The Psycho Records by Laurence A. Rickels

Author:Laurence A. Rickels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

2

That mummy horror has no history (even the exploitation of King Tut’s curse was a long time coming) is owed to the truth its name cannot conceal: look at Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955) to appreciate what cannot be hidden, only denied or laughed off. We must go back to the very beginning of Hollywood horror to discover the story for which Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932) was the sequel adaptation.

Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra explored the ghostly limits of the sensorium by following a phantom ‘Voice’ and placing the work or ‘opera’ of mourning in the foreground of its tale of haunting. The first film adaptation, Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925), can be watched, after the fact, as the premiere articulation of psycho horror. Toward the close of the Psycho Effect two or three remakes of the story fit this range of recoil. In addition to The Phantom of the Opera by the slasher genre’s European correspondent Dario Argento in 1998, there was, eight years earlier, Phantom of the Opera: The Motion Picture, starring Robert Englund aka Freddy Krueger.

The Faust story, which plays in Gounod’s version on stage in the background of the phantom’s intrigues, enters the slasher phantom’s history in 1990. This phantom sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the ability to break through to masterpiece music and take home the love of his audiences. He asks for renewal of life. But what he forgets to ask for is what he gets (superego-style): the life he wanted to control now hangs from his person as degenerative loss of face. He can save face, the face-to-face, only for the brief duration that lies between each death mask’s perfection and putrefaction.

The pieces of skin he peels off his victims and sews onto his putrid face as heterograft patchwork never last too long. To incapacitate Carlotta so that understudy Christine can rise up in her place, the phantom plants in her closet one of the stagehands, now his skinned victim, still living and bleeding. At a time when The Phantom of the Opera, never an opera, was condemned to be a musical, this slasher film restored the after-the-fact connection between the Psycho Effect and the prehistory passing through it. Throughout the Psycho Effect the medical-prosthetic mask, like that worn by the phantom in Julian’s film, alternates with the metamorphic mangled face which, no longer underneath the firm mask, gets stitched together or doubled by a skin mask. In 1990 a pitch could be made on behalf of the gore face of Freddy Krueger as reclamation of the ‘leather face’, a new mask standard. As I tried to establish as ‘typical’ fantasy in The Devil Notebooks: switching bodies or assuming a victim’s face as flesh mask is not in the main an external ripping off. In keeping with its infernal significance as creative act it implies entering the victim from behind.

My next example of projection of psycho horror inside Leroux’s story is literary.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.