Psychos
Page 61
A special word must be said about the role of women as killers…there’s not nearly enough of them, and the ones who exist embody less the essence of feminine madness than men’s fears of clingy, pushy, emasculating bitches. The conniving stalker in Play Misty for Me (1971) cropped up as an unexpected side effect of the sexual revolution, which gives us the worst of both worlds––an assertive woman who won’t take no for an answer and a clingy freak who doesn’t understand how one-night stands work. Fatal Attraction (1987) defined crazy bitches for a generation, and set up formalized rules for the stalker movie almost as ridiculously formalized as slashers. Feeding on women’s cultivated mutual mistrust, feminized copies of this formula, focusing on the cuckolded wife’s POV, continue to dominate the fem-friendly Lifetime network.
Female psychos get short shrift in Hollywood, but one remarkable film that came out the same year as Fatal Attraction actually tried to give us a crime drama with a totally female dynamic. Staid DOJ agent Debra Winger’s body-strewn pursuit of the chameleonic killer Theresa Russell in Black Widow (1987) causes her to delve into the otherness of the sexual predator in an intriguing mirror of the police procedural arc, even adding a layer of sexual tension that all but renders the film’s male victims irrelevant. Russell is a chillingly realized female Ted Bundy as she charms, marries, and subtly murders rich suckers. If this one had ended more like Hannibal (the book, not the movie), it would’ve been a legendary kick in the balls to male audiences.
But the reigning queen psycho is still Annie Wilkes in Misery (1990). No more lavish portrait of a psychotic killer has been committed to the printed page than the murderous, Liberace-loving nurse who captures and torments her favorite author. Stephen King clearly put into his novel all the angst he’s felt over his legions of demanding fans, but the movie blows it away with William Goldman’s drum-tight script and Kathy Bates’s squirmily convincing portrayal. Asexual yet addicted to a saccharine delusion of “romance,” Wilkes’s femininity is almost irrelevant. She wants to make the world a decent place, free of lies and pain and cockadoodie dirty things, but her methods would shame a Siberian gulag. To be at the mercy of a lunatic, hostage to her violent mood swings and fits of temper, is the worst kind of hell imaginable for an artist, but at least it’s an audience.
To identify with the killer in our overcrowded modern herd is to identify with power, but a far more troubling theme, which cuts to the heart of our fear of the insane, asks us to identify with madness. If our fears of being killed by a wandering maniac are enervating fantasies, then our fear of going insane ourselves is something much deeper and darker, and therefore much harder to depict effectively on screen.
As the bereaved widower of a Manson victim, Roman Polanski would come to know all too well what the former kind of terror is like, but he had already broken out with an authoritative cinematic treatise on the latter variety. Repulsion (1965) postulates the most horrible unexamined aspect of the question of madness: Could it happen to you? Catherine Deneuve is like the prototype of the virgin survivor type of every slasher flick, yet it is she, alone in a strange apartment and wound into a frenzy of sexualized terror, who becomes both killer and victim. Her mushrooming hysteria turns to manslaughter in a short series of scenes, but witnessing it, we feel every twitch of crumbling sanity. Putting himself into the crucible in The Tenant (1976), Polanski succumbs to an obsessive terror at the thought of being possessed by a ghost, à la “The Horla.”
A more convoluted but similarly troubling theme is struck in Session 9 (2001) and Shutter Island (2010), which play on our fears of mental institutions as more a vector for incubating and spreading mental illness than curing it. That the investigator or the administrator in these kinds of films invariably ends up being a patient is only a dishonest twist to rationalize our irrational fear of the unclean getting upon us.
A vital subgenre mining this fear is the transplant film, which digs even deeper into organic mistrust and superstition tarted up as cutting-edge science. Oddly enough, the French have done more than their share in this line. Our heads tell us that tissue is tissue, but a killer’s hands trump a loving heart and a rational mind.
