Pound 1970 Scream and Scream Again 1970

Hither's another lengthy gear up of remarks culled from lectures I gave for the British Horror Film course from a few years ago . This time the subject isn't Tod Slaughter butScream and Scream Again(1970), a peculiar film that brings together a disparate set of genres, tones, and narratives, few of which cohere with each other, though the issue is nonetheless a pretty compelling and (at times) remarkably slow horror motion picture, which is no mean feat.

As those of yous who stuck around last Tuesday night already well know, the film we're going to be talking almost this week, Scream and Scream Again, poses a number of challenges to interpretation that speak to some of the things I allusively tried to prepare the grounds for during my position argument last week right before the Thanksgiving holidays. For starters, at that place'south the fact that the motion-picture show is a generic mess, a shambling aggregation of discordant moves and archetypes, a distractingly clumsy mash-up of conspiracy thriller paranoia, by-the-book police procedural forms, Swinging London iconography ("I love yous, human being!"), parodically outsized (and presumably Cold State of war-instigated) totalitarian fantasy projections supposedly giving united states of america a peek backside the Fe Curtain (though that reading gets quickly enough troubled and undone once you showtime to apply a petty pressure to it), and (finally) horror-ish signifiers (a vampire serial killer, Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee, oh my!). The obvious (but no less essential) thing to notation nigh Scream and Scream Once more's unseemly clutter and general untidiness is the degree to which the picture's unruliness seems to be related to the threat the movie does non and so much contain as it open up-endedly represents and (dare I say it) embodies. That is to say, Scream and Scream Again is every bit much a blended equally are the living dead superhumans beingness designed by Dr. Browning with his applicator and his fabricator. The film, in short, is a beefed-up, amped-upwardly, sped-up assortment of distinctive parts that all seem to exist governed past a blueprint that is not itself reducible to the functions and expectations commonly attached to those parts, at to the lowest degree not when they testify upward in a British horror motion picture from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In this respect, therefore, it's perhaps helpful to continue in mind that Dr. Browning's revelations at the terminate of the film don't really tell u.s.a. anything that would help u.s.a. to brand sense of what it is we just saw. For instance, to take the most obvious (but no less of import) instance: nothing Browning says satisfactorily explains why Keith is a vampiric serial killer instead of just another normal run-of-the-factory serial killer, like the real-life (if non quite contemporaneous) Yorkshire Ripper who terrorized England and killed thirteen women betwixt 1975 and 1980. In fact, Keith'due south activities and the police effort to take hold of him are evidently such a consequential sub-plot or blended chemical element in the picture show that Keith'due south protracted chase and death scene gets fifteen minutes of screen-time in a ninety-five minute moving picture, meaning that Keith's failed escape and his successful suicide take upwardly well-nigh 20 per centum of the picture itself. Even so despite this conspicuous focus on Keith's clumsy escape attempts and his acid-bath death, all Browning has to say about him is that Keith was his start composite with "autonomously operation brain patterns," but that does little to help you lot understand or business relationship for in a tidy sort of mode why Keith'south "autonomously functioning brain patterns" lead him to rape, brutalize, and drain the claret of young women out on the town for a shag. In short, much like Keith, the film itself is much in need of our interpretive efforts because the explanations and motivations with which Dr. Browning very elaborately regales Dr. Sorel at the end of the motion picture very noticeably leave a lot of stuff explained, not merely with respect to the narrative itself merely also to the world that that film attempts to build up in its aplenty (and disorienting) use of lucifer-cuts equally information technology moves from story-to-story, from genre-to-genre, and from zone-to-zone.

