoned only to be replaced by the next sensational set-piece.
Argento’s villains, now witches, though abandoning centuries of tradition, show more interest in stabbing their fellow women with kitchen knives than in worshipping Satan or riding broomsticks. Regardless of who they are meant to be, Argento’s characters must express his desires, enact the atrocities in his dreams, inhabit the places built for his own aesthetic pleasure rather than theirs. Following Bava, he saturates his rooms in light blasted through colored gels, making every scene a stained-glass icon, without any naturalistic explanation for the lurid hues. Nor is an explanation provided for a room full of coiled razor-wire in a ballet school, or for the behavior of the young woman who throws herself into its midst without looking.
Dario Argento’s true significance, at least with respect to Giallo, was perceiving in the nick of time the almost incandescent obviousness of its limitations. Italian commercial cinema’s garish, polychromatic spin on the garden-variety psychological thriller — departing from its forebears mainly in the rampant senselessness of its “psychology” — had Dead End written all over it. It could never last. On the other hand, Giallo does take a fresh turn with Argento’s Inferno, thanks in no small measure to a woman screenwriter who sadly remains uncredited. Daria Nicolodi explains that “having fought so hard to see my humble but excellent work in Suspiria recognized (up until a few days before the première I didn’t know if I would see my name in the film credits), I didn’t want to live through that again, so I said, ‘Do as you please, in any case, the story will talk for me because I wrote it.’”
Nicolodi’s conception humanizes (it would be tempting to say “feminizes”) Argento’s usual sanguinary exercises du style, while at the same time summoning legitimate psychology. This has nothing to do with strong characterization — indeed, the characters barely speak — and everything to do with the elemental power of water, fire, wind.… Inferno rescues Giallo by plunging it into seemingly endless visual interludes, a cinema that draws its strength from absence.
Early in film history, nitrate-based stock, with its twinkling mineral core, gives Poe’s crepuscular light its time to shine, and thereby to illuminate the world. No longer held in the solitary confinement of a page of reproduced text or an image, frozen, rendered in paint or ink. Poe’s singularly tormented vision is finally written alchemically, in cinematographic rays beamed through silver salts into moving images of such aggressive vitality as to blast every rational from one’s mind. A Black & White image flipped into negative makes black fire, or black sunlight as in Nosferatu’s Transylvanian forests, through which a box-like carriage rattles at Mack Sennett speed. But with the slightest underexposure, or a minor degradation of the print, or even a little imagination (such collaboration is not discouraged), this liquid blackness will spread everywhere and anywhere, the most luminous pestilence known to creation. Be it in the laughing nightmare of Fleischer cartoons of old (Out of the Inkwell, indeed) or John Alton’s vision of the night, we are left to wonder: is daylight burning out a corner of that building, or is the blackness of the building eating the sky?
As with all such questions, film permits us no easy answer. We are simply here to watch as the characters smudge into shadows that pulsate and flicker, that emanate out beyond themselves. If Poe represents the loss of control over one’s existence and the ensuing panic, then cinema, consciously or not, takes this loss and the existential dread that goes with it as a given.
Take Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for instance, which isn’t pure noir but is pure Poe: what would the surgical excision of an influence look like? Granted, the noir genre seems an unlikely Poe derivative, but what of Laura — fatalism, romance, necro-fantasy (with Lydecker as Usher)? DOA is the kind of concept Poe might have dreamed up; one of the great noir scribes, Cornell Woolrich seems to be channeling Poe through an all-thumbs pulp-sensibility. And how hard would it be to cast Val Lewton as the horror noir hybrid, with premature burials, ancestral disease, and lunatics taking over bedlam? Jean Epstein, who adapted The Fall of the House of Usher in 1928, complained that Baudelaire’s translations fundamentally mistook Poe’s innocence for ghastliness.
The dead in Poe, writes Epstein, are “only slightly dead.”
To the extent that Epstein was correct, the whimsy that Poe bequeaths to cinema finds itself absorbed in almost material terms — not as sensibility but as a texture whose particular nap or weave is never granted a name. In Mesmeric Revelations, a voluntary subject is quite near physical death and under the ministrations of his mesmerist, answering precise questions about the nature of God. Before dying, he says God is “ultimate or unparticled” matter: “What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought,’ is this matter in motion”. The same unnamable textures apparently survive on television, a case of Poe resonating inside our minds, a collective consciousness replaced by cathode rays.
