Mystery and Imagination presents Dracula (Patrick Dromgoole, 1968)

At the cinemas Christopher Lee was the reigning Count Dracula, an increasingly mute and brooding predator of base impulses: revenge, hunger, and reproduction.   Television was getting in on the Stoker act as well.   British anthology playhouse Mystery and Imagination offered their take with Denholm Elliott as a more social monster.  It was an adaptation that, while truncated, was the first to include a few details from the novel that had been neglected before, and for a TV production was more frank with sexuality than even Hammer had been. 

A patient known only as Thirtyfour (for his room number at Doctor John Seward's sanitarium) escapes confinement and crashes the dinner party Seward is hosting.  Guests at the party include the Weston mother and daughter, a count from Transylvania, and arriving late will be Mina  Harker.  Thirty-four throws himself at the feet of Count Dracula, calling him "Master".  The Count declares they have never met, and Thirtyfour immediately walks it back and returns meekly to his cell.  The party goes on, Dracula dominating the room (and young Lucy Weston's gaze) with his presence. 


You may know Denholm Elliott from the Eighties as Marcus Brody, the schoolmaster who employs Indiana Jones, or as the butler to Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in Trading Places, or from any number of other character parts both more and less prestigious.  That's when he hit my own radar.  It's not easy to picture him as Dracula until you see the younger and slimmer Elliott rocking a Van Dyke and shades (eat your heart out, Gary Oldman).  Elliot's Count is highly urbane and has a confidence that's almost snide, quiet until talk of his heritage fires his angry pride.  If you think you know Denholm only from his late career, check this out. 

Dracula is the man of the hour.  Thirtyfour is easily swayed by a few words from him when the sanitarium guards are no match for the patient; Lucy breathlessly attends his every gesture, oblivious to her fiance Seward;  Seward has to hide his annoyance that his guests the Westons extended their invitation to the unexpected and unwelcome Russian royalty who has swayed them.  Mina is eager to meet the Count as her husband Jonathon Harker has gone missing after a stay at Dracula's home in Transylvania.    It's not the only question surrounding the Count - Thirtyfour was a passenger on the ship Demeter on the same voyage that brought Dracula to England.  After Dracula came ashore early the ship met with tragedy, the unidentified patient the sole survivor. 

Thirtyfour isn't just an amnesiac but a maniac obsessed with devouring insects and small animals for their life force while he awaits the arrival of "the master".   Seward consults his mentor,  esteemed Professor Abraham Van Helsing.  Mina meets the man, and things begin to fall into place.  Dracula sets his eyes on Lucy and begins to visit her each night.

What's interesting about this Dracula is that he comes across as a fairly skilled social manipulator, except for the lies that are easily exposed.  Seward is the first to suspect the Count of driving the tragedies that are unfolding around his clique, but Dracula has set him up to look the jealous lover and so his suspicions are dismissed by all.  Lucy and Thirtyfour are pitted against each other through yet more jealousy, the patient's for his lost place as the Master's favored pet.  Lucy's frail mother becomes a plot device as the vampire exploits her fears for her daughter (this is taken from the novel, and had never appeared onscreen before in earlier adaptations).  Later, after Lucy has become a vampire, Dracula will play off of Mina's grief and her depression, having driven her and her fiance apart. 

Under hypnosis, Thirtyfour recounts a little of his meeting with "the Master".  We see this in a dreamlike flashback in which three ghostly women stalk and  attack him in a castle.  The sequence is nearly silent but for the hissing of the women and the patient's narration.  The sequence stands out from otherwise staid camerawork and direction - not dull but not innovative.  The brides also stand out for their overt sexuality: for a television production, their sheer robes are shocking.  Now, I'm watching this on a bootleg disc made from an unrestored copy, so the image is not pristine...and that's from a production that had a constrained TV budget.  Its in black and white.  Plus, that sequence is murkily lit.  All the same, I can see that the the gowns become opaque only strategically, allowing glimpses of the actors' breasts that are nearly complete.  I couldn't get a screenshot to prove it.   Hammer took audience's breath away with decolletage - British TV took it further.  No one remembers.  Only Hammer is still known.

Later on Dracula will assault Lucy as she sleeps.  This is another sequence that is surprisingly frank for television.  Lucy writhes in bed, asleep and having a clearly sexual dream as Dracula kneels and watches.  When finally he penetrates her throat she climaxes.  Strong stuff for 1968 television. 

As the plot heats up, Dracula uses the undead Lucy as a proxy to seduce Mina.  The lesbian (well, bi really) attraction between them is undisguised for television.  Happily, this is depicted without bias, there is no vilification of sexuality in the film.  It's simply erotic. 

Looking back to the novel,  this is also the first production to allow the Count's facial hair, and the first time Lucy and Mina meet the old man Swales at the cemetery, where he engages in spirited talk of the town's seemier history.  In this, a colorful but inconsequential bit of the novel (a bit of mood-setting and character development) is spun into a clever twist that helps streamline the movie. 

I like this Dracula.  It's talky but neither slow nor stagebound (despite obvious, low-budget sets), and took me by surprise for a number of reasons: its sporadic fealty to the novel, its unadulterated sexuality, the revelation of Denholm Elliott.  More substantially, Dracula's crafty manipulations are given as much weight as his supernatural abilities, an innovative advance for the character.  Performances are good across the board - Bernard Archard is an engaging Van Helsing.  Corin Redgrave is a little affected as Thirty-four, suggesting he's more a stage than a screen actor.  James Maxwell (Seward) and Susan George (Lucy) are natural and fluid, easily sympathetic. 

Who'll Stop the Rain (Karel Reisz, 1978)

“Let me tell you the latest. Military Command has decided that elephants are among enemy agents because they carry supplies to the Viet Cong. So now they are stampeding elephants and gunning them down from the air. Of course, I filed a suitably outraged story about it. And that was my last one. I have no more cheap morals to draw from all this death. So I've taken action...I've started something here that I can't stop, and it's the right thing, I know. You see, in a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.”

Those words are written by John Converse (Michael Moriarty), a writer for a tabloid rag who has been in Vietnam in an attempt at being meaningful for once in his life. Demoralized by his experiences, burnt out, and alienated he has just made a deal to smuggle heroin into the states. He doesn't really know why he's doing it or what it's supposed to mean, it's just a gut reaction – his idea of protest. Little does his wife Marge, to whom the above missive is dispatched, know what's coming. The heroin may be the least of her problems once John's new associates come looking for the skag. For that matter, she's going to have her hands full with Ray Hicks, John's true friend who does the carrying.

