Monsters, Demons and Psychopaths

Psychiatry and Horror Film

Fernando Espi Forcen

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315353920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

Descriptions of monsters, vampires, demonic possessions, and psychopaths in horror films have been inspired by psychiatric knowledge about mental illness, leading to several stereotyped models of horror that have prevailed through decades. Some scholars have proposed that horror films can be a teaching tool for psychopathology, but for the most part the genre has been underutilized as a learning tool. This book explores the idea of relating horror films to psychiatric ideas as a way of engaging people in learning.

CHAPTER 1

The Horror before Film

HUMANS HAVE ENJOYED HORROR since the beginning of civilization or perhaps even earlier. Before the “seventh art” of cinema was born, people enjoyed tales that provoke a somehow pleasurable panicky feeling of fear. According to Mesopotamian mythology, the gods created demons and monsters. For instance, Lamassus were human-headed winged oxen that guarded Assyrian palace doorways and gates to frighten away the forces of chaos. Lamashtu was a very fearful creature, represented with a lioness’ head, a donkey’s ears and teeth, and long fingers and fingernails, that preyed on unborn and newborn children. Pregnant women often wore an amulet depicting Pazuzu, who was charged with defending women and infants from Lamashtu. Pazuzu, a good demon, in addition to protecting pregnant women and their children, guarded humans against plagues and malevolent forces. Pazuzu was depicted with a monster’s face and eagle claws. (Paradoxically, Pazuzu is the Mesopotamian demon that has taken possession of Regan in The Exorcist). According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from Mesopotamia and regarded as one of the earliest works of literature, the goddess Ishtar convinced her father to send the Bull of Heaven to kill people but Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, and his friend Enkidu were able to stop him. Earlier, the two friends had killed a giant with a hairy face called Humbaba who guarded Cedar Mountain.

Although we use the word “demons” to describe some of these counterparts of gods, etymologically the word “demon” comes from the Greek daimon, meaning a spirit. For the Greeks, however, these spirits could be good or bad. In Greek mythology, Typhon, the father of all monsters, was the most fearsome and deadly. He had a hundred dragon’s heads erupting from his shoulders and neck. The female counterpart was Echidna, the mother of all monsters, represented as a half woman–half snake. Legendary hero Heracles had to kill the Nemean lion as one of his ‘twelve labors’ or penances. Cerberus was a multi-headed dog that guarded the underworld. While also an Egyptian monster, for the Greeks, the Sphinx had the body of a lion, the wings of a bird and the face of a woman and would kill anyone who could not solve her riddle. According to Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, the Sphinx caused chaos in the city of Thebes until Oedipus solved the riddle. The Harpies were monsters with a female human face and the body of a bird that would steal food, and the Sirens were half woman–half bird monsters whose enchanting voice could cause ships to wreck on their island. Cyclops was a member of the race of giants and had only one eye. Medusa was a dreadful Gorgon with snakes as hair and a gaze that could turn anyone into stone. She was decapitated by Perseus with a mirror scythe. Another hero, Theseus, had to kill the Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a human, hiding in a labyrinth, in order to stop the human sacrifices ordered by King Minos.

In contrast to Greek beliefs about demons, Semitic civilizations referred to demons as merely bad spirits. As reported by the first book of Samuel in the Old Testament, future king David relieved the torments of Saul caused by a demon by playing the harp. As reported by the Gospels, Jesus believed in demonic possessions and practiced exorcisms. With the spread of Christianity in Europe, priests and other followers of Christ would also perform exorcisms as a way to imitate Jesus. During the Middle Ages, bestiaries were books that described the different actual or mythical animals and their behavior. These monsters were also often represented in the marginalia of books or in churches and cathedrals. One of these monsters was Donestre, a man with a lion’s head who could speak every language. He was believed to approach random travelers and pretend that he knew their relatives in order to gain their confidence. Once the traveler thought he had found a good host Donestre would eat him and then mourn over his head. In medieval times, monsters were also depicted as regular humans with malformations or distorted anatomical features. For example, the head of Blemmyae was contained within their chest, and the Epiphagi had their eyes on their shoulders. The Troglodytes were very fast and did not talk. Gargoyles were elongated monsters that decorated the walls and served as waterspouts.

During the Late Middle Ages and especially in the Renaissance concern grew over witchcraft practice, especially the use of black magic. One alleged practice involved the turning of people into werewolves. The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), written in 1486, alerted the public to these kinds of practices and refuted arguments that witchcraft did not exist. Soon hysteria grew against these falsely accused witches all over Europe. Social outcasts, religious minorities and at times political rivals were accused of witchcraft practice, causing plagues and other calamities and unfortunately many were executed.

In the modern era, some Eastern Europeans have used theories of vampirism to explain the origin of plagues affecting small towns. With a lack of science and understanding of these problems, people craved for a magical explanation that could provide a quick solution. Rumors that dead people could come back to life with the intention of turning the living into vampires were common. Staking dead bodies with the hope of preventing more deaths in the community became a common practice. At this time too, when great ocean voyages led to the discovery of new lands and territories, sea monsters were used for decoration on maps.