Deep within the 18 hours of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, there is a moment on its incandescent surface that could have been lifted weightless from the great post-war dream of material deliverance. It’s as if the zeitgeist of the mid 20th century had somehow got lost and ended up in this one: Daytime, the convertible’s top down, the radio tuned, The Paris Sisters singing I Love How You Love Me as a reincarnated Laura Palmer lifts her face to a cloudless sky. Within this tapestry of an early Phil Spector production — his trademark reverb eternally evocative of Romance and Death (two conditions Spector knows well) — the voice of Priscilla Paris could be a siren sound from the banks of the American Beyond, or a dream goddess lullaby from the whispering gallery, or sweet nothings from the crypt. We don’t know. We’ll never know.
In this oneiric echo chamber, Poe smiles down upon American blondness, muscle cars soaked in sunlight, candy for eye and ear; the terrible ecstasy of unending motion and immortality.
If Lynch’s Return means going back home, then home is that Lemon Popsicle/Strawberry Milkshake species of innocence proffered by America’s music industry between 1957 and 1964. The horror genre always has to have some component of innocence to be truly devastating, be it the existential kind that inspires the malevolence everyone paid to have vicarious transit with, or the mere victimisation of the unsuspecting. Either way, there was no other period in American popular culture when innocence of any variety was so lavishly examined, then toyed with, and finally killed. The free-floating chord that opens The Everly Brothers song, All I Have To Do is Dream, remains a lamentation in sound: the sudden recrudescence of Poe’s beating, tell-tale heart. Adoring such guilt-free teenage odes to sleep, death, and sexual desire, David Lynch finds a muse in Amanda Seyfried. Specifically her visionary eyes melting Phil Spector’s dark edifice of sugar in a deathless, Sternbergian close-up — iridescent search lights, ever more urgently scanning the sky above, waiting for the sun to swallow her whole. We can only bear witness, and internalize this shimmering ingénue, this angel in a red convertible, trading places with Old Sol; as if whatever she just snorted has entered our system through her nose. But in that ephemeral instant, she achieves oneness with all things, the transcendence of stardom — true, a fleeting stardom — shorn of fame and the imperatives of show-business.
To this day David Lynch’s favorite film remains Otto e Mezzo, directed by Federico Fellini: Western Europe’s sorcerer of confectionary delights and unending motion, the man who put the “dolce” in La Dolce Vita. Fellini, he states, “manages to accomplish with film what mostly abstract painters do; namely, to communicate an emotion without ever saying or showing anything in a direct manner." Even if one were to take him at his word — and we must, of course, for no filmmaker has ever been known to misrepresent themselves to us — this seems a strange instance of gravitational pull, particularly in the light of the formal strategies both men developed over time. Lynch has always favored a blunt pictorialism that, in its bluntness, borders on the language of Imagism: the studied simplicity of the language used to complex, powerful effect. Fellini, in 8 ½ and through much of his career, by contrast, unleashes upon the viewer an insanely fluid, brutally precise camera ballet. Any good cinephile might be tempted to resolve the disparities and move toward a brighter, less subterranean comprehension. But, ultimately, such understanding would be a didactic burden no lover of movies need concern himself with. For here, in these conflicting dialects, you have ribbons of ideology swirled together like candy: a blur of four-wheeled luxury from the New World zooming past the region’s splendor into that brotherhood of man, that socio-economic nirvana imagined by Karl Marx in the Old.
Careening from one via to another at harrowing, white-knuckle speed, Fellini was once heard to lament that “Some neo-realists seem to think that they cannot make a film unless they have a man in old clothes in front of the camera.” George Bluestone, recording these words for the pages of Film Culture in 1957, was sitting in the literal passenger seat of that ideal metaphor for 20th century ebullience—post-war expertise; a precision machine hurtling through Roman streets past graffiti-scrawled churches proudly bearing the hammer and sickle; that famous Black Chevy like Odysseus’s ship skirting Scylla (the Vatican) and its equally dogmatic Charybdis (the Party), because at that velocity, anything could and did make sense.
