THE DEVIL BAT (1940)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


THE DEVIL BAT marks poverty-row studio PRC's first attempt to enter the horror-picture business, as well as the first of several microbudgeted fright-films for Bela Lugosi. As he would in various other poverty flicks, Lugosi plays a mad scientist with a particular mad-on for the mundane world that has rejected his outre theories.

One of the odd aspects of the film is that in its opening it's at pains to tell viewers that Lugosi's character, small-town chemist Dr. Paul Carruthers, is universally liked by everyone in town. Presumably this was to downplay Lugosi as the "suspicious foreigner" figure he so often played. Frankly, Carruthers doesn't seem especially likeable, though the actor was capable of projecting charming qualities.

Carruthers nurses a long-concealed grievance: long ago he devised formulae for shaving-lotions for a company in which he held membership. He opted to let his partners buy him out for a cash settlement, and then to his dismay saw them go on to become millionaires from his invention. Carruthers finally decides that he will take vengeance with a unique method. Using advanced electrical treatments, he causes common bats to grow about three times their normal size, and then trains them to attack anything with a certain scent. That scent can only be found in a new brand of shaving-lotion that Carruthers distributes only to the men who bought him out. As soon as the intended victims slap the lotion on their throats, they get unerring visits from the giant bats ready to tear out their jugular veins. Eventually, however, intrepid reporter Dave O'Brien (two years ahead of his becoming "Captain Midnight" in a serial) uncovers Carruthers' scheme and turns the tables on the mad bat-breeder.

One surprising facet of DEVIL BAT is that Carruthers manages to keep his emnity for his former partners under wraps over the course of many years, but presumably the script needed him to do so. Had any of the victims known of his hostility, surely none of them would have donned the deadly cream. Moreover, none of the magnates consider that they cheated Carruthers, which would be the more expected trope of economic exploitation. One of them even reflects, more unthinkingly than callously, that if only Carruthers hadn't let them buy him out, he'd be as rich as any of them. The script thus places the responsibility for the scientist's past failure squarely on his own shoulders. Thus his long-cherished grievances seem to have less of the grandeur of a Promethean challenge to the gods, as seen in Lugosi's Dr. Mirakle in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, and more like the repressed anger of Uriah Heep from Dickens' DAVID COPPERFIELD. This bit of psychology is the only reason I give the film a "fair" rating in terms of mythicity.

Naturally Lugosi's performance is the star attraction here, but O'Brien is one of the few cast-members who proves memorable. Jean Yarbrough's direction on his first horror-picture-- of which he would make a scattered few during his career-- is efficient, but there's not much he can do to eliminate the comic effect of the papier-mache bats. Yet though one imdb review called DEVIL BAT a "comedy-horror," the comic elements aren't prominent, and are actually kept in control-- which is more than one can say of many other horror-films that included wisecracking reporters in the mix.

One odd metatextual touch: about halfway through the picture, after reporter O'Brien kills one of the bats with a handgun, a subsequent newspaper headline is presented to viewers reading, "REPORTER KILLS DEVIL BAT." This is fairly risible in itself, but not as funny as the only other two words discernible to DVD viewers on the screen: "GIRLS" and "AMERICANISM."

DEAD OF NIGHT (1945)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological, metaphysical*


It's always puzzled me that 20th-century British cinema was so slow to exploit the pleasures of scary stories, given that the culture boasts some of the best-known masters of the fictional frisson, ranging from novelists like Stoker and Shelley to those better known from spooky short tales, like M.R. James and E.F. Benson. Whatever the reason, Ealing Studios's 1945 anthology film DEAD OF NIGHT finally translated the quintessential feel of the British horror-tale into celluloid. That it included adaptations from two British prose-authors, the aforementioned Benson and H.G. Wells may have helped guide the filmmakers (despite the fact that one doesn't ordinarily think of "H.G. Wells" and "horror" in the same sentence).