It was mainly during the Romantic period of the nineteenth century that the so-called Gothic horror genre of literature rose to prominence. In 1818, Mary Shelley, while just twenty years old, published Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus in England. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886, and Irish writer Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. On the Continent, in France in 1831 Victor Hugo published The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, while in Spain Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was writing Romantic tales of the supernatural including “The Souls’ Mountain” in 1861. In the United States, Edgar Allan Poe became the most prominent horror storywriter. His short story “The Black Cat” (1843) and narrative poem “The Raven” (1845) are among his most popular publications. Many of these Gothic horror novels were soon adapted into plays for theater and later were a major inspiration for the first silent films. In the period 1819 to 1823, acclaimed Spanish painter Francisco de Goya created some fourteen works known as his “Black Paintings” which depicted demonic possessions, witchcraft practice and body mutilation.

Finally, in 1896 pioneer French filmmaker George Méliès directed Le Manoir Du Diable (The Haunted Castle), considered to be the first horror film. In this silent film, a vampire bat turns into Mephistopheles (the Devil) and encounters several phantoms.

As we can see, people have long enjoyed tales of monsters, demons and horror, and horror has existed within art, literature and film throughout history.

CHAPTER 2

Silent Horror

EXPRESSIONISM WAS AN ARTISTIC movement that started in Germany before World War I. As opposed to Impressionism – the prior leading artistic movement – which emphasized the importance of color and reflecting the immediate perception of the artist, Expressionism attempted to build more complex psychic structures, involving a distortion of the image in order to better express the inner quality of human emotion. The Expressionist movement was reflected in poetry, painting, architecture, dance and cinema. The birth of the German Expressionist movement took place in Dresden in 1905 with a group of artists who called themselves “Die Brücke” (The Bridge). Among them were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erick Heckel. The artists set up their studios in working class neighborhoods in an attempt to escape from the influence of the bourgeoisie and build “a bridge” to the art of the future. German Renaissance artists such as Matthias Grünewald, Lucas Cranach and Albert Dürer were their main influences. With the advent of World War I, Expressionism shifted towards a more rebellious protest against the devastation and negative impact that the war had made on society. Death, suicide, moral corruption, vice, and images of mutilated veterans became popular themes. Examples of this include Käthe Kollwitz’s “Death Grabbing at a Group of Children,” an image that revisits the medieval motif of the “Dance of Death”; Otto Dix’s “The Match Seller,” which portrays a homeless veteran, blind and limbless, sitting in the street selling matches, ignored by the well-heeled bourgeoisie while a dog is literally peeing on him; and George Grosz’s “Suicide,” in which the body of a suicide victim lies abandoned in the street in front of a brothel.

In cinema, German Expressionism focused on intellectual and macabre themes. The major directors of the time were Fritz Lang, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Robert Wiene and Paul Wegener. The influence of psychiatry on their films is evident from their first motion pictures. Insanity became a recurrent topic such as in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The film had been initially offered to director Fritz Lang but he refused and Wiene was commissioned for the project in 1920. The idea of the movie had originated when writers Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer met in Berlin after World War I. Both were enthusiastic about actor, writer and director Paul Wegener’s early works (The Student of Prague, The Golem) and decided to write a horror film. They came up with the concept of telling the story of a psychiatrist and a somnambulist after visiting a nearby fair, where a man claimed to be able to predict the future during a hypnotic trance. As initially suggested by Fritz Lang prior to abandoning the project, the film’s main character Francis narrates the film. Francis is a young man who attended the carnival of the German village of Holstenwall with his friend Alan. Both friends are competing for the love of the young and beautiful Jane. In the carnival they see the show of a psychiatrist and hypnotist named Dr. Caligari and a somnambulist, Cesare, in a coffin-like cabinet. As part of his show, Dr. Caligari induces a hypnotic trance in Cesare, which allows him to predict the future. An innocent Alan asks the somnambulist how long he shall live. Cesare’s prediction is shocking: he will live only until dawn. That night, as the somnambulist had predicted, Alan dies at the hands of a shadowy figure. This crime will be just the first of a series of mysterious murders in the German village. Alan’s friend Francis and Jane commence to investigate the murders and their research raises suspicions of Caligari and Cesare’s relation to the homicides. When Dr. Caligari discovers the couple’s intentions, he orders Cesare to kidnap and murder Jane. He creeps into Jane’s home as she sleeps and is about to stab her but, overwhelmed by her beauty, abducts her instead. In the meantime, Francis goes to the local insane asylum to ask about Caligari and discovers through old records and a diary that Caligari, while still working as the head of the asylum, had become obsessed with an Italian monk who in 1703 had used a somnambulist to commit murder by proxy. This obsession led Caligari to attempt to prove whether it was in fact possible to do such a thing. After finding that Cesare is dead, Caligari reveals his insanity and is arrested by the authorities.

The original story written by Mayer and Janowitz intended to make clear that Caligari and Cesare were responsible for the crimes. However, the producers were interested in a less macabre ending and suggested that the film end with a twist in which a spectator unexpectedly discovers in the final scene that Francis is actually an inmate at the asylum and his story was the result of a delusion. In this alternative ending, the man who Francis called Caligari is actually the asylum director and he announces that, now that he understands Francis’s delusion, he is confident he can cure his mental illness.