Not that Hicks (Nick Nolte) wants to or thinks it's a good idea. Ray Hicks, a Merchant Marine and close to being temperamentally fried by the war himself, is a self-educated man whose two major influences have been Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and Friederich Nietzsche. Learning that Hicks still reads Nietzsche, Converse declares it “piquant”: a typical comment from Converse, it's impossible to tell if he's being condescending. “'Piquant', I don't know the hell that means. You turned me on to that book.” Hicks doesn't like this scheme one bit, not the drugs or the risk. He'll do it, though, because Hicks has cultivated a strong sense of honor and John is his friend...besides which, his good friend John has backed him into it by telling his new associates all about Ray Hicks.

All of which leads to Marge's doorstep in liberal Berkeley California. Marge (Tuesday Weld)...well, she's a busy woman, alright? She's raising her young daughter, her father is John's publisher, she's got a modern, active life trying not to let the war touch her, and truth be told she's developing a mean little drug habit with Dilaudid, not that it's anyone's business, and now she's got this letter from her husband saying he owes one Ray Hicks some money and can you please pay him, so you'll just have to be understanding if she didn't take the time to get to the bank.. Nobody said anything about heroin or guns or about her and John being marks!

Yeah, and nobody told her that her evening would go bad as fast as it does, with Hicks not so much paying her a visit as exploding into her life. Ray: “You can't treat people in this outrageous fucking manner!” Ray and Marge do not “meet cute”. Cue a couple of thugs who work for a crooked Fed named Antheil (Anthony Zerbe). The drug deal is his, but guess what? Ray ain't rolling over.. “I spent my whole life takin' shit from inferior people. No more!”

Who'll Stop the Rain has a lot going for it, but above all it's an actor's movie. I've already named the principal cast, and Nick Nolte has long since proven his acting ability and his presence but please trust me that his Ray Hicks will bowl you over anyway. At the time Nolte was considered a pretty boy lightweight, a romantic leading man and not up for much more. Best known for The Deep, Rich Man Poor Man, and a Clairol hair lightener ad, his total ownership of Hicks was a revelation. He plays Hicks like a sore tooth best left alone. Treated gently he won't flare up on you. He can be a nice guy but there's a raw fragility to his carefully built self-esteem as if it is something he will lose the thread of if he doesn't react immediately and harshly to anything and everything that offends his sensibilities. Nolte finds that note and makes Hicks a force to be reckoned with. It's his movie, and much as I love 48 Hours I'll take this one for pure Nolte.

I should talk about Michael Moriarty as John next – the story is a look at the moral decay setting in with Vietnam and alienation, Hicks as the warrior soul with mission creep and Moriarty the pacifist conscience giving in to futility. There may be a bit of bias here as Hicks is unfailingly noble even as his reactions are a bit unhinged, and John Converse is pacifist to a fault, ultimately coming across as pathetic or despicable in the hands of Antheil's hired goons as they drag him in search of the fled Ray and Marge. Moriarty gives John a resigned air just spilling over into self-pity, hiding behind the last shreds of dignity. It's the right touch that lends a moment of contrast later when he sees his wife getting high and looks on in horrified self-realization at what he's done. An aspiring author, he's written a wartime play in which the protagonist is a version of himself. Antheil comments that the character isn't sympathetic: 'Why doesn't he do something?” Both Hicks and Converse, in their separate ways, want to vindicate their ideals and take a stand against “them” but neither knows who “they” are anymore.

That's all there, but when it comes right down to it the core of the film lies in the chemistry that emerges between Nolte and Tuesday Weld as Hicks takes Marge on the lam with a horde of unwanted heroin to get rid of. Marge would like to just dump the stuff but Hicks is locked into making some kind of deal because...well, just because. It's the principle of the thing. He agreed to the mission and he's gonna see it through no matter how fucked up or wildly astray it goes. That means his taking on the role of guardian and companion to Marge, helping see her through her addiction and keeping alive her hope of seeing her husband and child safe again. For her part, she has to navigate his moods and see the nobility on the man, not an easy task given interludes like the one with Eddie Peace, a Hollywood-schmoozy lowlife who promises to deal the skag but would rather play amusing games with Hicks and his prospective clients both. Charles Haid gives a brief gem of a performance as Eddie, oily and unpredictable. The scene brings out the worst in Ray who declares them all Martians after turning their lark into a nightmare.

Weld gives her role a decency and intelligence where many actors would have gone for a generic strung-out performance.

What develops between Marge and Ray is a respect that borders on an unspoken love. Thanks to cinematographer Richard H. Kline, their scenes together have a quiet intimacy that poses them as lovers not quite physically interacting except in psychic support of each other. If Ray's mission ultimately is to keep Marge alive, you end up emotionally invested in wanting the two of them happy and safe.

I don't know the ins and outs of directing enough to examine how director Karel Reisz gets us there, but he does. From rainy Saigon evenings to California suburbs, naval yards and an old Jesuit mission in the hills (based on the Kesey compound where the Merry Pranksters tried to drown their worldly worries in revelry), Reisz and Kline show as strong a knack for location as Reisz does for getting the best performances from his actors. The script also excels - written by author Robert Stone from his novel 'Dog Soldiers', his dialog has a wonderful lyrical quality to it that's often quotable and lends the cast plenty to work with. I've read the novel and found it to have a rather snarkier sense of humor than is apparent in the movie, at least in the passages that deal with Converse. Some of that humor makes it into the film in the form of Antheil's pair of goons Danskin and Smitty (Richard Masur and Ray Sharkey). Sharkey is an ex-con who would like to be important if only his natural inferiority would get out of his way, perpetually overshadowed and abused by the amiably sociopathic Danskin (“Most people will hit you when they lose at chess. Danskin hits you when he wins!”) Danskin's nature is perfectly reflected by the casting of perennial nice-guy Richard Masur, who will pleasantly call you 'bubbie” while he sits you down on a hot oven burner. These two are clowns you don't dare laugh at.

Rounding out the cast is Anthony Zerbe as Antheil... are you familiar with Zerbe? If you are, then you know what you're getting. The guy has a wry, sardonic edge as capable of being sympathetic as threatening, he can get by on a look and turn of phrase. Honestly, I can't think of one standout performance of his yet he's one of my favorite personae on film and television – pure charisma.

