PART TWO:
BROKEN DOLLS
“You know what you are? You’re a schizo.”
“You just don’t understand women, that’s all.”
– Robert Altman’s Images
It’s often commented that Antonioni’s L’aventura (1960) is unique in that it is defined by absence – that its plot is dominated by a person who is not there.
The character of Anna goes missing at the film’s outset, and the remaining characters are fuelled entirely by their reaction to her absence, her ghost hanging over them through every decision and misstep.
For me, these ghosts were my sister (physically absent) and soon after, my mother (emotionally absent).
I filled these vacancies with many things, ranging from mildly damaging (over-achieving) to completely damaging (anger, spite, sabotage, violence); even as a child, and in the midst of turmoil, I would come home with excellent grades and would initiate an abundance of extracurricular projects.
I was constantly – then as now – struggling with the dilemma of whether to give up completely, or to succeed as a form of revenge against those who habitually abandoned me.
In Juan Antonio Bardem’s The Corruption of Chris Miller (1973), Ruth Miller (Jean Seberg) lives with her exotic-looking stepdaughter Chris in an isolated country house.
Chris is recovering from a recent stay in an institution, and the dynamic between them is immediately set up as one of oppression and mistrust.
Abandoned by Chris’s father, Ruth spouts her hatred for the male gender at frequent intervals (“Men don’t love… they possess. They injure, they invade. Always cruelty and violence.”), while Chris has no choice but to listen and absorb.
Ruth veils her own possessiveness in a guise of concern for Chris’s welfare; Chris suffers from fits of hysteria whenever it rains and can’t be trusted not to hurt herself or others, but Ruth’s means of caring for her are suspect from the outset.
On rainy nights, Ruth dresses in seductive nightclothes and rushes to Chris’s side like a lover, kissing her all over to calm her down.
Eventually Chris is quieted and lies there in a catatonic state while her stepmother molests her.
But for someone who experiences violent flashbacks whenever it rains, they’ve certainly chosen a rainy region to settle down in, and that’s only one of many clues that something’s seriously wrong in this household. The move was a conscious decision:
Ruth likes the girl’s dependence on her.
When Ruth finds a handsome young vagrant crashed out in the barn one morning, she invites him in for morning sex and coffee, then puts him to work doing odd jobs around the house.
He immediately notices the strained relationship between Ruth and Chris:
Man: “What do you ladies do all day, stuck in a place like this?”
Chris: “Ruth designs, I ride and sunbathe. For amusement we spy on each other – don’t we Ruth? We wait for someone who never arrives. We don’t know whether we love or hate each other.”
The two women plot to use the man against each other; however, he has his own agenda – and it’s not romance.
His role in their hermetically sealed drama is that of a catalyst for a drastic role-reversal, wherein Ruth must admit her dependence on Chris to validate her own feelings of anger and betrayal:
Ruth (to Chris): “It’s true, I wanted to corrupt you, to destroy you… but now… I need you more than you need me.”
Ruth has allowed herself to be destroyed by a man – by Chris’s father who abandoned them both years before.
Now she lives only for revenge, happy to isolate herself in a cocoon of man-hating security that has manifested itself as an obsession with Chris, who she sees simultaneously as an opportunity and a threat.
According to her own deluded logic, she can achieve her pitiful ‘revenge’ on Chris’s father by effecting Chris’s psychological ruination.
But as Chris grows older and shows signs of independence, Ruth’s anger becomes warped and misdirected; it loses its focus.
Now there is only Chris to hate.
Now there is only Chris to abandon her.
And that abandonment is inevitable.
The female characters in Carlos Aured’s The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (aka House of Psychotic Women, 1973) are similarly bound to each other by a fear of abandonment.
The film stars – and was co-written by – the late horror maestro Paul Naschy (who passed away just as I was writing this chapter) who plays the part of Gilles, a drifter hitchhiking through the Spanish countryside looking for work and hiding from a distressing past.