DEAD OF NIGHT begins with a dream, and to some extent, one never definitively knows where dream and reality part company. Architect Walter Craig (Mervyn Johns) journeys to a country house to investigate a business prospect, only to find that he has a hazy recollection of his host and all of the man's guests from his dreams. Craig's tormented fear that his dreams may come true in some way sparks the guests to start relating their own brushes with the supernatural, with one noteworthy exception. Three of the stories related deal with ghostly survival ("Christmas Party," "Haunted Mirror," and "Golfing Story,"), a fourth, "The Hearse Driver," deals with a timely premonition, and the last, "The Ventriloquist," is told by psychologist Dr. Van Stratten (Frederick Valk) about a ventriloquist whose mental problems cause him to take on a "dual identity" with his dummy. Throughout the framing-sections of the anthology Van Stratten functions as a foil to the others, who tend to show some tentative belief in the supernatural. Van Stratten is never decisively converted by the anecdotes, but when one aspect of Craig's dream comes true-- with deadly results for the psychologist-- he comes to regret his staunch materialism.

That "quintessential feel" I mentioned above is the film's ability to convey how hints of the supernatural slowly infiltrate the cultural belief-systems of the protagonists. Because all of them exemplify stereotypical British traits of reasonableness and common decency, the eruptions of the incomprehensible into their worlds becomes all the more effective. Ironically, the doctrine of scientific materialism is exemplified by a character given a Germanic-sounding name, which may have allowed the original British audience to "distance" themselves more from materialism and to believe in parapsychological events as being more true to common experience.

It's ironic that the final story in DEAD is not, strictly speaking, marvelous as the others are; since there's never any strong conviction that the rebellious ventriloquist's dummy is actually alive, I would label the story by itself "uncanny." Yet "The Ventriloquist" is for many fans their favorite story. On my earlier viewings, I found it creepy enough, but not nearly as persuasive as some later "dummy-horror" outings. In addition, the character of the maybe-schizophrenic ventriloquist isn't drawn nearly as well as some of the other characters. "Haunted Mirror" manages to play on the unease between a man and woman planning on joining their lives together, as a ghost slowly possesses the husband and turns him against his new wife, with nearly fatal results. "Christmas Party" also deals with the sins of the past, albeit in more mournful, less scary fashion. "Golfing Story" (the tale adapted from Wells) is an amusing tale of two golf-rivals bickering with one another from beyond the grave, giving the viewer a brief respite from the doom and gloom. But for my money, "Hearse Driver," in which the tale-teller describes a near-brush with destiny, had the creepiest vibe, although the final dream-sequence in Craig's head-- in which he encounters all the figures from everyone else's stories-- is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

In terms of phenomenality the film presents some problems. In the end, it seems as if everything the viewer has seen has been part of Craig's dream. If this was the entirety of the film I might label it with the trope "delirious dreams and fallacious figments." Yet, because Craig seems to be in diegetic "reality" for the last frames of the film-- because it seems that he is finally about to have a "real" encounter with all these people narrating stories of "real" encounters with the supernatural-- I've labelled the film as dominantly "marvelous."

The Campbellian motifs here depend on the focus of each particular story. I would judge most of them dominantly psychological, particularly "Haunted Mirror," but the framing-story supplies some simplified debates about the nature of the metaphysical. And to the extent that DEAD OF NIGHT conveys the sense of British commonplace rationalism breaking down, the film also incarnates a minor sociological-cultural conflict.

FIRESTARTER: REKINDLED (2002)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


By the time the Sci-Fi Channel rebranded itself as "Syfy," I thought their new name should have read, "ShiFi," for "Shitty Films."

Now in 2002 the Channel hadn't garnered quite so bad a reputation, at least as far as my memory goes. However, I must have had low expectations for this 2-part telefilm, since I copied it and squirreled it away for some future date.

My low expectations may've sprung from a disinterest in the original theatrical film. I've never read the Stephen King novel on which the 1984 FIRESTARTER was based, but I didn't find the film all that compelling, and have never watched it a second time. Now that I've watched the telefilm, I'm free to dis REKINDLED for its own lack of ambition rather than its failing to live up to the original's pattern. .

FIRESTARTER: REKINDLED (no "2" in the broadcast title) is technically not a strict sequel to FIRESTARTER, but more of a "soft reboot." In this reboot pyrokinetic Charlie McGee still has a childhood encounter with the mad Amerindian secret agent John Rainbird. However, in the reboot she does not kill Rainbird as a result of that encounter, but escapes his influence and that of his secret organization. She grows to young womanhood but sadly can't lose her virginity, since every time she tries to do so she risks giving the guy a much "hotter" time than he expects.