Let me caution you about the transfer. I have the DVD issued by MGM in 2001, and while most of the film looks great (original aspect ratio 1.85:1, non-anamorphic) the first 16 or 17 minutes are inexplicably just out of focus. This is clearly not deliberate as evidenced by the too-soft titles text, though it could be argued as reflecting the fuzzy morals of Vietnam where the movie opens. Saigon in the rain at night and Moriarty standing at the gate to a private estate...already atmospheric, these shots would be even tastier if MGM would give the movie the care it deserves. This problem was present as well on the earlier VHS release.

I have loved this overlooked gem since first seeing it on cable in 1980. Please, give it a shot. It deserves a revival.

Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2009)

Spoilers follow.

What many fans of 1989's Tetsuo: The iron Man may not know is that it was a refinement of an earlier version of the same story. Allow me to place emphasis on 'refinement', because that's precisely what it was – an expansion and further explication of a rather incoherent and meaningless experiment in no-budget filmcraft. The reason I stress this is because there have since been two more Tetsuo films from Shinya Tsukamoto, and both of them have had a lukewarm reception at best from fans who feel that elaborating on the first feature has robbed it of it's essence...moved it from raw anarchic howl toward more conventional cinema. And they're right, it has, but it's only fair to the director to realize that he was already well along on that trajectory back in 1989. Just sayin'.

The son of businessman Anthony (Eric Bossick) is deliberately murdered right before Anthony's eyes. His wife Yuriko (Akiko Monô ) aches for revenge, but to her disgust Anthony cannot bring any kind of emotional reaction to the surface. That is, not until his body begins to morph into a metal instrument of pure rage. The killer comes after them both, leading Anthony to revelations about himself, his parents, and his father's research into recreating the human body through robotics.

In many ways this fourth Tetsuo (third feature film) is a throwback to a part of Tsukamoto's career that he was already finished with and left behind. Specifically it is a remake of sorts of Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, and it had no more creative impetus than the notion of making a Tetsuo film in America. and having the antihero fly. When it came down to it, neither of those made it into the film, except that the salaryman role played before by Tomoro Taguchi was replaced by Bossick, an American Taguchi lookalike. For many it was too little too late. However, I would like to suggest that this Tetsuo could not have been made at any other time in Tsukamoto's career. Where he takes it to is a complete refutation of the earlier films, honoring the spiritual journey his body of work had led him on.

Tsukamoto and co-writer Hisakatsu Kuroki (who co-scripted the Nightmare Detective movies) have pared the story down to the most simplistic possible characterizations and plot resulting in a brisk comic-book (or manga) film (fittingly, Anthony transforms through a number of stages, first looking every bit like a character from Marvel then like a metallic John Merrick – a face that might have inspired the look of The Scarecrow from Nolan's Batman Begin.). At only seventy minutes, it almost feels more of a sketch. Even the performances are lasered in on the moment like comic-book peoples, unnaturally flat or eschewing nuances they are dictated not by normal human responses but by the style of the film. Aesthetically, Bullet Man recreates the chaotic, micro-budget look of the first Tetsuo feature but with a very calculated, high-budget approach: not black and white but digitally desaturated: not grainy, grimy 16mm but crystalline HD. Again, YMMV – I found it exhilarating to see a Tetsuo flick that looks this good, not to mention hearing Chu Ishikawa's original themes again.

What's not readily apparent is the heart of the film. The earlier films – in fact, nearly all of the directors works until recently – had struggled with the conflict between the natural body and an aggressively artificial environment However, Tsukamoto had already succeeded in resolving that conflict, exorcised the demon, and moved on. There was no need to revisit it, and it is not revisited in Bullet Man. The story built around that theme remains, but the theme itself is no longer present as a driving force. 

On the other hand, Bullet Man has a few links to his more recent works. Echoing Vital, a flashback to Anthony's dying mother sees her requesting that her husband dissect her body, study every bit of her and recreate her physically, a request born of a concern for the peace of her continuing spiritual presence. This part of the story is the weakest, and I believe it of less importance thematically than simply owing to the conventional need to flesh out a quick plot. More substance can probably be found in a visual motif Tsukamoto has lately begin using in all his films, that of colorful microscopic footage and renderings of the human body's internal workings. As meticulous as Tsukamoto is with his metaphorical imagery, I'm sure it's not coincidental that the most colorful sequence in the movie has the killer/instigator stand before a gray wall on which a projector is shuffling slides of the human body in medical renderings, brightly colored and superimposed over himself. What it might mean, though, I have to confess goes right over my head. There is also a direct if obvious re-iteration from Nightmare Detective 2 that anger, hate, a refusal to forgive mutates the soul and effectively kills the self.

I'm not convinced that Tetsuo: the Bullet Man is actually exploring anything. That, I think, is what keeps the movie a slight work, neither Tsukamoto nor his characters are striving for meaning and so neither are we the audience asked to do any heavy lifting. Rather than working out a question, Bullet Man stands as a statement of principles from the director, gleaned over a lifetime of exploring his most personal concerns. It plays like a coda to his work thus far, the capping of an era. Iron Man and Body Hammer at the beginning of his professional career embraced an apocalyptic vision. Bullet Man walks us right up to that very same door of annihilation...and then says 'no' and resolutely closes the door. That's not a place Tsukamoto had reached before Nightmare Detective 2. 

Over the body of his work Shinya Tsukamoto has crafted tales of personal metamorphosis. Through his filmic explorations, it is Tsukamoto himself who has transformed.

Nightmare Detective 2 (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2008)

Kagenuma, the reluctant psychic of Nightmare Detective, has not found peace. His dreams are filled with the heartbreaking memories of his mother, a woman with an extreme social anxiety disorder. When Kagenuma innocently revealed his ability to read minds by asking her about her crippling fear of the world, it gave her a new one: that she was exposed to everyone, humiliated. She tried to murder her child, then she hanged herself.

It isn't just bad memories and dreams that come to him. As a child, was was terrorized by ghosts that visited him in the night or marched outside in the street. His father saw them too.

Now he spends his days shut up in his hotel room, surrounded by the children of families living there. They are fond of him, and are probably the only people he can stand to b around: bright, full of happiness, not filling his mind with adult disillusion and anger. Still, he'd rather be alone. The last thing he wants is to be called upon for his services as a psychic. 

That's when teenaged Yukie shows up. She and her schoolgirl clique pranked Yuko Kikugawa, an unloved student who has now shut herself off from the world but is appearing in their dreams. Yukie senses a threat, and she's right – soon they begin dying.