“Appearances aside” Bluestone wrote, “the Chevrolet is at every moment under Fellini’s control. He weaves in and out of traffic, misses pedestrians by inches, swerves away from Nomentana’s interminable monuments, dodging yellow traffic blinkers as if he were trying out a darkened slalom.” It is every bit a performance. Rome, after all, is the land of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Apollo and Daphne — marble-cum-flesh, even as flesh itself gives way to forms that leave the viewer in terrified awe. While reliving his own mythic, carbureted experience, Bluestone does some weaving of his own, quoting Genevieve Agel’s one-line pronunciamento (and, in the process, defining what would soon be labelled ‘Felliniesque’), “Fellini is a visionary of the real”, as the passenger positions his driver somewhere between corporeal reality and ecstatic truth while the big man (no old clothes for this maestro) drives and drives. “As one hand lightly guides the wheel, the other gestures — it acts.”
Spirits of the Dead is one of those compendium films, with voguish directors (Malle, Vadim, Fellini) entrusted with bringing to the screen a Poe story each. Only the Fellini episode, Toby Dammit, is notable; indeed, very notable, a hallucinatory yarn owing as much to Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill! as to Poe's Never Bet the Devil Your Head, its ostensible source. The title character, played by Terence Stamp with white-blond hair and dark roots, and constant beads of witch hazel perspiration, is visiting Rome to attend an awards ceremony, and to play Christ in a western. But he’s fatally distracted by his new sports car, and a vision of the devil in the form of a little girl. Toby’s ride through a hellscape of nocturnal Rome seems lifted from Jules Dassin’s 10.30 p.m. Summer (1966), but it works even better for Fellini than it did in the Duras adaptation. An oppressively subjective film, Toby Dammit narrows the view down to the Ferrari’s headlights, a ghastly floodlit interzone where human forms are gradually replaced with mannequins and cut-outs, as the city becomes as unreal as an elaborate movie set, an uncanny valley laid out for the staging of an epic stunt/snuff film.
Fellini and Lynch celebrate bodily extremes in intriguing if differing ways, which should, in our time, naturally gallop beyond the pale, but nevertheless become wholly, weirdly digestible. It is perhaps the innocent glee of these artists, their wonderment at the vast variety of shapes the human body can assume, and an innocence that leans toward erasure of our awareness of the way physical representations function in the 21st century. Lynch presents the disabled as childlike, mysterious, magical beings without ever worrying about lending them agency (The Elephant Man’s John Merrick functions both as passive whipping boy and chic spectacle for the whole of Victorian London), or exhibiting the mendacity of adult sophistication (the latest Twin Peaks iteration includes a pint-sized hitman who whines like a puppy when his icepick is broken). Is it any wonder Lynch evolved a style that places them front and center in unmoving shots, without irony or pity?
Poe, while certainly a pioneer of fake news, also had a way of vindicating the lumpen masses of humanity (to the middle-brow’s abiding chagrin).
The Mystery of Marie Roget, a Parisian murder mystery, presented as a fictional sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue, was simultaneously trumpeted as a correct solution to the real-life murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in New York. When a news article presented fresh evidence while the story was still being serialised, Poe made minor changes to the final instalment to keep his fiction in line with the facts.
He later published a story about an Atlantic crossing by balloon, accomplished in three days, in The New York Sun in 1844. "Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason’s Flying Machine!!!" The piece was presented as truth, and only revealed as "The Great Balloon Hoax” a couple of days later. “The more intelligent believed,“ wrote Poe, "while the rabble, for the most part, rejected the whole with disdain.” He saw this as a new development: “20 years ago credulity was the characteristic trait of the mob, incredulity the distinctive feature of the philosophic.”
What had changed? Perhaps the acceleration of scientific and social progress meant that the more literate and scientifically-minded had become inured to startling new developments, so the most surprising events now seemed credible. And since these same technological leaps were always presented as social benefits, the working class was growing skeptical, since they rarely saw any improvement in their condition.
by Daniel Riccuito