He gets a lift from a busty but stern redhead named Claude, who has a badly scarred arm and a fake hand, which she attempts to hide when she notices him staring at it.
She offers him a job tending to the house and garden at the remote mountaintop home she shares with her two sisters: the nymphomaniac Nicole (also a redhead); and Ivette, who is wheelchair-bound after a mysterious accident – the same accident that likely caused Claude’s disfigurement.
When a temporary home-care nurse confides in their long-time doctor her concern that the three women are “not normal”, he offers that, “these three women are frustrated individuals. To some degree they all suffer some sort of neurosis. Only Claude has some balance, and she sacrifices everything for her sisters’ sakes. I don’t know a lot about their parents, but their mother died insane and the father committed suicide, overtaken by a sickly melancholy.”
The doctor also believes Ivette’s paraplegia to be psychosomatic – like the murderess in A Candle for the Devil (1973), her neurosis is the result of having been abandoned at the altar years before.
Her fiancée, it turns out, left her for her best friend.
The relationship between the three women is one of obligation – all three maintain that they are ‘stuck’ together, and complain frequently about being shut away from the rest of the world (the nympho Nicole being literally locked in her room at times by the jealous Claude), but none of them will do anything about it.
Instead they play manipulative games, vying for male attention (which has included a rotating stable of groundskeepers), sneaking around and spying on each other.
Claude has assumed a matronly role in the house – her beauty is not immediately apparent due to her severely pulled-back hair and a permanent scowl – and the doctor urges her to seek out a normal life away from her sisters and their neuroses; his insistence that she is the most ‘balanced’ of the three sisters is belied by the fact that she refuses to acquire a more modern artificial limb, even though she laments that her current one is “hideous and disgusting”.
For Claude, there is safety in ugliness, but Claude’s predicament is symptomatic of a larger problem: change is frightening and inconvenient.
This was the defining factor explaining why I idolized my sister conversely resenting my mother; my mother fabricated excuses as to why she had to remain in an unhappy situation while Karen – by running away from home – made the statement that she would never put up with anything less than she felt she deserved.
Little did I know that years later Karen would prove to be just as complacent.
As with most people who refuse to remove themselves from damaging situations, Claude feels more comfortable blaming her loneliness on her family obligations and her mild physical handicap than on her own unwillingness to take steps toward fulfilment.
Even when Gilles makes advances towards her, she protests: “No one can like me. I can only be disgusting.”
My mother and sister in particular had struggled with the identities being shaped for them by the new familial arrangement: Karen was used to doing whatever she wanted due to my stepfather’s lack of parenting skills, and my mother was too busy nursing some serious emotional wounds to deal with Karen’s confrontational nature.
So the concept of family is something I’ve always looked at from a distance, making those films that emphasize the posturing inherent in family constructs especially interesting.
In common with The Corruption of Chris Miller, the roles in Nikos Nikolaidis’s Singapore Sling (1990) are substitutive and contrived (and both films end the same way, which I won’t disclose here).
A man searching for his lost love stumbles upon an isolated villa where two women play out a perverse identity game.
We don’t know the precise relationship between these women – who have assumed a mother/daughter dynamic – only that it’s a dangerously co-dependent one.
Barely conscious upon arrival, he is quickly adopted into the fold as both plaything and patriarch.
The film is a depraved take on Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir Laura, and the lush black and white cinematography by Aris Stavrou recalls the esteemed work of Welles staple Gregg Toland even amid the sea of nauseating decadence and spiritual corruption that it enthusiastically puts on display.
The secluded house in Singapore Sling is a sticky arena for masturbation, pedophilic obsession, gluttony and erotic regurgitation, vivified more confusingly by remarkable performances that would have been Oscar-worthy in any other kind of film.
But in the cinematic landscape, Singapore Sling lives in a place entirely its own.