I'm not exactly sure what master maneuvers Charlie performed to keep Rainbird's organization from finding her, but one day Vincent, a young accountant working for the secret society, picks up Charlie's trail. Before you can say "Richard Kimble," Rainbird's people are on Charlie's trail. In the meantime, Vincent falls in love with Charlie and joins her. In addition to his regular cadre of killers, Rainbird also unleashes on Charlie a small team of super-powered boy children. I can't help but wonder if the scriptwriter had given the 2000 X-MEN film a watch and then opted to steal a march on the X-sequel with this brood of "new mutants." Be that as it may, the two fights that fire-powered Charlie has with the superkids are easily the best parts of the film.

Despite the length of the film, none of the characters are given much attention. Even mad Rainbird comes off as fairly dull despite the efforts of Malcolm McDowell. Dennis Hopper has a more minor role in the film, which seems to be little more than plot-padding. This is even more true of a peculiar vignette-that-goes-nowhere involving another psychic-talented young woman, Deborah Van Valkenburgh.

For what she's given to work with, Marguerite Moran does a creditable job as the tormented pyro-girl. But even the 1984 Drew Barrymore film flirts with a sort of "bad father/innocent daughter" vibe between Charlie and Rainbird. The climax touches on that dynamic but doesn't really build logically to that conclusion. So in terms of the psychological potential of the telefilm, REKINDLED never-- what else-- catches fire.

BERSERK (1967)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

***SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS**


Though there are some perceptive psychological motifs scattered throughout the Herman Cohen-Aben Kandel script for BERSERK, I can't help feeling that if they'd been doing this script in college we'd have witnessed them peeking over Robert Bloch's shoulder to read his notes for STRAIT-JACKET (1964).

To be sure, many horror critics have noted that even in his films of the 1950s writer-producer Herman Cohen showed a penchant for depicting young people being exploited or dominated by the older generation, often mad scientists like the ones in I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF and I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN. That said, since in BERSERK Cohen and Kanel had to focus on a female star, Joan Crawford (then over 60 years old) it's perhaps natural enough that this time the conflict became one between older and younger females.

The photo above in essence depicts three women in a contentious stance. At center stands Crawford's character, circus-owner Monica Rivers, while at left is her demure looking daughter Angela (Judy Geeson) and at right is the flamboyant circus-performer Matilda (Diana Dors). It's significant that director Jay Connolly's mise-en-scene shows romantic lead Ty Hardin more or less skulking off to the side, for as the diegesis eventally reveals, men really are pretty irrelevant to the main conflict of BERSERK.

Hardin's character, wire-walker Frank Hawkins, makes his entrance near the picture's beginning, just after the circus' regular wire-walker meets a grisly death. Did Hawkins arrange his death so that he could get a job with the patrician Miss Rivers, who buried one husband and seems to rule the circus despite any input by her supposed partner Dorando (Michael Gough)? Dorando is patently jealous when Hawkins starts seeing Monica in the wee hours of the night, and in moments, Dorando is the next to die, killed in the film's most memorable scene: a spike being pounded through his head.

Yet Hawkins is never a serious suspect for the audience or the film's characters. Because the deaths boost patron attendance, the performers begin to suspect that Monica, not content with using them in the usual capitalistic manner, is actually killing them for profit. Matilda is the most vocal voice against Monica, but her case is compromised by the fact that she tries to get a thing going with Hawkins. Hawkins tosses her out, though it's clear he's doing it purely to protect his meal-ticket.

Thus even before the late appearance-- over halfway through the picture-- of Monica's daughter Angela, BERSERK is set up to present a sexual conflict between representatives of older and younger generations (Dors was in her thirties at the time). By contrast Geeson appears, in keeping with her name, to be "angelic:" she's discharged from her girls' school and dropped off at the circus because she's guilty of a lot of silly misdemeanors. Yet she makes it clear that she doesn't like Hawkins sleeping around with her mother ("She's too old for him") and seems to seek redress by teaming up with another performer, an older-- and married-- knife-thrower. Surprisingly, even though Angela is seen as the target of the man's knives during a public performance, there are hardly any of the phallic visual puns one might expect.

Compared to some psycho-films of the time, the female body-count is low here: only Matilda falls victim to a big-top murder, and the film ends with the death of the weak suspect Hawkins, who is sent plummeting to a bloody death upon upturned daggers. Angela then reveals herself as the murderess so quickly that one suspects the scripters were impatient to let her recite her wealth of grievances against her unmotherly mother. She even accuses Monica of having killed Angela's father, which may speak less to Monica's actual murderousness than to her lack of maternal and familial values. Angela, having killed the man who tried to supplant her father's memory and the woman who was in essence Monica's "disobedient daughter," is then quickly disposed of by a convenient lightning-bolt that furnishes a cost-free electrocution.