Centrolineal to the composite-style of which Scream and Scream Again is cussedly comprised, a remarkable lack of piety toward this thing called "The British Horror Pic" as well seems to get strikingly demonstrated again and once again throughout the movie. Another mode of maxim this would exist to note that what the film presents us with is decidedly not the "English gothic tradition" so stridently singled out and generously described past David Pirie in his book-length study of British Horror. To exist sure, nosotros do indeed find a vampire amidst all the stitched-together popular civilisation detritus of the film, but this isn't a Hammer (or fifty-fifty a Universal) vampire. Far from beingness the stuff of Byronic anti-hero legend that Pirie reliably sees instantiated with varying degrees of approximating success in Hammer'south long run of Dracula flicks, Keith, the vampire series killer in Scream and Scream Again, does not seem to embody familiar British gothic archetypes so much as he does a ready of evacuated preconceptions that neither he nor the film makes much effort to thereafter fill in or mankind out for united states. That is to say, certain, Keith'south a vampire, but the moving picture doesn't actually requite us the sorts of vampire business (similar close-ups of the bite marks) to which we've grown accustomed by the Hammer business firm style, nor do we always get to run across Keith baring his canines equally he moves in for a gulp from the jugular. Similarly, the rationale for Keith's bloodlust is so non-real that evidently it doesn't even rate a quasi-logical cover story. Naught Dr. Browning says suggests that Keith'southward vampirism is a necessary supplement to his living dead superhuman-ness. We have no reason to suspect that Keith needs blood to stay alive, meaning that we're thrown dorsum on trying to interpret this wildly inconsistent picture in terms of the elusive motivations of its wildly inconsistent characters, who seem to have overdeveloped fantasy lives, of which the film does not make ever let us partake or catch more than a glimpse.  Different a lot of the other films we've been watching this quarter, it would mayhap be fair to say that Scream and Scream Again doesn't much care well-nigh putting together a coherent embrace story for us, nor does information technology seem to think that this is a trouble. Instead, its incoherent cover story merely is the case, like information technology or lump it.

While I do not want u.s. to ever lose sight of this incoherence or of this doubled inconsistency at the level of the film itself and of the motivations of the film's characters themselves, I do even so want to make a start here today of addressing these confusing and maybe even nonsensical features of the text by way of a long detour into figures and national film traditions that have not yet come into our view this quarter in the British horror films nosotros've watched up to this point. The reasons for this detour are easily plenty justified because you all ought to know upwardly-front that I understand Scream and Scream Again'south symbolic investments and pieties as being non at all reducible to the British film-making milieu, industrial arrangements, and reservoir of citational material with which you've all grown quite proficient at recognizing, analyzing, and making utilize of in novel ways these past 8 or so weeks. Instead, the argument I'chiliad making today would accept you lot all believe that Scream and Scream Again evocatively scrambles the tools you all accept been working with because its main intertextual points of reference be beyond a range of times and national spaces that seem to have picayune to do with Pirie's much-vaunted "English language gothic tradition." At the risk of speaking schematically, I think we can reduce these points of references to at least ii orders, which I will list for yous at present and and then spend a practiced chunk of today's lecture detailing at greater length.

Our first point of reference (and the 1 I am going to spend well-nigh all of today'south lecture talking about) comes from German popular movie theatre from the 1920s to the 1960s (in other words, from Weimar Germany through Nazi Federal republic of germany and out the other side in a Cold War-set Western German language milieu), and this point of reference goes past the name of Dr. Mabuse, the great criminal mastermind, anti-hero, and supposedly allegorical embodiment of all that went wrong with German history following World War I. Our second point of reference is more concisely expressed and comes from a near future that was just becoming discernible at the time Scream and Scream Again was in product, and this betoken of reference goes past the proper name of the conspiracy movie, peradventure the American film genre par excellence in the 1970s.

Let me go back to my commencement point because it needs a chip more than unpacking. If I had time today, I would build up another German point of reference, one that comes from West German popular cinema, but from a subsequently period that roughly overlaps with the years of Hammer'southward ascent and fall (roughly speaking, from the tardily 1950s to the early 1970s), and this bespeak of reference goes by the proper noun of Kriminalfilms (Krimis for short), which more by and large ways criminal offense films only in this period tended to refer principally to German-language adaptations of the pulpy law-breaking novels of an early twentieth-century British writer (Edgar Wallace) by a Danish and German film studio called Rialto Pictures. Because I don't take the time to develop linkages between Scream and Scream Again and these comic-book-like and downright goofy Krimis (parenthetically, I would note for you all that the best imaginative approximation of these films for those of you who haven't seen them is to think about a Sean Connery James Bond pic shot similar an hour-and-a-half-long Scooby-Doo drawing episode, consummate with endings in which the killer gets unmasked by the snoopy Scotland Grand investigators, and you'll be damn awful shut to any given Krimi), I'll very briefly describe them to yous and why they might be worth your fourth dimension.