While the man doesn’t speak a word of dialogue throughout the whole film, his off-screen narration guides us through the basic elements of his past that have led him here, as well as his internal struggle to make sense of the situation in which he now finds himself.
The actresses, on the other hand, address the camera directly, constantly reminding us that this twisted scenario is playing out for our benefit.
Substitution, and the role-playing that results from it, is discernible everywhere in Singapore Sling.
The two women act out their mother/daughter fantasy – wherein they are lovers as well as kin – and the younger woman also confesses to having a sexual relationship with her absent ‘father’ before the two women killed him.
At the heart of the film and its bizarre trajectory of torture and manipulation is the visiting man’s belief that the younger woman is actually his missing girlfriend, Laura.
He is willing to endure physical, mental and sexual humiliation in an attempt to save her, but he appears already too broken to save anyone, including himself.
Instead he succumbs to the pretence they subsist on, assuming multiple roles that blend into one big, messy Freudian nightmare.
The interloper in these films often acts only to illuminate the complex dynamic of its primary characters – in this case the two women.
He is the character who leads us into the story, but the story is not his own.
As in Singapore Sling, the family in the 1970 Freddie Francis feature Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly (based on Maisie Mosco’s stage play Happy Family) are living in a semi-permanent state of infantilism – they exist in a Victorian fantasy world and speak in what Nigel Burrell (in Ten Years of Terror: British Horror Films of 1970s) calls “playground patois”.
Sonny and Girly are teenagers, but dress and act like oversexed 5-year-olds.
The teens habitually pick up strangers (all uniformly named “New Friend”) and bring them to the house for deadly games.
British stage and television actor Michael Bryant plays the latest New Friend – a male prostitute who is lured into their role-playing game and held prisoner until the time when he will inevitably be “sent to the angels”.
The lethal Lolita Girly is the film’s aesthetic centre (thus the shortening of the title in the U.S. to just Girly), but the household is run by a female autocracy – the bedroom-sharing Mumsy and Nanny.
All three women are equally mad, despite Girly’s assertion that, “We’re not mad – we’re happy! We’re a happy family!”
But when Girly discovers the sociopathic Mumsy bedding down with New Friend, she gets inexplicably flustered and tries to win New Friend over by offering to play a game with him called “Mothers and Fathers”.
But New Friend soon realizes that their infantilism is his means of escape – their lack of perspective has left them open to manipulation and confusion.
He starts fuelling Girly’s increasing need for independence.
Girly shares a room with her brother Sonny (complete with an oversized crib with railing and canopy), but she starts bending the rules and wanting things of her own, even though Mumsy says, “in happy families it’s nicer to share.” So they come to an agreement whereby they can share New Friend’s affections on alternating days.
However, this arrangement doesn’t last long before Girly’s budding sexuality and increasing jealousy lays waste to the whole perverse family unit.
Staten Island filmmaker Andy Milligan’s The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! centres on the Mooneys, an eccentric family living in a decrepit Victorian household who are stricken with hereditary lycanthropy.
Although the family has a dying patriarch as their focal point, the men in the family (including middle brother Mortimer and youngest son Malcolm) are subject to the whims of the three distinctly-typed females:
Phoebe, the eldest sister and self-appointed ‘mother’ figure; Monica, the sadistic and attention-starved middle sister; and Diana, the youngest and only educated sister, who is also the most emotionally stable, and born of a different mother than the others.
Sent to medical school abroad so that she could continue her father’s delicate genetic experiments, any hope of cleansing the family bloodline lies in her hands.
Given its predetermined fate on the grindhouse circuit, and produced by renowned exploitation kingpin William Mishkin (who fronted the funds for most of Milligan’s pictures), Rats… is more expertly-written than might be expected.
Milligan’s admitted obsession with Jean Cocteau is manifest in the female characterizations – even Diana, the level-headed one of the bunch, reveals herself to be just as manipulative and murderous as her sisters.