CHOCOLATE (2008)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*


CHOCOLATE is one of those kung-fu films that just totters on the brink between naturalistic and uncanny worlds, but ends up falling into the latter category. On balance the main thrust of the story involves an ordinary citizen taking up kung-fu arms against a corrupt criminal element exploiting society, much after the fashion of Bruce Lee's 1971 classic FISTS OF FURY.

All the kung-fu stunts performed by the heroine "Zen" (Thai actress JeeJa Yanin) are, while only barely believable, still within the framework of a naturalistic phenomenality. If the film had shown Zen rigorously training to gain these superlative fighting-skills, CHOCOLATE wouldn't fall into any metaphenomenal category. However, what tips the balance is that Zen's skills result from her being autistic, which apparently functions to heighten her reflexes and her ability to imitate any kung-fu move she sees (especially in-- what else?-- old-school kung-fu films). Whereas a more realistic kung-fu film may depict the hero honing his fight-routines over months of hard training, CHOCOLATE shows perhaps ten seconds of Zen kicking a stationary object to harden herself for the fights ahead.

I'm not downgrading the film for not depicting either autism or kung-fu training in more realistic terms. In essence, for CHOCOLATE autism functions to grant the heroic figure a means by which she can act more quickly than most ordinary people can, due to the normal reservations of civilized living. This is why I label the film as "cosmological," which in Campbellian terms applies to all aspects of the physical world that can be rendered into mythic discourse. There's only a brief discussion in the film of the strange psycho-physical properties that make Zen the way she is. In essence, though, her unique mentality is a gift that might as well be given to her by the gods of war, or (to cite a parallel to Hong Kong martial films) by the power of inebriation, as seen in the various "drunk fu" subgenre films.

There's no psychological complexity here. Once Zen finds out that various Thai gangsters owe money to her mother (who desperately needs expensive medical treatments), she goes after them with singleminded purpose and flying fists and feet. Only once does her autism hamper her, in that she has an irrational fear of flies. However, even when this weakness threatens to undermine her performance in one fight-scene, Zen simply shakes off her fear like a traditional hero and kicks major booty anyway.

BITCH SLAP (2009)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama* [CORRECTION: *irony*]
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


Writer-director Rick Jacobson's homage to the T&A oeuvre of Russ Meyer may not have a script as well-written (for a trash classic, that is) as the one Jack Moran wrote for Meyer's FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! But Jacobson does a great job of trying (as most Meyer imitators do not) of trying to make his trashy epic as violent and bawdy as possible under current cultural conditions. Said conditions mean that unlike Meyer, but like Quentin Tarantino, Jacobson can get away with almost every kind of violence and sexual reference to earn his "R" rating, but little actual nudity.

This is a film which I label "uncanny" only thanks to a few marginal elements in the story; had they been left out, it would be a "naturalistic" (however unrealistic) storyline. The central plot concerns three hot women who drive out to a house in the desert (by itself a trope with a strong resemblance to PUSSYCAT). Jacobson also changes up the "tough babe" ratio from the Meyer film. PUSSCYAT sported two hot women who weren't especially tough and one (Tura Satana's character) who was a karate-chopping wonder. Here one of the women, Trixie (Julia Voth, seen at left in the photo above), registers as a wimp, albeit one with a certain manipulative flair. The other two, Hel (Erin Cummings) and Camero (America Olivo), are proficient in both gun-skills and hand-to-hand fighting, and the film gives both ample chances to show off those abilities. The three of them do bring a male prisoner to the deserted house with them, but he doesn't survive his interrogation long enough to play much of a role in the story.

Said interrogation takes place largely to explain the women's mission: they're looking for a cache of money allegedly concealed on the property by a mysterious crimeboss known only as "Pinky" (almost surely a hat-tip to the Japanese subgenre of crimefilms nicknamed "Pinky Violence" pictures, since films in this category often included formidable women characters). Trixie is more or less being dragged into the plot by the more assertive Hel and Camero, though it eventually comes out that one of the three is actually a sort of superspy looking not for money but for a buried trove of nanotechnology, which is one of the aforementioned "uncanny" devices. Others such devices occur not in the main plot but in the many flashbacks scattered throughout the body of the film. One flashback shows the "lady superspy" pulling off some typically absurd James Bond stunt with the aid of rocket-skis. Another depicts what happened when the tech was stolen from the army by the phantasmal Pinky, not clearly seen thanks to some sort of dark ninja garb but essentially decimating a cadre of soldiers a la KILL BILL. Pinky even goes Beatrice Kiddo one better, using a sword to deflect gunfire.