Mad Love (1935), an American adaptation of Maurice Renard’s 1920 novel Les Mains d’Orlac pitted Peter Lorre as a mad surgeon who grafted a killer’s hands onto concert pianist Colin Clive, in hopes of somehow stealing his wife. Hands of Orlac was adapted twice more, and planted a generational seed in French minds. Crime writing duo Pierre Boileau and George Narcejac (Diabolique, Vertigo) adapted the popular novel Les yeux sans visage into the film Eyes without a Face (1960), in which another mad surgeon captures girls and steals their faces to heal his own disfigured daughter.
In 1965, they took the premise a step further with their novel Choice Cuts, a laughably awesome medical thriller in which a murderer is cannibalized for spare parts. When his limbs and even his head(!) are grafted onto ordinary citizens who turn to murder––yes, even the guy with the feet––the question of the seat of the soul is set back at least ten centuries in pursuit of shock.
Somehow, this misbegotten gem misfired in Hollywood’s first attempt to shoot it, but a very loose adaptation by Eric Red––creator of superhuman serial killer spiritual guide John Ryder in the iconic The Hitcher (1986)––finally emerged in 1991 as the intermittently hilarious Body Parts. Here, evil or madness is like leprosy, a corruption of biology that cannot be purged from the flesh. If it took itself too seriously to be as fun as it could’ve been, it didn’t take itself nearly as seriously as the hammy, the horripilating…The Hand (1981).
When hot-tempered comic artist Jon Lansdale (Michael Caine) loses his hand in a car accident, sultan of subtlety Oliver Stone goes to work on him and us with a string of murders that may or may not have been committed by Lansdale’s missing digits. The idea that his hand is out there, somehow acting as an agent of Lansdale’s suppressed id, is somehow preferable to the audience than the possibility that it’s all in his mind, and he’s another ordinary one-handed killer.
The very rational fear of losing all rationality is stripped to its barest essence in 28 Days Later (2002). Mislabeled and celebrated as a zombie film amid the current craze, the epidemic of madness as a viral plague in Danny Boyle’s stripped-down apocalypse renders its victims into screaming, eating killers in seconds. No understanding of the mental degeneration into madness is offered or expected. The suddenness with which Brendan Gleason’s infection drives him to kill his cherished child is little more than a gimmick, but its flagrant disregard for our precious individual sanities is exciting to watch from afar. Thankfully, unlike real mindlessness, the plague uses up its victims and burns itself out.
A better specimen for the understanding of what our sanity means to us and what it means to lose it is Pontypool (2009): a locked-room apocalypse in which a corrupted linguistic meme causes a complete mental breakdown. Adapted by Tony Burgess from his novel Pontypool Changes Everything, the other mislabeled zombie flick succeeds on higher intellectual levels than anything in the survival horror genre because its protagonists are only incidentally fighting the brainless army seeking to crush them with their dyslexic fury. The real enemy is the virus itself, which—like so many manias, crazes, and rushes to stupid wars—is a virus of words.
We are justifiably afraid of violence to our precious, fragile bodies, which may come in the dramatic form of a pinhead in a hockey mask or the tainted Tylenol in our medicine chest, because of someone else’s insanity. But this is a fear we can’t control and can’t really imagine coming for us, and so it’s always been fun, and it always will be.
In an era when every ethnic, social, professional, and religious group has a vigorous media watchdog, mental illness will always be fair game because of the other fear, the very real one, that dogs us all…
That through a traumatic episode or an undiagnosed hiccup of heredity—or in the golden degradation of advanced age—we might join that untouchable minority.
And go mad ourselves.
APPENDIX B
The Albert Fish Letter
Editor’s note: What follows is, I believe, the precise transcript. It is by far the most horrifying piece of writing in this book because it’s true. And if you read it, it will haunt you for the rest of your days. Not in a good way. But in a very real one.
You have been sincerely warned.
Dear Mrs. Budd. In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong, China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1-3 per pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak—chops—or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girl’s behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys, one 7 and one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them—tortured them—to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 year old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except the head—bones and guts. He was roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried and stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E 100 St. near—right side. He told me so often how good human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3, 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick—bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.