These films are fascinating intertexts for a course like this considering Rialto's Edgar Wallace Krimis are pretty much West Germany's answer to Hammer Horror. That is to say, if in that location's a popular cultural property of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s instantly recognizable as "West German," it's these Krimis, and they're pretty neat intertexts with Hammer horror when yous starting time to remember near them together. For starters, if near of the canonical Hammer films are set in a Hammerland that'south supposed to exist the Europe or Eastern Europe of the nineteenth century or before, then these Edgar Wallace Krimis are also all gear up in a place nosotros can take to calling Krimiland, which is supposed to be a mid-twentieth-century West High german's pop imaginary representation of mid-twentieth-century London, where evil clandestine organizations (oftentimes led by men and women who wear foreign masks and colorful disguises) confront off confronting the good secret organization called Scotland K. A lot of jokes at the expense of the Brit's stiff upper lip are made, huge quantities of poisoned tea get consumed, remnants of a decaying aloof form get unmasked for the decadent wastrels that they are, and the conservative-fied members of this remaindered landed gentry end up winning the vast inheritance and marrying the dashing Scotland Yard investigator. I would also annotation for you lot all that though these films always show Scotland Yard coming out on top, along the way the One thousand's detectives permit a lot of people die, either through incompetence or boneheaded negligence.

There'due south a lot more to exist said here, but the thing to agree onto here is the sort of supranational work that is being done in Hammer films and in these Krimis in lodge to make more imaginable or thinkable something like an integrated and integral Europe. Call back of both equally popular civilization anticipations of the European Union from the Common cold War menses. Although I'1000 non going to be able to talk about these Due west German language Edgar Wallace adaptations in any sort of item, I would like to give you a gustatory modality so you accept a sense of what it is we're dealing with here. Here's a clip from The Monk with the Whip (1967), in which a boarding school headmistress, done up in a lurid blood-reddish monk outfit, terrorizes the teaching staff and student torso of her all-girl school somewhere in the countryside simply outside of London. Here are the opening iv minutes of the film:

I don't have the time to go into any sort of detailed analysis hither, but let information technology suffice for me to bespeak out to you that if nosotros get-go in a British horror film—that is to say, if we offset in a pulp Eastmancolorized mad scientist moving-picture show—then by the end of the credit sequence we're pretty securely situated in Krimiland, replete with a Scooby-Doo villain whose dramatic entrance is scored with an organ music cue that segues quite jarringly into the poppier jangle of belatedly 1960s Euro-jazz that's such an integral function of this film and of Scream and Scream Again. Compare this opening credit sequence, with the red monk effigy approaching the camera as the credit rolls, with the opening of Scream and Scream Once again, where our unfortunately disoriented human approaches the camera every bit the credits splay out over him and as the Euro-jazz pap plays:

If I had more time today, I would stress the importance of Scream and Scream Once again'southward credit sequences as the place where the film starts cueing viewers for a perceptual experience in which Krimis—and non Hammer or its British knock-offs—are the motion-picture show-watching and -making models to be followed. As I don't have fourth dimension to practise this, however, I'll let that claim loom over us for a bit as I motion on.

In a nutshell, what we have here is a circuitous weave of styles, figures, tropes, narratives, filmmaking traditions, national cultural backdrop, and temporalities informing the intertextual network that Scream and Scream Again establishes, which is a roundabout way of saying that all the bug presented by Dr. Browning's composites remain with us notwithstanding. Maxim that these film traditions or figures or genres or modes are the principal ones being evoked by Scream and Scream Again does non make the untidy hash of things described by the ill-fitting assemblages in that film's narrative, style, or characters become away. What starts as a mess, in other words, is going to stay a mess, simply at least at present nosotros have a bigger mess to work with and select from in interpreting the film. I ought also to fess upwardly at this indicate and tell y'all all that the mess is going to stay a mess throughout this lecture, which is to say that I am not leading y'all all down a path at the stop of which stands a perfectly coherent and singularly reconstituted Scream and Scream Once more. Instead, at 3:45 nosotros're still going to exist stuck with a endless number of composites (blended narratives, composite styles, composite intertexts, composite histories, composite national cultures, etc.), and if there's any goal I have in view for my commentary today, then that goal is that we all will have a improve sense of how to coherently talk nearly the incoherence of Scream and Scream Again'south compositeness. Another style of putting this would be to say that while I am trying to do justice to the moving-picture show's compositeness, I am not at all going to be true-blue to its incoherence.