“Apologize to her”, that's Kagenuma's advice when he turns Yukie away.

Naturally he doesn't stay uninvolved for long, or we'd have no movie. When he does agree to enter Yukie's dreams, it isn't sympathy that motivates him. He sees in Yuko the same crippling terror that drove his mother mad, and he badly wants to understand. What did his mother see? Was he, her child, a monster in her eyes? What kind of fear makes someone you love unreachable?

This second film in a still unfinished trilogy about Kagenuma feels like a nexus for the character and for writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto as well. For more than half his career he has sought a reconciliation of the body with its environment. with a measure of empathy and compassion, and with a measure of optimism. Having finally achieved that his quest has moved inward to the troubled soul, and I'm finding his stories (Vital, Haze, Nightmare detective) far more tempered in their optimism. The first film featuring Kagenuma ended with nothing more spirited than a temporary respite from hopelessness for the title character.

That film was saddled with a routine police procedural plot that hindered the movie from feeling like a personal work. This time the film takes the visuals and plot logic of a Japanese ghost story, though the specter is that of a girl still living. Rather than being forced into a formula, that frees Tsukamoto to spend quality time with his characters, and to let them discover common ties (spoilers ahead)

Yukie has not been the nicest person toward her classmates, and she's fully aware of it, but then she hasn't had the happiest home life either with a mother who makes no effort to connect with her. At school she has surrounded herself with friends who are similarly uncaring of others. Yukie's insistence on reaching out to Yuko, the girl they hurt together, is alien to their nature and we gather new to Yukie herself.

Examining Yuko's bedroom, Kagenuma finds artwork she has done: dark, crowded, anxious but also among the works are pages radiating color and wonder, brightness. Happiness. If Yuko has joy in her, perhaps Kagenuma's mother did as well? In the very next scene we see Kagenuma as we've never seen him before: happily playing at games with the children of his apartment. Something in himself has been freed by the discovery. Note that Kagenuma can hear the inner thoughts of the girl's father wishing this stranger would leave his house, but importantly not until after he finds the happier artwork.

The film's coda is a sequence in which Kagenuma of hos own accord helps a child by ascending into the child's anxiety dream only to discover that the child is himself. His child self sleeps fitfully, sharing a futon with his older brother while his parents seem to find enjoyment in his suffering. It's an uncomfortable moment: on the one had, his mother is happy and laughing, and his father shares a moment of binding with her uncommon to Kagenuma's understanding of them; on the other, it's beyond him what they find delightful about their child's anxieties. It is, after all, only a dream, but one that plays on the cognizance gap between children and adults. Meanwhile, we've just learned a new detail about Kagenuma, that he has an older brother. It means nothing to the story proper, but it means something to viewers who know that Tsukamoto himself had an older brother and a troubled relationship with his own parents.

The key to setting them all free is empathy – Yukie, Yuko, Kagenuma, the troubled memory of his mother (or perhaps literally her spirit, after the ambiguous Vital, as the ghosts indicate), and maybe even setting free the director himself. Empathy comes with a price, openness to the unwanted pain of other people that warps their inner essences.  Yuko is caught in the middle. We see her and some of the figures in her art as having one eye shut and the other open too widely.  Yukie alone of her clique learns empathy, and it will forever alter her perceptions. The alternate course is to; hurt people in order to shut down one's ability to feel, which is tantamount to killing one's self (as Kagenuma's mother and Yukie's friends). Through empathy, Nightmare Detective 2 finds something more valuable than solace. The movie finds forgiveness, and through forgiveness catharsis.

Nightmare Detective (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2006)

Police investigate two cases, a young woman who has stabbed herself to death and a married man who has done the same. To Detective Sekiya the verdict is clear: suicide. Detective Kirishima isn't so sure. Shortly before their deaths both had called someone named '0'. The dead man's wife says that he was screaming for help in his sleep even as his arm, puppetlike, plunged a boxcutter at himself. The police chief decides that a psychic should be brought in to help locate '0'.

That psychic is Kagenuma, with the ability to enter other people's dreams. Kagenuma has never had a happy life. His mother feared and rejected him for his psychic gift. When he uses it, he sees nothing but other people's pain, their miseries, the darkest forgotten secrets that misshape their psyches. They come to him begging for his help, then resent him for what comes of it after he has endured their nightmares. Kagenuma would like for himself nothing better than oblivion and an escape from the company of others. 

Writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto has explored a number of disparate ideas over the course of his career, and now with his ninth feature release he draws most of them together in one film. Alienation and the deadening of the spirit have been a constant theme throughout his oeuvre, and suicide particular to Bullet Ballet and Vital (Vital especially explored the idea of suicide pacts). In recent films Tsukamoto's gaze had turned from the body itself to the inner essence (Vital, Haze). Suppression of memory to blot out pain was key to Vital and Haze both. ESP and the idea of shared psychic space between people (that is, people visiting each other's subconscious minds) appeared in Tetsuo: the Iron Man and resurfaced in Vital.

Tsukamoto himself plays '0', a more or less direct continuation of the morphing antagonist of Tetsuo and Tetsuo II, the man who has gone from seeking the destruction of his self to a perverse joy in the destruction of everyone and everything around him. '0' also is the more malevolent reflection of the instigator he played in A Snake of June.

Tsukamoto's films have a history of showcasing strong female characters. Those sensibilities are again put forward in Keiko Kirishima, the detective who presses Kagenuma to get involved in the case. She is new to the force, having been stationed a desk job with the police before now. Seeing her first dead bodies she has a hard time with the bloody aftermath. In a Tsukamoto film, squeamishness is a device like glasses were for Hitchcock: in the master's movies the wearing of glasses signified faulty moral vision. For tsukamoto, an inability to deal with blood, decay, etc. means a character who is not fully in touch with nature and often blind to something important in the story. Kirishima says that she asked for a transfer because she wants to do work that is more substantial, but we will learn later that it is more likely that an inner drive is seeking closer proximity with violence and death. Privately, Kirishima has been having her own series of nightmares in which she meets a wilder version of herself. 