Acknowledgements
I hope you’ll forgive me if I keep it short and sweet. Reason being: I’M BEAT! All these months of full-tilt immersion in crazy have strangely taken their toll; and all I wanna do now is curl up in bed, go to sleep, and dream about nice people doing nice things.
Speaking of nice people…THANK YOU, DINAH DUNN, for being as smart, tough, kind, and open-minded an editor as this editor could possibly wish for. Thanks to all at Black Dog for keeping our winning streak streakin’.
Thanks to Lori Perkins, Ravenous Shadows, Fungasm Press, Eraserhead Press, Crossroad Press, and everybody else whose business interest in my work helps keep me alive and kickin’.
Thanks to Cody Goodfellow, for the constant brilliant above-and-beyond.
Thanks to Andrew Kasch and the filmmaking community we have entered into together, giving me a new creative lease on life.
Thanks to Janie, Max, Chris, Bianca, Dan, Allison, Mike, Mehran, Kaitlin, Stan, Sadie, Scoob, and all residents of Cazador Manor, past and present, for giving me the place I call home.
Thanks to Marianne, Mykey, Melanie, and the brand-new Griffin-Bennett Skipp-East, freshly expanding our nuclear family. Thanks to Tim, Griffin’s dad. Thanks to my dad and mom, my sisters, and on out through the gorgeous ganglia of our ever-expanding human family tree.
Thanks to all my friends, and many more warm acquaintances. Thanks to everyone who appreciates the work. Thanks to the members of the Horror Writers Association, who awarded Demons with the Stoker award for Outstanding Anthology in 2012, thereby stamping approval on our whole mad series of cool.
Finally, thanks to all the astounding writers who made this book what it is, and these books what they are. And thanks to all the great ones who didn’t make it in this time, but made my job so goddamn hard by being so goddamn good.
As it turns out, this wasn’t so short after all. But it sure feels sweet to thank you all. It’s the least I can do.
I LOVE YOU GUYS! THANK YOU!!!
About the Author
John Skipp is a New York Times bestselling author and editor, whose 23 books have sold millions of copies in a dozen languages worldwide. His first anthology, Book of the Dead, laid the foundation in 1989 for modern zombie literature. He has edited three anthologies for Black Dog & Leventhal, Zombies, Werewolves and Shape Shifters, and Demons, which won a Bram Stoker award. From splatterpunk founding father to hilarious elder statesmen, Skipp's legendary horror works include The Light At The End, The Scream, Jake's Wake, and The Long Last Call.
For Scooby Hamilton, that crazy dog.
Copyright © 2012 Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information and retrieval systems without written permission of the publisher.
CLASSICAL SCENES OF FAREWELL © 2011 Jim Shepard, Reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
MARMALADE WINE From GREEN FLASH AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR, copyright © 1971 by Joan Aiken Enterprises Ltd., Copyright renewed 1999 by Joan Aiken Enterprises Ltd. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. All rights reserved.
THE SMALL ASSASSIN © 1946 Ray Bradbury Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc.
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INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD © 1991 Joe R. Lansdale. First published in Night Visions.
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IN FOR A PENNY © 1999 Lawrence Block
NOW HOLD STILL © 2012 David J. Schow
FEMININE ENDINGS © 2007 Neil Gaiman
GOING SOLO © 2012 Leah Mann
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RALPH AND JERRY © 2012 Leslianne Wilder
AND WHAT DID YOU SEE IN THE WORLD? © 2010 Norman Partridge
LIFE WITH FATHER © 1998 Bentley Little
THE SHALLOW END OF THE POOL © 2008 Adam-Troy Castro
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INTRUDER © 2012 John Boden
STRAYCATION © 2012 Scott Bradley and Peter Giglio
LIFE COACH © 2012 Cody Goodfellow
RIGHTEOUS © 2012 Weston Ochse
THE MEANING OF LIFE © 2012 Amelia Beamer
DAMAGED GOODS © 1993 Elizabeth Massie
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; AT EVENTIDE © 2000 Kathe Koja
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