The other preliminary thing that I ought to signpost for you lot all a bit more forthrightly has to practice with this issue of the Britishness of the British horror motion-picture show. For starters, for those of you lot thinking about writing about Scream and Scream Again for your final paper, I would strongly encourage you to re-read the material written by Andrew Higson in the class reader on the idea of national cinema. I really don't have the fourth dimension to belabor this point (though it is a point well worth belaboring), but I do want to gesture toward the Higson chapters in gild to pose the following question, and I want all of y'all to mull over this question as you keep thinking about Scream and Scream Again this calendar week: if we start from Higson'south cultural valence of the concept of national cinema—that is to say, if nosotros presume that the concept of national cinema in the instance of Scream and Scream Once more is preeminently a cultural notion every bit opposed to an economic ane—then what sort of mass identity is being affirmed in a "British" moving picture where the chief cultural traditions being negotiated are not-indigenous so long as we approach the "British Horror Film" in terms of its "Britishness"? In a nutshell, what's so British well-nigh Scream and Scream Again? Alternatively, just how German is it?

The tentative answer I am offering today would have you all believe that Scream and Scream Again ruptures the sorts of national frameworks that this class has provisionally put around the films it has shown y'all upwards until now considering the ethnic and shared cultural traditions that this motion-picture show imagines (and would take you imagine along with it) derive from a continent-wide reservoir of cultural properties that traverse a supranational unit, similar that of the European Coal and Steel Community or the European Economic Customs or (finally) the European Spousal relationship. In short, I want you all to start thinking about the necessity of approaching this motion-picture show in terms of a broader European motion-picture show culture and horror picture show tradition because my readings today and my hunches today all limited in one way or another a principled dissatisfaction with the capacity of sure jealously guarded and nationally demarcated film concepts and tools to adequately open up Scream and Scream Over again to adequate estimation.

This has been a long, roundabout way of saying that there is more than than i style to written report British horror movies, and the purpose of my comments in this our concluding week is simply to shake things up a chip and get you all to start thinking near British horror films not then much in terms of "indigenous" film traditions only rather in terms of pan-European cultural interchanges, exchanges, and product differentiation. For example, a useful sort of question to ask in this vein would exist the following: what do the Hammer Dracula movies await similar later on we accept into account Italian vampire films from the 1950s, Castilian vampire films from the late 1960s, and French vampire films from the 1970s? Alternatively (and more interestingly perhaps), I can't help but notice that it would exist very instructive to juxtapose Hammer Dracula and Frankenstein movies with the chief contemporary horror icons from other European countries, like the figure of the witch in Italian republic or the wolfman in Espana or lesbian vampires in France or Dr. Mabuse in West Germany. In short, what happens when we replace Great Britain with the figmentary (but no less powerful) idea of a unified Europe as our referent for these "British" horror films? With those questions asked and those observations expressed, we tin can begin to talk almost the Scream and Scream Over again past way of that shadowy criminal mastermind, expert hypnotist, and counterfeit artist, Dr. Mabuse, arguably the almost popular anti-hero of German pop cinema and the bailiwick of twelve official Mabuse films made over the course of seventy years.

For most contemporary non-German film-viewers, withal, the name "Dr. Mabuse" conjures up visions of an auteur considering the film-maker most commonly associated with Dr. Mabuse is Fritz Lang, who directed and co-wrote the first iii Dr. Mabuse flicks: Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), and The i,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). Following The 1,000 Optics of Dr. Mabuse, Artur Brauner, the producer who owned the rights to Dr. Mabuse in the post-war period, began cranking out campy remakes and sequels to the original Mabuse trilogy, and these serially-produced sequels and remakes borrowed a good deal both from 1960s spy films and from the Krimis being churned out by Rialto films in Due west Germany at the same time as well, but I'll bracket that connexion for the at present and focus instead on the 3 Lang Mabuse films.