As noted these marginal fantasy-elements barely impact the main theme, which involves the three women stuck in the middle of nowhere quarreling with one another, or having sex with one another, or eventually battling two gangsta-wannabes who show up trying to hijack the treasure: Hot Wire (William Gregory Lee) and Kinki (Minae Noji). There's also a deputy sheriff who shows up and eventually gets drawn into the chaos, while all the while the beleaguered gang-girls keep trying to complete their errand before their nemesis Pinky overtakes them. As to Pinky's nature, deponent saith not, but the experienced viewer will probably see this particular plot-development coming from many a mile away.

I give BITCH SLAP a fair rating in terms of its psychological mythicity. This isn't because the film imparts any psychological depth to any of the characters, who are all intended to be larger-than-life archetypes of formidable femininity. Rather, I rate BS "fair" simply because Jacobson does a good job of balancing these archetypes against one another so that they don't seem overly predictable (even if the script itself frequently is). As noted above, Trixie is manipulative and cunning, Camero is violent and unstable, and Hel is driven and businesslike. Yet although none of them is either "realistic" or even intended to be so, Jacobson plays them off one another well enough.

Still, the emphasis is on sex and violence, not character. At one point a character (perhaps speaking as a filmic alter ego for Jacobson?) says something like "I love a good catfight." Viewers who love hard-hitting punch-like-a-man female combat shouldn't be disappointed here, especially given that the two most formidable femmes have not one but two concluding fight-scenes.

Jacobson's resume, in fact, reads like a laundry list of many of the best-known formidable-female TV-shows of the 1990s and 2000s: XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS, LA FEMME NIKITA, CLEOPATRA 2525 (which also sported a lead heroine named "Hel'), and SHE SPIES, not to mention short runs on serials that mixed male and female heroes (MORTAL KOMBAT: CONQUEST, HERCULES: THE LEGENDARY JOURNEYS). Jacobson's experience working on a lot of the "Renaissance Pictures" shows is unquestionably the reason why BITCH SLAP features short perfs by several alumni of those shows: Kevin Sorbo, Michael Hurst, stuntwoman Zoe Bell, and even a short "reunion" of Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor.

The director's commentary isn't nearly as entertaining as the film, but it does have its share of "wow-we'd-never-duplicate-that-stunt-in-a-million-years" stories and is worth a listen.

ADDENDA:  On reconsideration I've decided that the narrative emphasis of BITCH SLAP is not that of "pathos," which is typical of the drama, but "sparagmos," dealing with not just the rending of bodies (which certainly occurs in SLAP) but the rending of souls as well, which is the essential result of the Big Reveal at film's end.

MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


SPOILERS AHEAD...

...although, if there's any famous film that needs spoilers about as much as THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, it's probably Tod Browning's 1935 MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, itself a remake of the famed lost silent film LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT.

To my recollection, long before I saw the film, it was commonplace for horror film-books to reveal MARK'S denouement: that the only "mark" that truly concerned the false vampires was the kind of "mark" actors have to stand on to deliver their lines. I feel reasonably sure that I never saw MARK without knowing in advance that the spooky Count Mora and his daughter Luna (rated by many fans as the first definitive image of the cinematic female vampire) were just actors playing the part of bloodsuckers as part of a detective's gambit to unmask a murderer.

Given that LONDON remains a lost film, there's no percentage in drawing comparisons between bits and pieces fans know about that film and this remake. It does interest me a bit to reflect the change in the story's location from England to Czechoslovakia, which was reflected in the film's working title "The Vampires of Prague." It's likely Browning changed the location to piggyback on the success of his earlier foray into vampirism, the formidable 1931 DRACULA. He even begins the film not with any of the main characters but with the humble peasantry singing mournful songs. One old woman has a bad experience in a cemetery, being spooked by a common bat and catching the hem of her dress on a tool that looks, for a moment, like a clutching skeletal hand. Though the sequence has nothing to do with the plot as such, one might argue that it sets up the audience for the quasi-Freudian revelation that the only boogiemen with whom mortals must contend are the constructs of their own minds.

