Tag Archives: Edgar Allan Poe

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1972)

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La mansión de la locura; AKA Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon

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DIRECTED BY: Juan Lopez Moctezuma

FEATURING: , Arthur Hansel, Ellen Sherman

PLOT: A journalist visits a celebrated mental health asylum in this loose adaptation of ‘s 1845 short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.”

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A surrealist exploration of insanity from within the walls of a 19th century asylum should be a shoo-in for us. Add to this premise Panic Group-style theatrics, trippy sequences blurring the line between delusion and reality, and low-budget constraints which up the surrealism factor, and it becomes an even stronger contender.

COMMENTS: Poe’s satiric tale “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether” begins in Gothic style: “Through this dank and gloomy wood we rode some two miles, when the Maison de Santé came in view. It was a fantastic chateau, much dilapidated, and indeed scarcely tenantable through age and neglect. Its aspect inspired me with absolute dread. . .” The Mansion of Madness begins with a horse-drawn carriage swallowed up by fog. The image then solarizes into contrasting pale blue light and blood red shadows, plunging the viewer into a psychedelic journey.

American journalist Gaston (Hansel) has finagled an assignment to report on the innovative methods of treating mental illness developed by renowned Dr Maillard. After a disturbing encounter at the mansion’s gate with armed guards dressed as rejects from Napoleon’s army, Gaston’s traveling companions desert him. His friend Couvier has an abhorrence of the mentally ill and his female cousin is near to fainting. He assures Gaston his card will serve as an introduction; their carriage turns around and the intrepid reporter proceeds on his own.

While Gaston meets the distinguished Maillard (Brook), and his charming young niece Eugénie (Sherman), Couvier’s carriage succumbs to a violent attack by the “guards” before it can leave the forest. With his coachman overpowered, Couvier proves himself comically useless in a fight; after commanding his cousin to flee, he leaves her to save herself. The trio end up being taken captive, while Maillard takes Gaston on a tour of the sanitarium while explaining his “system of soothing.”

Sensory overload best describes the experience of entering The Mansion of Madness. Artfully arranged actors and still-life accumulations of everyday objects fill every frame. We never see a single establishing shot. Gaston appears to enter the maison through its boiler room, passing through a maze of industrial piping and blazing furnaces as curious faces stare out of the machinery. The “soothing system,” as Maillard explains, allows the inmates their freedom; there are no straight jackets here.

Moctezuma studied art in college before turning to film making (which he called “painting at 24 frames per second”). He began his directing career in television. On one of his shows none other than destroyed a piano as a musical performance; Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1972) →

Apocryphally Weird

50*. TOBY DAMMIT (1968)

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“I am always displeased by circumstances for which I cannot
account. Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his
health.”–Edgar Allan Poe, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING:

PLOT: Toby Dammit, a once famous actor whose career is in jeopardy because of alcoholism, accepts a role in a “Catholic Western” to be shot in Italy, on condition that he be given a Ferrari. Drinking throughout the evening of his arrival in Rome and increasingly incoherent, Dammit bumbles his way through a television interview and an appearance as guest speaker at an awards ceremony. Finally, he jumps into the sports car and races through the deserted streets of Rome, but becomes lost in an increasingly unreal city.

Still from Toby Dammit (1968)

BACKGROUND:

  • “Toby Dammit” was originally filmed as an entry in Spirits of the Dead, an anthology based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.  ‘s version of “William Wilson” and ‘s “Metzengerstein” were the other entries. “Dammit” is inspired by Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,”  an unusually comic outing for the macabre author, but takes almost nothing from the short story’s plot.
  • Terence Stamp traveled to Italy to make this film with Fellini, and stayed for several years afterwards. His very next film project was the lead role as the mysterious seductive stranger in Pasolini‘s Teorema.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In Poe’s story, the Devil was an old man, but Fellini chose to recast Old Scratch as a young girl (the actress was actually 22, but appears much younger). Fellini said he felt that Toby’s personal devil should represent his own immaturity. Fellini again demonstrates his genius with faces, as the pallid, mysteriously grinning girl is as devilish and chilling as waifs come.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Bouncy-ball escalator game; waxwork chef run down by sports car

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Fellini and Poe are an unexpected combination, but the Italian director takes to the American writer’s gloominess like a libertine takes to laudanum.  Fellini’s carnivalesque portraiture easily bends towards the ghastly. The director never tried his hand at another outright horror movie, but “Dammit” makes you wonder what might have been.

Trailer for Spirits of the Dead (1968) with “Toby Dammit” clips

COMMENTS: “Toby Dammit” is an interstitial work which Fellini Continue reading 50*. TOBY DAMMIT (1968) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1928)

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DIRECTED BY: Jean Epstein

FEATURING: Charles Lamy, Jean Debucourt, Marguerite Gance, Abel Gance

PLOT: Roderick Usher invites an old friend to the portentous mansion where he lives in the company of the servants and his dying wife, Madeline, whose portrait he has been obsessively trying to paint.

Still from The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Like it’s source material, Epstein’s silent film treatment of ’s short story doesn’t explicitly depict any extraordinary phenomena, but the aura of metaphysical discomfort and  mysterious menace is so pervasive that it lends it an oneiric character—one that’s likely to give a stronger and longer lasting impression than any more overt effect.