Rats… is ostensibly a werewolf film (the rat subplot only existing as a half-baked attempt to cash in on the then-recent success of Willard, which even gets a nod in the form of blatant on-screen references) but is actually a thinly veiled examination of repression and inbreeding.
The family lives together, feeds together, kills together, and they will die together.
They are suspicious of outsiders, and – bound by a dire family curse – they have reason to be.
They are not especially trusting of one another either, but given that they cannot fraternize freely with others, they have no choice but to maintain a volatile familial loyalty.
Like Singapore Sling, Rats… takes place exclusively on an antiquated family estate.
Milligan loved Victorian settings and they act as the perfect backdrop for his wordy and histrionic dramas.
But more pointedly, the house provides the domestic environment that seems to go hand-in-hand with any horror film predominantly concerned with female characters.
Because the woman’s sphere of influence was traditionally limited to the home – certainly in Victorian times – it is the most believable setting for any exercise in female agency. It is also, by extension, the setting in which a woman’s natural talents for manipulation could have the most resounding success; certainly a prerequisite for Milligan, an admitted misogynist.
Considering Phoebe’s acknowledged sexual relationship with her father, and the emphasis on cleansing the bloodline through extracurricular breeding, it’s obvious that the film’s werewolf premise is allegorical.
The Mooneys’ real affliction then, the cause of their mutual dementia and Malcolm’s permanently arrested development, is likely to be inbreeding.
Despite Diana’s attempts to find a scientific means of escaping the cycle, continued inbreeding is only reinforced further by the repression associated with harbouring such a grim secret.
In family-melodrama horror there is always one family member (in this case Diana) trying to escape the confines of their limited existence, or an outsider coming into the narrative poised to steal them away.
Their only social interaction – which sometimes encompasses sexual intercourse – is with their siblings, but something happens that awakens them to the possibilities of the outside world.
They may even make sincere attempts to escape, but as we have learned from a century of such films, the family always comes first, a reconciliation takes place, and the would-be escapee is forced to recognize their inherent nature and the fact that they belong with their family – especially when they are concealing a secret that would render them socially unacceptable to the outside world.
They retreat to the familiarity of the only people who accept them for who they are.
Again: traumatic bonding.
Repression was a subject Milligan would return to with some frequency in films such as The Degenerates (1967), Seeds (1968) and The Body Beneath (1970). and in literature and film lycanthropy is traditionally linked with repression, notably in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or other famous doppelganger stories.
In The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! – as in Singapore Sling – roles are convoluted and perverted: every daughter becomes a mother, a wife, a killer – they are interchangeable substitutes for the absent mother figures who came before.
In addition to its Victorian setting, Milligan’s film is also notable for its fundamental religious sensibility.
Repression is a keystone of Catholicism, and countless horror films – most notably European ones – rely on Catholic concepts of sin and punishment as plot propellers.
Perhaps this is what has drawn me to the Italian films so often: my parents were church-going Catholics, and the grotesque imagery and dirge chants associated with the faith would inspire horrible dreams, coupled with a crippling sense of guilt that still plagues me to this day.
Catholicism loves its suffering, and teaches that real love and loyalty always involve a tremendous amount of anguish as proof of one’s dedication.
French director Pascal Laugier’s ambitious and controversial Martyrs (2008) is a heady fusion of sibling and doppelganger horror.
While far from a perfect film, Martyrs goes full-throttle into hypotheses of guilt and religious transcendence, but with consequences that are far more grim than anything in Andy Milligan’s Gothic melodrama.
A tidy synopsis would describe Martyrs as a tale of long-term revenge with a metaphysical twist, but — for better or worse — it’s more complex.
It is the tale of two abused children who grow up haunted: Lucie, a young woman determined to murder the strangers who tortured her as a child, dogged by the spectre of a fellow victim who never made it out; and Anna, Lucie’s protector and enabler.