All of this echoes the female protagonists of Tokyo Fist (Hizuru discovers her inner fury), A Snake of June (Rinko hides her true essence from herself), and Bullet Ballet (Chisato lives on the edge in search of self-destruction). And that brings us to the major problem with Nightmare Detective: Kirishima, not Kagenuma, is the central character here but she does not live up to Tsukamoto's heroines of his past efforts. Those characters were more fully developed and played by vibrant actresses. We've seen the likes before. The female cop who has to work harder than everyone else to prove herself equal to the men. Sad to say it's true to life, so the problem isn;t one of credibility. Unfortunately it's overly familiar – a cliché. Coming from a director renowned for his wild imagination establishes the movie on a disconcerting note. Compounding the problem, Ysukamoto has cast pop singer Hitomi in the lead, a decent actress of limited experience and without the range of his previous lead actresses. Kirishima doesn't resonate like Rinko, Hizumi, or Chisato.

I blame the premise of the movie. In tying together so much of his past work in one movie, this should be the Tsukamoto film to end them all, his crowning achievement. It is a good film, yet in sum it ends up one of his slighter works even as he brings his disparate strands together in one uniform piece. Weakening the piece substantially, these themes don't make themselves plain until late in the movie. In order to bring the audience to that point, Tsukamoto must take pains to build and support his premise. That takes the form of a standard police procedural, nothing like the fresh original storytelling the director is known for. We've seen criminal investigation movies of this flavor before, and coming from Tsukamoto it feels impersonal and uninspired. Nightmare Detective takes patience and probably multiple viewings before you see the real Tsukamoto in it. I didn't until I watched and reviewed his films in chronological order.

You can catch some sense of the director in the camera movements, like the nervous handheld shots. Here too, though, Tsukamoto departs from his usual tendencies. While he's still experimenting, true to his nature, this time his use of colors employs not gels and filters but digital manipulation with color timing and desaturation. Tokyo no longer seems a cold, sterile place to live, just another urban center with an alluring night presence. Chu Ishikawa tones it down as well, where an emotional montage is informed not by the director’s favored composer but by Erik Satie's Gymnopaedia.

I've always been fascinated by dreams and the dream experience, and the difficulty in recreating that experience on screen. Most directors fail – hell, most don't even try. I suspect they have never spent a moment recalling their own dreams, falling back on popular misconceptions (fill the screen with extravagant visuals, et voila). Have you ever noticed how in dreams you often know intuitively what a thing, person, or creature looks like even though you never actually see them? How would you convey that in a movie without heavy expositive dialog? In Nightmare Detective Tsukamoto has come close by creating elaborate nightmare creatures and then not letting us have more than shaky glimpses of what they might be. 

Repeating another motif of late is imagery of life in water, both fish and microscopic. In Nightmare Detective, water indicates the organic boundaries between the physical and spiritual, and between one consciousness and another. Kagenuma descends in and out of dreamastates and others' selves by sinking onto the keel of a sunken ship. We also see imagery of fish and microscopic life.

Preparing to enter someone else's dream state, Kagenuma dresses in a rain slicker, and beneath that pants and shoes he can easily slip out of. It's a psychological trick, helping him find the right mental state by shedding encumbrances. The rain slicker looks a bit like a cape – echoing the visual cue from M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable but much more amusing as a jab at superhero costumes.

Tsukamoto can also be found in a visual motif that recurs from Vital, an act of mutual asphyxiation between two characters seeking oblivion together. This is not erotic asphyxiation, but shared hopelessness. Both films trade in depression without solving it. In Nightmare Detective, one character finds his depression linked to a buried childhood trauma while another who suffers looks into her own past and finds abundant joy. How did they both end up in the same place? It's the mystery that preoccupies Tsukamoto's movie.

Nightmare Detective is the first in a trilogy proposed by Shinya Tsukamoto. To date he has yet to begin production on the third film.

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (Freddie Francis, 1968)

How do you set about fighting vampires if you happen to be an atheist? That's the central dilemma of this fourth film in Hammer's Dracula franchise. It's an oddly gentle movie for standard vampiric fright fare. Oh, you get your bloodlettings and wanton cruelty (it does star Christopher lee, after all), yet when it's all over the lingering impression is of an idealistic good nature, almost a gee-whizness concerning the good will between rival systems of belief. The world could use more of that.

The dilemma above is faced by Paul, a forthright young man in love with the niece of a disapproving Monsignor. Paul is an atheist, and when the Monsignor tells him he admires honesty Paul makes the mistake of telling the truth about his convictions. It causes a schism between everyone at just the wrong moment, as the Monsignor has unwittingly gotten on the bad side of the newly resurrected Dracula. For revenge Dracula targets the Monsignor's niece, Maria., as his next conquest.

There are a few of things that are slightly off about Dracula Has Risen, and Paul is one of them. He's a nice guy, sure enough, highly personable and no character flaws. He's an earnest and forthright fellow, wishing offense to no one but eager for “Truth”, which he seeks in books. It's his upbeat persona and interactions that give the movie a G-rated feel in spite of the violence involved (bizarrely, the movie has even been granted a G rating by the MPAA). Paul seems displaced in tone and also in time. He and his drinking buddies come of as anachronistic in their manners and ideals (and their hairstyles...) DHRFtG was made to appeal directly to the youth audience at a time of spreading protest among college students - 1967 had seen protests against the Vietnam War, and within months of Risen's release in February '68 those youth protests would spread worldwide to become the “Year of Barricades”. It was a generational conflict, youth shaking up and shaking off the institutions of their elders.

Yet Dracula Has Risen is not an angry film, far from it. The generational conflict is represented here as that of atheist Paul and the film's most learned man, the Monsignor – who rejects Paul the moment he learns of Paul's convictions. To this point in the film the Monsignor has been shown to be a somewhat affable man but one who will bully and coerce to enforce his views. A visit to the discussion boards on IMDb brings up conversations in which people see his hostility to Paul as a sour surprise. Actually, though, it isn't nearly negative enough to be accurate to the period – another anachronism, the entire community shows the film's Paul far more tolerance than a real-life counterpart would have met. In reality Paul would have been a scandal regardless what a swell guy he was.

Even so, Paul really is presented as scrubbed so clean he's nearly glowing pink. Don't alienate the core audience! His character never hints of anger or rebellion, not even at odds with society at large. Paul's boss loves the boy, Maria's mother asks him to leave only our of deference to the Monsignor who cares for the family but is clearly pained to do so. Paul's friends are as inoffensive as he is, with the possible exception of the barmaid who chafes a little resentfully at romantic boundaries. Essentially: what conflict? The world's a happy get-along place! If DHRFtG is taking pains to be a part of the movement and not just being opportunistic, then it's the voice urging calm and understanding amidst passions. We can work together. 