The plot of MARK is, as many critics have observed, frankly preposterous. The patriarch of a wealthy Prague family, Sir Karell Borotyn, dies suddenly of two wounds in his neck and the loss of all the blood in his body. Though police inspector Neumann (Lionel Atwill) and many of his colleagues refuse to credence vampires, there are enough believers around (such as Donald Meek's certifying doctor) that the inquest concludes that the death takes place by "causes unknown." None of this does bereaved daughter Irena or her fiancee Fedor much good, though Irena's neighbor and guardian Baron Otto (Jean Hersholt) hovers in the background to provide solicitude of some sort.

Then, though Browning's diegesis is far from clear on this point, an entire year passes without much change (causing one to marvel at Fedor's patience!) Then suddenly two vampires start hanging around the local abandoned castle, apparently the recrudescent forms of Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) and his daughter Luna (Carol Borland). In a movement also strongly reminiscent of DRACULA, the two vampires eventually start flitting in and out of the Borotyn house. Count Mora doesn't do very much but Luna seems to take a particular interest in Irena, with a slight suggestion of some lesbian vampire action. With uncanny alacrity the vampires are followed by an apparent vampire hunter Professor Zelen (Lionel Barrymore), who gives all the usual Van Helsing advice about dealing with vampires, and predicts darkly to Irena, Fedor and Baron Otto that the two vampires have brought Karell Borotyn back to undead life as well. Indeed, someone resembling Borotyn is seen in the company of the vampires, and Fedor is apparently attacked by vampires, though the incident isn't depicted on-camera.

As noted above, however, it's all a big hoax, Zelen having been brought in by Neumann to "catch the conscience of the king." Apparently Neumann has suspected Otto as the culprit for the whole time, but only through this maneuver could he find out how Otto faked the vampiric murder, and his reason for doing so. Zelen and Neumann imply that their whole deceit depends on convincing Otto that the man he murdered has come back from the grave, implying that this will have a "hypnotic" effect on Otto so that he will recapitulate the murder, following the Freudian notion of psychological "repetition." Sure enough, the threat of seeing Borotyn return lulls Otto into attempting to repeat the murder on an actor feigning to be the dead nobleman, and so the inspector and his aides learn the means and motive. In addition to an end-scene revealing that Mora and Luna are simply actors engaged for this conscience-catching play, there's a revelation that Irena was in on the scheme and faked all of her vampiric encounters with Luna-- though it's far from clear as to why these crypto-lesbian encounters should have a persuasive effect on the Baron. However, Fedor was NOT in on the scheme, and the script by Browing and Guy Endore never elucidates whether or not the actors actually attacked him or not. (Perhaps they were ancestors of "the Method!")

As David Skal comments in THE MONSTER SHOW, the original script by Endore included a backstory for the long-dead count: that he and his daughter had an incestuous liaison, after which they both perished in some sort of suicidal pact. Or possibly Mora killed Luna, since Luna's character shows no death-marks, while Mora sports a bullet-wound in his temple to depict how his persona perished by his own hand-- a wound left unexplained in the diegesis, since MGM didn't allow any direct reference to incest.

Yet, in an interesting psychological twist, the Browning-Endore script does manage to put across a quasi-incestuous motive for Otto's crime, for late in the film he reveals that he, guardian and implicit replacement for the late patriarch, coveted Irena for himself. To the extent that Otto incarnates the Freudian myth of the "bad father" who covets his own daughter, the essence of the Mora-Luna relationship does make it into the film in displaced form.

Neumann's scheme-- to hypnotize a murderer whose used fake vampirism with the spectres of real vampires-- is of course unbelievable. But the many disappointed horror-fans who wanted Mora and Luna to be diegetically real in the film suggests that they, like Otto, were no less capable of being beguiled by such spectres.


ADDENDUM: I should note that though the simplicity of Irena's character mitigates against any psychological depth, there is one line of reasoning that might explain the lesbianism, one that invokes KING LEAR more than HAMLET. Folklorist Alan Dundes once observed that one might view LEAR as a fantasy projected from the psyche of "favorite daughter" Cordelia, in which she proved herself the most desired by provoking his extremely emotional reaction to her refusal to place him first. Perhaps it means something beyond simple plot-convenience that Irena lets a year go by without marrying her intended Fedor? Perhaps there's a part of Irena wants to walk on the wild vampiric side of life before she settles down to dull domesticity?