The two women met at a home for orphans and disturbed children, following Lucie’s escape from her captors.
Visibly traumatized, Lucie is reticent and secretive, and only Anna knows about Lucie’s nightly visits from the grotesque, crawling, white-skinned woman that functions equally as a physical manifestation of her guilt over having abandoned another child in escaping, and as a doppelganger that fills her with homicidal rage.
Both Lucie and Anna grow into beautiful young women, not physically dissimilar (further echoing the doppelganger element), but even as she matures outwardly, Lucie is still being followed by the doppelganger, and she believes the only way she can get rid of it is to seek revenge on the people who captured and tortured her almost 20 years earlier.
The black-clad Lucie arrives at the strangers’ house with a loaded shotgun and Anna in tow, and things quickly spiral from a simple revenge story into a morass of substitutive relationships and abject horror.
Martyrs (as with Laugier’s 2004 film Saint Ange) is also strangely preoccupied with 19th century psychological, domestic and spiritual concerns.
This is not unfamiliar in a genre context considering that fin-desiècle culture created the neurotic stereotypes of female psychological development that would come to be the crux of much cinematic horror.
But while Martyrs revels in its protagonists’ neuroticism, it also allows them to transcend it in disturbing fashion.
As indicated by its title, the final act of the film takes a sharp turn in another direction, one whose contrast of graphic physical torture and spiritual cultism divided many audiences.
The strangers’ house is revealed to be a meeting place for a sinister cult that tortures women until they reach a state of ‘grace’ or ‘martyrdom’, hoping that they may be able to provide a key into the afterlife.
Most of these women and children ‘fail’ their torturers by dying like pathetic, whimpering dogs, without ever reaching this state of spiritual perfection.
But Anna, who has accompanied Lucie on her homicidal mission, is different – she has given her life in the service of others, sacrificing her own sanity and safety in the process.
She is practically a saint already.
In the 19th century there was a popular belief that being close to people on the verge of death brought one closer to God, hence people would congregate around the sick and dying hoping to experience a vicarious flicker of divinity – this would later be called ‘The Cult of Invalidism’, and is only one component of Martyrs’s weird Victorian ethic (although the director of Martyrs came to know of this historical precedent only after making his feature).
The film also posits women as more suitable ‘martyrs’ than men, a notion that is prominent not only in Victorian and Edwardian literature but (most infamously) in Japanese cinema as well: the woman sacrifices and endures, ultimately transcending humiliation and debasement to emerge as a noble and revered creature.
Despite its religious overtones, at the heart of Martyrs is the neurotic bond between Anna and Lucie.
Laugier’s focus on the intimacy of this relationship causes the film to be both emotionally and physically insular, facilitated by the delusions of its protagonists: Lucie’s that she can end the mental terror by killing, and Anna’s that she is helping Lucie by allowing her to unravel.
Even as a child though, Anna made a decision about what her role would be in Lucie’s life: she is all things to Lucie: mother, sister, and – it is suggested – lover.
When Lucie is killed, Anna’s loyalty is transferred to another character with equal fervour: a grotesque, white-skinned woman who is discovered deep in the ground beneath the captors’ house, unable to speak or see after years of continuous torture.
It’s no mistake that the white woman bears a remarkable resemblance to the creature that haunted Lucie at night for all those years – in this film, one woman is very like another.
All are equally damaged, but as with any doppelganger film, coexistence isn’t possible for long – one always has to die so that another can live.
The fractured personalities that result from the adoption of different roles, faces or personas are one of the most prominent aspects of sibling- or family-centric horror films; the relationship between the siblings (or pseudo-siblings, as in the case of Martyrs) is often such that one functions as a reflection of the other; they’re not quite doppelganger films but they dabble in the doppelganger lexicon.