So how does Dracula fit into this? Erm – well, yeah. Exactly. I mean, the movie isn't thematically deep, the subtexts are there but they float on the surface like oil, never quite convincing that they are organic to the whole. Dracula is the catalyst for reconciliations. Furthering both the faith angle and the message of cooperation, Dracula has taken as his servant a fallen priest suffering a crisis of faith and conscience. Contrast this with his direct opponent, the Monsignor who must rely upon a disbeliever to defeat evil. If the movie is ultimately a little unsatisfying in resolving these themes, it's still full of tantalizing little provocations.

Not the film is all hope and joy: Christopher Lee is back as wild as ever. I don't recall seeing look quite so cadaverous before – not Lee himself but the makeup, which has taken a more sallow hue. Nothing dead about his performance, though, he's even vicious to the horses that take his carriage. The only thing that can stop him flat is the flavorless dialog he's given. Honestly, the actor is a lot happier when his vampire is snarling.

Freddie Francis replaces Terence Fisher as director, and he does a fine job of keeping things lively if tonally awkward (e.g. there's a bit of business with a porcelain doll pushed off a bed by one of Dracula's victims – succinct but unsubtle). Early in the movie I was concerned that the look of the picture would be a bit dull, as the natural lighting threatened to undo any atmospherics with the Count's castle, or it's surroundings, or with a profaned church where a bit of grue is discovered, but Francis has a new trick up his sleeve. Whenever Dracula appears on screen he's shot with a filter that goes deep amber in a halo around the center of the screen. The effect is that of a miasma of sickness or evil surrounding the count. Or even more, perhaps, late in the movie I was struck by the way the yellow seen in a fireplace matched the filtered shots, and how it reflects the religious bent of the movie – perhaps the yellow filter suggests the suffocating nearness of hell itself. Not inapt, as Dracula has already been conflated with the Prince of Darkness if only by title. As the movie progresses its lighting becomes more and more dreamlike with colors intensifying, mostly by an increasing use of gels.

Adding to the sense of surreality are some anomalies. In the city of Kleinenberg, where Dracula tracks down the Monsignor, our principle characters have a habit of getting around by rooftop rather than by street. By the end of the movie all of the characters are traversing the roofs. It's absurd, but it has an endearing dream logic to it. Similarly the cellar of the inn where Dracula secretly takes up residence is ridiculously extensive for a meager establishment with a cramped bar and closetlike rooms. The guests and servants can hardly get around upstairs but down below are more spacious work and storage areas that include a spooky Gothic structure that must be well out from under the building. It could have no possible function except as an invitation to furtive evil monsters. Personally, I find the dreamlike aspects of Dracula has Risen are ultimately the most endearing thing about it.

5 Short Films by Shinya Tsukamoto

The moment his father brought home an 8mm movie camera, young Shinya Tsukamoto appropriated it as his own and began experimenting. Inspired by the kaiju (monster) movies he loved, the first proper movie he made with the home camera was about a man who becomes a monster and destroys Tokyo. Film became a passion for him and he continued making movies throughout his school years recruiting everyone he could find including his older brother. Despite the budget he had to work with, his movies were often feature-length with fully developed scripts. These he would show to various school classes. Eventually Tsukamoto became involved in school theater, and on leaving school formed his own shortlived stage company. His officially recognized body of work numbers eight movies before the more widely known Phantom of Regular Size.

Phantom of Regular Size (1986, 18 minutes)

More correctly translated as Monster of Regular Size, meaning human-sized monster, Phantom was the rough sketch of an idea that would be fleshed out to become Tetsuo the Iron Man. This was Tsukamoto finding his voice through experimentation, content to let story and narrative slide. 

  

The Adventures of Denchu Kozo (1987, 45 minutes)

 Into every generation an Electric Rod Boy is born: one boy in all the wold, a chosen one. He alone will have the power to bring light to a world in darkness. He is the Electric Rod Boy.

Some five or six years before Buffy, high-schooler Kai was the chosen one fighting punk rock vampires in this short movie that fuses early music video style to manga, Back to the Future (or maybe the Terminator), Godzilla, and Plymptoons. It's a marvel of demented editing, stop motion, and no-budget ingenuity. It's also the most pure fun of anything Shinya Tsukamoto has made, a bright comedy about a dark future.

Kai is an odd child, picked on at school for his deformity: an electric rod growing out of his back. Let me clear something up about that, it's not a lighting rod – not some short little stick. No, it's a freakin' street pole! Sharing his shirt collar and growing to tower over him. That's the kind of movie you're dealing with: one in which, during a fight, a stuffed toy dog flies into the room and vomits stuffing for no apparent reason.

Kai's schoolmate Momo is sweet on him. She's also a fighter and rescues him from bullies. One day while he shows off his prototype for a time machine, he is suddenly whisked to the future by another machine appearing out of nowhere. Arriving twenty-five years into the future he finds the world has been conquered by vampires who have enslaved humanity. They have devices that keep the world shrouded in darkness for short periods of time. They are about to make that state permanent with an amplifier that uses an untouched female virgin as a battery. Awaiting Kai's arrival is a foe of the vampires, a mysterious woman who wears a photo album on her head like a professor's mortarboard. She tells Kai that he is the chosen one who is meant to defeat the vampires.

While there's not much meaning to any of this it's got a fully developed storyline that's easy enough to follow if you're quick enough to keep up with the visuals – not an easy task. t's brisk and funny, and hard to take your eyes off of. Kai is a polite kid, not goofy but engagingly awkward, and there's a gentle bond between Kai and his future mentor. (Kei Fujiwara in a much more substantial role than she would play as the subway attacker in Tetsuo). Among other signature likes, Tsukamoto works his love of giant monsters into the movie with a giant vampire looming over a miniature tokyo while spewing atomic breath ala Gojira. First time I've ever seen dai-kaiju that was a gorgeous nude woman. There's also a running sendup of the archetypal masculine hero of cinema: Kai is anything but the he-man type yet the dialog is taken up with double-ententes about how the power of his rod is going to save the world.

Tokage (2003, 50 minutes)

Tokage was commissioned by television network NHK for a series in which the works of famous Japanese authors would be narrated on film, as captured by noteworthy directors. Tsukamoto was asked to direct the short story Lizard, by Banana Yoshimoto.