Three German Expressionist artists, Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, were hired to create the set design and props for the film. They produced a visual style with deliberate distortions of form, perspective and dimension. The oblique doors and chimneys, tilted roofs, arrow-like windows and trees, and the whole town of Holstenwall are reminiscent of the cities painted by the Expressionist Lyonel Feininger.

Figure 2.1Dr. Caligari, The Hypnotist; Cesare, The Somnambulist; and Jane, The Object of Desire (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

The legacy of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari can still be seen in many contemporary movies. There are clear aesthetic parallels between Cesare and Edward in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990). The twist ending or final revelation is now a common technique in cinema to maintain intrigue or surprise the spectator. David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010) are examples.

In the 1920s, psychopharmacology in psychiatry was not yet developed. Patients with severe mental illness were usually placed in insane asylums, in which moral treatment (a therapy that proposed a benevolent guidance for activities of daily living) was the standard approach. Hypnosis, a medical offshoot of Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism, was a valid therapy and patients with fantasies or delusions could be treated with hypnotherapy. In hypnosis, the hypnotist helps the subject fall into a sleep-like state with heightened suggestibility – a trance. As a result, the hypnotized person is able to focus on specific thoughts without being distracted by their surroundings.

In the late nineteenth century, while working at La Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot supported the use of hypnosis for the treatment of hysteria (a syndrome that the time was used to describe states of emotional excess with somatic symptoms, including neurological and psychiatric ones). Through hypnosis, a clinician could help patients enter a trance in which they would be more susceptible to queries about the true psychological nature of their symptoms. They could then potentially be cured through this self-awareness of the nature of their symptoms. Sigmund Freud learned hypnosis with Charcot in Paris and began practicing it. However, later he began thinking that hypnosis was too dependent on what the hypnotist suggested to the patient and proposed a free association technique in which a patient would lie on a coach and express random ideas that the clinician would carefully analyze during sessions. He called this method psychoanalysis. Nowadays hypnosis is still a valid therapy in psychiatry and has also been shown helpful in the treatment of anxiety, pain and insomnia and to help people increase concentration for studying. The works of Milton Erickson and Herbert Spiegel have been major influences on hypnosis in the United States.

There are several aspects of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that deserve our attention for a psychiatric discussion. In the first place, the film can be seen as a beautiful depiction of hypnosis and how it was portrayed at the time. Cesare is depicted as a highly hypnotizable person (usually just a very small percentage of the population have this quality). As a result he enters a highly suggestible trance state under Caligari’s commands. The film uses psychiatric scientific literature to support what happening. When Francis and three other physicians go to Caligari’s office to investigate the crimes, they find a treatise on somnambulism published at the University of Uppsala in 1726. (In modern nomenclature, somnambulism is called sleepwalking disorder.) In this treatise, they learn about the case of the monk Caligari. In the asylum director’s diary, they read about his obsession with the monk and his excitement the prospect of a somnambulist possibly being admitted to the institution, giving him his opportunity to attempt to reproduce the monk’s project. In a flashback, Dr. Caligari is depicted as going gradually insane surrounded by books on psychiatry right before leaving the asylum and he starts hearing voices saying, “You must become Caligari,” which reveals the origin of the plot to the audience. After they bring Cesare’s body to him, Caligari becomes enraged and attacks one of the physicians, requiring six people to restrain him, put him a straitjacket and secure him in a quiet room. At that time, chemical sedation was not possible and the straitjacket was the most common method of restraint. From a modern psychiatric point of view, Caligari could be seen as someone with bipolar disorder going into a psychotic mania, or an isolated psychotic episode. At this point the story would have ended, according to the initial script. However, in the alternative twist ending, we see Francis in the asylum yard with the rest of the patients, each one absorbed in their own delusion: an old man giving a speech on the stairs, a young woman playing an imaginary piano. Cesare is now seen stroking a bouquet and Jane believes she can’t respond to Francis’s advances because she has royal blood.

With the use of hypnosis at the beginning of the twentieth century, a debate took place in society over whether it was possible to make someone commit a crime under a hypnotic state. Charcot’s disciple Gilles de la Tourette and forensic psychologist Hugo Munsterberg were inclined to believe that such a thing was not possible. Still, they acknowledged that it was something that could not be experimented with for obvious ethical reasons. The issue got more media attention when a female patient of Tourette’s shot him in the head, alleging that she had been hypnotized without her consent. The debate ov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• About the Author
• 1 The Horror before Film
• 2 Silent Horror
• 3 Vampires
• 4 Monsters
• 5 Aliens from Outer Space and the Paranoid Horror
• 6 Witchcraft and the Worship of the Devil
• 7 Demonic Possessions
• 8 The Supernatural
• 9 Ghost Hunting and the Paranormal
• 10 Slash Killers and Psychopaths
• 11 Zombies
• 12 Body Horror
• 13 The Horror in the Asylum
• 14 Psychiatry and Horror
• References and Further Reading
• Index