Otto Rank’s notion of the doppelganger, or ‘double’ in his 1914 book Der Doppelgänger is the template for all subsequent doppelganger studies, stating that, “all instincts and desires that don’t fit the ‘ideal’ image are rejected and cast out of the self, repressed internally, and inevitably return externally personified in the double, where they can be at once vicariously satisfied and punished.”& It was a concept that would be revisited again and again throughout the history of horror fiction.
Robert Altman made four films that are generally referred to as his ‘Feminine Quartet’: That Cold Day in the Park (1969); Images (1972); 3 Women (1977); and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), two of which – 3 Women and the earlier Images – deal specifically with manufactured familial relationships and the concept of the double (both also bear striking similarities to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 feature Persona).
It would be safe to say that this period is Altman’s darkest hour in terms of exposing the frailties of identity and the inconsistencies of emotion, and these two films are the closest Altman would come to making an outright horror film (That Cold Day in the Park was a more subtle approach to the psychosis that would be full-blown in its two successors).
Images is the more self-referential of the two, thrashing about between chaos and tranquillity, between light and dark, expression and repression – all the while returning to the literal puzzle “with so many missing pieces” that functions as an analogy for the film as a whole.
Susannah York stars as Cathryn, a children’s writer with a husband, two houses, and a split personality.
The film opens with her reciting her newest book in her head, as she will often do throughout the film (whether or not she actually writes children’s books increasingly appears to be a possible delusion – a clever twist being that Susannah York herself wrote the children’s book that the film uses as her character’s story).
The atmosphere and setting are nothing short of brilliant; the eerie score by John Williams is randomly interrupted by sharp, alarming sounds (courtesy of Japanese musician Stomu Yamashta), and the house itself is host to deliberately inconsistent architecture and decor – half of the house is old and dark, the other bright and contemporary.
This certainly hearkens back to the Gothic notion of the house being representative of its owner’s mental state (i.e. The Fall of the House of Usher, Miss Havisham’s Satis House in Great Expectations), and is emphasized by the fact that Cathryn has two homes, one apparently in the city, the other in the country in a magical valley that she loves dearly, almost – revealingly enough – as if it is not real.
Her disconnection from the world outside of her own mind is conveyed straight away by means of her phone call with her friend Joan; she puts the phone down and wanders away, disinterested in what her friend has to say, and when she returns to the conversation there is an alien voice on the line — that of an aggressive, malicious woman who claims to be with Cathryn’s husband.
When her husband returns home, Cathryn questions him furiously as to his previous whereabouts, and when he tries to comfort her – their faces disappearing into the darkness of a kiss – he emerges transformed into another man, and Cathryn is thrown into a fit of hysteria.
This becomes a common occurrence throughout the film: things will transform into other things, voices change, and yet Cathryn will grow accustomed to it and cease to respond as if a change has even taken place.
In Freudian dream-logic – and the film does largely function according to this logic – things, or the illusion of things (i.e. images) ‘condense’.
Condensation, or ‘compression’, occurs in dreams so that many truths can be conveyed to us in a short period of time.
This also relates to the puzzle that appears throughout the film as a recreational activity; a dream is like patchwork, with parts that are lost or missing (but really only forgotten), and when a transformation takes place it is evidence of a mental short cut.
A further complexity of the film, and one connected to the dream-process of condensation, is the appearance of a double.
If the existence of a double is attributed to guilt over the difference between one’s ideal self and one’s actual self, then in Cathryn’s case, the double exists as an outlet for her adulterous desires.
There are two Cathryns (often distinguished by black/white costuming), just as there are two homes, and the camera will follow one and then the other without warning, so that the viewer comes to accept the simultaneous existence of both.
The teenage daughter of her husband’s friend can be seen as a double as well, as the physical similarity between the two is mentioned more than once, and the younger girl tells Cathryn that she wants to be “just like her”.
As further evidence of Altman’s deliberate doubling, the two actresses have interchangeable names – Susannah York plays ‘Cathryn’ while Cathryn Harrison plays ‘Susannah’.
hexafu 