Lizard concerns a love affair between two healers who are unable to heal their own psychic wounds. The narrator is a counselor for disturbed children. He has fallen in love with a profoundly sad woman nicknamed Lizard who longs for oblivion. Lizard has an uncanny ability to diagnose and treat other people's illnesses. The story follows their mutual fumbling towards the point where they can share with each other their most personal stories. The relationship – two depressives in despair, who seek mutual healing – looks forward to Vital, which Tsukamoto would direct the next year. So do some of the themes raised by the story, like psychic abilities and the question of soul independent of body though these are lightly touched upon. Properly, the tale is about empathy and the wounds left by trauma. Also anticipating Vital, it's one of the director's bleakest works.

Shot on hi-def video, Tokage follows actress Ryo as she reads Yoshimoto's text. Our first sight of her is in a bedroom, and then the camera follows through through a succession of rooms in what we soon realize is an abandoned building. As the story unfolds and the two lovers reveal more of their inner selves, the rooms Ryo visits show more alarming states of disrepair until we find ourselves in a cafeteria still festooned with the streamers that once saw a celebration. Tsukamoto films under a variety of light sources, primarily natural – they filmed it in a single continuous shot at sundown.

Jewel Beetle (2005, 22 minutes)

Named for a beetle whose lustrous wings make it desirable for ornamentative purposes, Jewel Beetle concerns a yakuza leader and the mistress he keeps far away from society. The relationshoip is founded on sexual fulfillment but the two are genuinely fond of each other. The woman (never named) is restless as she is not allowed to wander away from her remote cabin. The 'Old Man' (as she calls him) fears for her future should he be killed, which is becoming likely, so he introduces her to his young protege. 

There are three sex scenes in the movie: the first is a fully clothed interlude between the yakuza head and the woman, that speaks of the playfulness of long familiarity; the second is again fully clothed, tender, a tentative moment between the mistress and the young man, a less-than-chaste kiss with the camera close and intimate on their sweat-dewed faces, chaperoned by the sound of rain; the third is tension-relieving naked animal pleasure. I wonder whether this might be the first depiction of female ejaculation in a non-pornographic film. All of the scenes of the woman inside her cabin are caressed in blue, purple, and pink lighting. Jewel Beetle echoes A Snake of June in that the tale is about a woman who comes to realize that she owns her own sexuality and can choose autonomy.

Jewel Beetle was Shinya Tsukamoto's contribution to an anthology film titled Fîmeiru (Female), featuring works by Ryuichi Hiroki, Suzuki Matsuo, Miwa Nishikawa, and Tetsuo Shinohara.

Haze (2005, 49 minutes)

Haze is an exercise in extreme claustrophobia and paranoia, in that order. A man awakens in the dark, in a maximally confined space that offers only the slightest options for movement. He has no memory of who he is or how he got there. When it becomes apparent that the space is a maze, he attempts to find his way out amidst various hazards like pipes that grate along his teeth, nails protruding from the floor, and automated hammers that beat at him. All the while, he tortures himself with speculation: is he in hell? Has war broken out and he is in the hands of some enemy force? Has he been kidnapped by some rich sadist? The narrative is as closed in as the set, a limited film but a harrowing one that's impossible to look away from. Grimy, nasty, and terrifying, Haze is a darker exploration of an idea Tsukamoto first visited in Vital.

I have not yet seen either the short film that was entered in “Venice 70: Future Reloaded” or "Ayashiki bungô kaidan".

Zinda Laash aka The Living Corpse (Khwaza Sarfraz, 1967)

You've been here often enough to know how it goes: Jonathon Harker travels to a forbidding manse where he is greeted by a noble he doesn't realize is a vampire. At night he meets one or more of the vampire's seductive female concubines. Then she breaks into a musical number.

As an adaptation there isn't much to say of Zinda Laash except that it's quite good. It's modeled directly on Hammer's 1958 Horror of Dracula, liberally appropriating some sequences shot-for-shot as well as tracks from James Bernard's score. Those lifts are supplemented by a deranged range of musical selections that include nightclub songs, Western saloon piano, the Barber of Seville, and La Cucaracha. Some of it misses the mark tonally, but somehow altogether it works to infuse the movie with a sense of fresh energy. Shot in luminous b&w, Zinda Laash is pretty to look at and well paced. Like Horror of Dracula, Zinda Laash pares back the need for sfx – no wolf, bat, or mist transformations. Harking back to the original novel, the vampire's feeding of the kidnapped baby to an underling makes its second appearance in a Dracula adaptation. Not that the moment is explicit, bitings are discreetly staged and edited. Much more effective are the shadows and webs of the vampire's home.

One effect I found notable was a transitional fade that occurs two or three times. You know, that old technique used for, say, werewolf transformations? The camera focuses on the actor's face, a few frames are shot, and then makeup is added in increments before shooting a few more frames. In Zinda Laash the difference between a vampire and a human is a matter of fairly subtle makeup – no Joss Whedon vampfaces here. Basically, when an actor changes from human to vampire, they just look a little less restrained of nature. So, when you see a transitional fade in this movie you're seeing an obvious fade with little or no obvious difference: the actor, a fade, and the actor looking the same. The effect calls attention to itself, and the first time it threw me. Then I realized that you don't need to see the change, the fact of the fade itself clues you in that there's been one. Subtle and brilliant.

The differences are mostly cultural: the supernatural horror aspects are kept to a minimum, which necessitates a prologue in which we learn that the Dracula character was a scientist named Tabani who vampirized himself with a potion gone wrong. No one waves any crosses about, there's not much talk of religion...and every so often the women break into song and dance (even the climactic fight sequence is choreographed to look like a dance, though I suspect this was unintentional). That's just par for the course with Lollywood (Lahore-based) cinema, a film is incomplete without musical numbers. Similar to Drakula Istanbul'da, Zinda Laash transplants the tale not only geographically but temporally as well to modern times. We've seen Dracula driving a car in other versions, but somehow it seems fundamentally wrong to see him driving a car. The styles on display are Western in attire and furnishings, and there's a strong sense of '60s youth “scene” about the movie.

Also interesting are the women of Zinda Laash. They never show much skin but are all highly sensual, not least when they dance. Human, vampire, and in transitions between they move like flames and drape themselves over the furniture with the silky fluidity of some of their costumes. Their looks smolder. Even in innocence they radiate energy, as in a beachside number. Still human, Shabnam (the Lucy character) waiting for Dracula is the most outright expression of sexual longing to appear in any Dracula movie to that date and for some time to come.