COMMENTS: Despite the expected controversy over the precise definition and characteristics of the movement (or whether it even qualifies as a movement), one could say that the underlying tenet of French Impressionism is the search for an emancipated cinematic language, with its own forms and techniques, in contrast to the “filmed theater” approach. Instead, cinema was to articulate, with its own unique means, certain realities (and modes of expressing them) that no other art-form could. Impressionist films focused on, among other things, subjective, psychological reality: dreams, madness and all sorts of altered states of consciousness, The methods necessary to compellingly bring it to life were unconventional camerawork, including character point-of-view perspectives, innovative editing techniques, a preoccupation with the visual composition of shots and their picturesque qualities (such as the contrasts between light and dark), etc.

With this said, it’s easy to see how such a movement proved vitally influential to weird cinema (and filmmaking in general)—as well as why it’s the perfect fit for an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story. And indeed, Jean Epstein aptly translates the author’s most revered hallmarks—a constant, underlying sense of unease—to the language of cinema. It’s so well-realized that the viewer can predict the house’s impending ruin even without the title. The suggestion of a spectral world of shadows and unconscious forces subtly advances on diurnal reality, and the persistent aura of mystery and the uncanny reveals itself at each new turn, be it in the enigmatic presence of Madeline Usher, in Roderick’s afflicted mood and behavior, or in the many disquieting details of the mansion and its surroundings.

The resulting atmosphere of dreamlike disquiet is sustained through the film’s runtime, as if the viewer were trapped in the elegant and ethereal matter of a cloud as it gradually darkens and thickens before the storm. And as overused as it might be, “atmosphere” is indeed the appropriate term, considering the amount of shots purely devoted to its establishment (the ominous images of Nature, the manor’s vast, empty spaces where nothing but the wind manifests itself)—especially when compared to the more practical approach Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1928) →

Capsules

B’TWIXT NOW AND SUNRISE: THE AUTHENTIC CUT (2011/2022)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Ben Chaplin, Joanne Whalley, Alden Ehrenreich, David Paymer, Don Novello, Anthony Fusco,

PLOT: A struggling writer’s book tour lands him in a mysterious small town, where the sheriff invites him to help investigate a serial killer and guides him through a dreamworld of ghosts, vampires, and murderers.

Still from B'Twixt Now and Sunrise (2011/2022)

COMMENTS: In 2011, Francis Ford Coppola released a movie called Twixt, a vampire/ghost story starring Val Kilmer as a low-rent horror writer, Elle Fanning as a pixie-esque dead girl, and Bruce Dern as the town sheriff/aspiring writer. Not many people remember it, which makes Coppola’s decision to re-release it, calling it B’Twixt Now and Sunrise: The Authentic Cut (2022), slightly baffling. Only slightly so, though, given both how much the man likes director’s cuts and the special significance this film has to him.

Its first time out, Twixt was roundly panned. The writing (by Coppola) is unfortunate, the look of the dreamworld—where Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer) is guided through the story of a mass child murder by Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin)—is overly crisp, background characters are either wooden or overwrought, and so on. There are odd choices throughout, and the overall effect is that Twixt is a bad movie—a very entertaining bad movie.

For The Authentic Cut, Coppola removed eight minutes of runtime (four of them from the ending, which was already abrupt) and didn’t add any new footage. While the changes are understandable, such as patching scenes together, creating a twist ending, removing a homophobic joke, etc., the movie isn’t much better for them, and this is tragic.

B’Twixt is a movie close to Coppola’s heart. This is because of a subplot wherein Baltimore’s daughter has been killed in a boating accident, and he comes to accept culpability. Coppola’s 22-year-old son was also killed in a boating accident, in the same way as shown in the film. So of course he would want this semi-confessional movie to be its best and not an embarrassment. But all that works in Twixt/B’Twixt is the stuff makes it funny and cheesy and bad, like Bruce Dern’s screwball sheriff. His over-the-top energy would be par for the course in an out-and-out comedy, but because this is not one, the question of whether certain things are intentionally funny is that much more fascinating.

There are cool moments, especially in the dreamworld when everything is black and gray and red, sometimes looking like an expressionist version of  Sin City (which was released 6 years earlier). These scenes are dominated by the leader of the evil, possibly vampiric goth kids, who has the gothiest makeup ever and reads Baudelaire in French. His name is Flamingo, and he broods under the full moon. Again, genius bleeds into the ridiculous, leaving us both chuckling and wondering about intentionality.

Coppola’s original vision for this film included performing it live, taking advantage of the digital nature of editing, and having the score performed along with a fluid cut—a groundbreaking undertaking,  which occurred only once, at Comic-Con. One can easily assume from this intention that Twixt was never meant to be the final version.

For people interested in (one of) the auteur’s vision(s), B’Twixt is here for you now. But if you want a low budget horror-comedy that is both intentionally and unintentionally funny, Twixt is a hidden gem.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The shot on digital low-budget indie film was inspired by dreams Coppola had and, well, that’s what it feels like. Although this trimmed down version is more focused and less clunky than the original (especially with Hall’s character arc), it still feels like a mish mash of ideas more than a fleshed out story… plays like a poor man’s ‘Twin Peaks.'”–DVD corner (Blu-ray)