It's kind of fascinating to watch Zinda Laash thread its way between suggestive behavior and the strict moral purity imposed by Pakistan's dictatorship of the day. The censors were apoplectic that a horror film had even been made in the first place (Pakistan's second, the first being 1964's Deewana, a version of The Invisible Man). Cuts were made to some of the more provocative dance moves, and the film was finally okayed for release only upon the promise by the producers that they would never, ever again make a horror movie. Zinda Laash was released with an 'adults only' certificate, guaranteeing that everyone wanted to see it. It was a hit. Pakistani theaters were well used to horror imports, but this was their own and nigh forbidden to boot.

I saw it a month ago on YouTube and have happily added Mondo Macabro's 2003 DVD release under the alternate title “The Living Corpse” to my collection. Having only recently been a lost film, this boasts a beautifully restored image that suffers only a brief drunken wobble in one scene. It's a sweet package that includes a commentary track , new interviews the filmmakers, a clip-heavy look at Asian horror cinema, a song cut from the film, galleries, and trailers. The movie itself is in Urdu with optional English subs.

Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)

Freaks is a movie I think of as a Voight-Kampff test. If you're not familiar with Blade Runner or the Philip K. Dick novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', I'll explain: administering a Voight-Kampff is how you tell a human being from an android replica. The test consists of a battery of questions and proposals designed to elicit an empathetic response. The android will not have genuine emotional responses – in theory, an android has no capacity for empathy.

On its original theatrical run in 1932 and for decades after, audiences and critics alike failed that test spectacularly.

Made and marketed as a horror film, Freaks is a colorful tale of the life of a circus troupe drawn from writer/director Tod Browning's personal recollections. We see the performers' loves, their jealousies, their rivalries and personal disputes, the bonds and the enmities they form. The great bulk of the movie is light, jovial. Emphasis is placed on the various romances (most of them frustrated in one way or another) that occur within the troupe. Some of it is daring for the era, including some risque dialog that caught the censors unaware. Phroso the Clown and Venus are taken with each other, but Venus is unable to elicit a warm physical response from Phroso (“You shoulda seen me before my operation”, he says without further elucidation). Strongman Hercules is a crude Alpha-male brute who dallies with all the camp's women. He's attracted to the show's hermaphrodite but can't admit it and so is often hostile. She seems to be attracted to him as well, but never speaks it.  The circus' owner wants to marry Violet but can't get a moment alone with her, being that she is a conjoined twin. Her sister Daisy and the owner don't get along one bit. Frieda is devoted to Hans but Hans has eyes only for trapeze artist Cleopatra.  Cleopatra plays off Hans' love in order to get closer to his money.  Hans and Frieda are little people, whom Cleo despises along with all other “freaks”.

Here is where audiences freaked: the cast is an even mix of normal-bodied folk, paraplegics and quadriplegics, gaffs (performers who fake physical abnormality), little people, microcephalics (“pinheads”), hermaphrodites, and others with genuine physical malformations of many kinds from the incredibly thin to “bird people”. That alone made “normal” audiences uncomfortable. Imagine their revulsion when Browning upped the ante by presenting the “freaks” as not only human beings but beings with sexual impulses.

This is what the critics had to say when confronted by such humanity: Script opined that the film could only appeal to “the morbidly curious and psychically sick whose libidos are stimulated by contemplating the sex lives of abnormalities and monsters”. According to the Boston Herald, “Any who enjoy watching the pitiful grotesque mistakes of nature may behold them in 'Freaks' (...) the sadistically cruel plot savors nearly of perversion”. Time magazine deemed the sideshow performers to be “subhuman animals”.

Isn't society lovely? There is an instinct we all know for social survival that could be summed up as “pick on the freak”. It works like this: to be accepted by a dominant society and thus have their protection, you must publicly hurt someone scorned by that group, someone deemed lesser or undesirable. By doing so you demonstrate your own worthiness to belong. It's ugly and cruel, and we all learn it at school either by doing it or having it done to us. Pick on the freak. Browning knows it well and cannily provides a stark example in Freaks when Hercules (recently abandoned by Venus) now woos Cleopatra. The two espy the hermaphrodite (she is never named) looking on at Hercules with heartbroken eyes. Remember, Hercules is attracted to her. In front of Cleo, though, he has to demonstrate that he's 'normal' and so shows off his masculinity by delivering the hermaphrodite a vicious black eye. Cleo responds with delighted laughter.

Bringing out the worst in each other, the pair get darker from there and so does the film. Cleo marries Hans for his money. Actress Olga Baclanova essays the role of Cleo with an air of undisguised loathing for her circumstances, having to abide the presence of so many contemptible colleagues. In the film's most celebrated scene, a wedding banquet is held at which Cleo gets drunk, literally from champagne and figuratively from her success in so easily fooling her little rube. While the troupe celebrates, mostly oblivious to her as she is to them, she proceeds to demean him openly, mocking him for his size and condescending to his apparent stupidity. Watch the way she reacts when Hercules points her attention to the sideshow performers drinking a toast to her that they accept her: “One of us! One of us!” The horror! The effrontery! The sheer, nasty insult – Cleo accepted as equals by filth! Baclanova plays a beautiful transition from boisterous hilarity to stuporous incomprehension to outrage.

Further betrayals sow an anger throughout the troupe, poisoning them all. Plans are made, vigils are kept, until one night as the caravan makes it's way through a stormy night (it has to be a storm at night, doesn't it?) varying bands form and attack each other. The sequence is a veritable lesson in filmcraft by Browning and his crew, as is the wedding feast. I've hardly even mentioned the talent on display...gloriously shot and lit, captured by a camera as fluid as the ones in Dracula were not, and set in a studio-created circus grounds that are not just convincing but inviting as a living microcosm. It's easy to immerse and lose oneself here. The script is sharp, perhaps even acidic given what's known of excised material – the censors removed some thirty minutes of material, and more was scripted but never shot. The finale involved a castration, no longer extant.

Even today, some are squeamish about that finale. Some find Browning's treatment of the circus folk to be exploitative, ambivalent...they see the sideshow people crawling beneath the carriages, wet with mud and shot in the visual language of horror cinema, and they see Browning proposing the circus folk as monstrous. In Tod Browning's reckoning, everyone ends up in the mire including the 'normals'. In 1932, Motion Picture Daily wrote that one can “not simultaneously capitalize on human misfits and pretend to pity them”. It is at least a recognition of basic human dignity, but still a failure to comprehend what's right there on the screen. When the hour of reckoning comes, it is the normal-bodied and “freak” alike who attack, or act to defend others, their courses decided not by their infirmities but by the strengths of their characters, side by side as equals and companions. In Browning's reckoning, lack of human empathy lowers us all into the mire.