All yous need to know about the first 3 Mabuse movies is that they all involve an "evil" mastermind who threatens the existing social order with his well-coordinated criminal arrangement, whose unparalleled efficacy at carrying out its anti-social misdeeds oftentimes seems to brand existing society its uncanny double. That is to say, these films reliably tend to suggest that the institutions and fidelities of a Mabuse-led or a Mabuse-inspired criminal underworld would make the world run more than smoothly considering they actually attain what they set out to do, unlike existing police force forces, market economies, and national governments, which all stumble, falter, and outright fail with far besides much regularity to exist of much service or aid to the billions of people they manage, govern, and law worldwide. Alternatively, Mabuse's criminal underworld, particularly in the kickoff Mabuse pic, tends to become read allegorically quite literally as an "image of the times" such that Mabuse's criminal activities are meant to be interpreted equally thinly-veiled representations of supposedly more than socially acceptable crimes, like speculative finance in the time of currency inflation in early on 1920s Weimar Germany or increasingly invasive surveillance technologies in the Common cold War-era. In short, the boilerplate or commonplace critical assumption regarding the Lang Mabuse trilogy is that they present u.s.a. with three "images of the times" that are all certainly different simply that all even so share a conspiratorial world-outlook that becomes increasingly harder and harder to localize in the figure of Dr. Mabuse himself as the twentieth century unfolds. Mabuse, afterward all, goes mad at the cease of Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, and and so dies halfway through The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. The criminal organization that carries out its terroristic campaign in early 1930s Frg does and then using the notes written by Dr. Mabuse in his insane asylum, and in The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, "Mabuse" is simply a name adopted by a new criminal mastermind who follows Mabuse'south Weimar- and Nazi-era example. In other words, Mabuse is not really Mabuse past the early 1960s. What we have here, so, is the evacuation of Mabuse as a person and its re-inscription (past way of Mabuse's notes, his terminal will and testament) into a subject-position that anyone else (or, alternatively, that any number of people) tin fill should they aspire to go criminal masterminds who are also images or symptoms or allegories of their times. In short, what we notice in the Lang Mabuse films is an overarching narrative in which the proper name, "Dr. Mabuse," becomes more and more abstract and less and less personalized such that anyone could be a Dr. Mabuse in potential.

I would further add that we know that Scream and Scream Again ought to be preliminarily approached as an unofficialMabuse moving picture because the West German distributors somewhat cynically re-titled the movie The Living Corpses of Dr. Mabuse and re-dubbed the movie and so that Vincent Price'south Dr. Browning underwent a name modify to Dr. Mabuse. In other words, flick distributors in Germany saw a way of cashing in on the renewal of the 1960s Dr. Mabuse craze by introducing minimal differences into a British and American-financed moving picture whose paranoid and totalizing outlook onto a Common cold War world system seemed to already make that film legible as a Mabuse picture show to West German nationals in the first place. In other words, Scream and Scream Again's updated conspiracy narrative with cocky-subversive and singular anti-heroes backside it all seemed to jive with the sorts of cultural preconceptions and expectations raised by the Dr. Mabuse effigy himself in the mid-to-late 1960s. Compare, in this respect, the rationale behind the Mabuse-conspiracy given by Dr. Baum in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse with the account given of the Mabuse-like conspiracy by Dr. Browning in Scream and Scream Once again. In this first clip from The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, we accept Dr. Baum describing the genius of his patient, Dr. Mabuse, to constabulary inspector Lohmann every bit they stand over the body of Dr. Mabuse himself. Have a wait:

Now compare this to a like scene at the end of Scream and Scream Again:

There'southward obviously a lot to exist said virtually these two scenes and their relationship to each other, but for our purposes today I want to focus on ii things. For starters, the scene from Scream and Scream Over again seems to pointedly revalue Dr. Baum'due south clarification of Dr. Mabuse, such that the sorts of things Dr. Baum celebrates Dr. Browning disparages, and the sorts of things Dr. Baum disparages Dr. Browning celebrates. For instance, the godlessness of the Weimer Commonwealth in the early on 1930s seems to be an occasion for welcoming the terror and horror that Dr. Mabuse'south singularly "phenomenal, superhuman mind" instigates in his last will and testament's call for an anarcho-fascist campaign of terrorism targeting all levels of gild: finance, energy product, heavy industries, transportation, etc. are all ripe for destruction so that humankind can exist purified of and by its own propensity for violence, self-destruction, and mass extermination. There's a sort of homeopathic quality to Mabuse's testament in this film, such that the acts of terrorism that his written words impeccably put into action after his death are just amplifications of the daily acts of terrorism (like mass unemployment) that already face Germans in the interwar period merely that are more than or less countenanced because they are accepted as being part and parcel of modernity. In other words, terror and horror already be every bit a baseline of social experience in Weimar Germany, only their presence has been obscured precisely because they are such a commonplace feature of modern human life, and what Mabuse calls for (according to Dr. Baum) is a series of criminal undertakings meant to apocalyptically unveil these baseline social experiences for the acts of quotidian terrorism they in fact are once and for all. All of Dr. Baum'southward talk of a regrettable lack of justice or pity is just a feint or a ruse, therefore, to comprehend upwards the real trouble with Weimar Federal republic of germany in the early on 1930s, which is that it wasn't frightening enough because its citizens were just too damned jaded to be scared past much anymore. Plain, this is the bespeak where the Mabuse-as-Hitler or Mabuse-as-proto-fascist readings accept a field-24-hour interval, and it certainly has a scary sort of strength as a culture critique that does seem plausible on its face: by the early 1930s, this Mabuse-equally-Hitler statement would accept you believe, Germans were then jaded that even the rise of High german National Socialism wasn't plenty to scare them back into their senses. I don't know that that approach gets yous much farther than these sorts of pithily aphoristic glosses, only you tin can't deny them a sure force all the same.

Curiously, Dr. Browning's big speech in Scream and Scream Once again invokes such From Caligari to Hitler readings by its employ of something like contrary discourse. That is to say, Dr. Browning tries to reclaim Dr. Baum's speech by repurposing or revaluing the negative connotations attached to its terminology, both inside Lang'due south film itself and in the history of German language National Socialism. Instead of presenting us with the "superhuman" in terms of wholesale destruction, terror, and horror, Dr. Browning makes the important qualification that while what he is describing to Dr. Sorel certainly looks an awful lot similar a super-race, it actually ought not to be understood every bit an evil super-race. This sort of revaluation can be seen throughout Dr. Browning's speech (call up for example of his commemoration of the condition of our godlessness, which inverts Dr. Baum'due south assertions in Lang's film).

All the same, if Dr. Browning really is our Dr. Mabuse, and then he'south a less plain malevolent Mabuse-figure, for rather than taking humankind's proclivity toward mass extinction as a mandate for quickly exterminating all human life, Dr. Browning interprets it instead as a phone call for greater and greater control of men and women by a super-race of scientists who (in 20 years time we're told) volition be fix "to act for the good of humanity," though (as with much else in this motion picture) of what such acts will likely consist is left pointedly undisclosed. What gets stressed in its identify (and what Dr. Sorel'southward questions reliably point out) is the technocratically totalitarian nature of Dr. Browning'south post-sixties Mabuse-similar program, which is to say that information technology presupposes a degree of superhuman rulers and a caste of human subjects ruled past those superhuman rulers. Our latter-day version of Dr. Mabuse may be kinder, gentler, and look a whole hell of a lot more similar Vincent Price than Fritz Lang's Mabuse did, merely the keynote here still remains ane of the conspiratorial subjugation of the masses, past ways of terror and horror in the earlier film and past means of a presumably genetically-modified biological dispensation in this one that is meant to look more like benevolent and competent caretaking than it does terroristic purification.

The other thing that ought to interest us about the connections betwixt this scene and the one from The Attestation of Dr. Mabuse has to practise with Dr. Sorel's initial reaction to Dr. Browning'south revelations: "So, you lot've created life. Information technology's the old mad scientist's dream. Let's play God." What leaps out at me here is the explicit way in which this part of the exchange between Browning and Sorel negotiates the shifting cultural fields of reference at play throughout the scene. In other words, what interests me here is the mode in which Dr. Sorel starts to translate Dr. Browning'southward oral communication in terms of a British horror movie just to have Dr. Browning himself express joy off that interpretation in favor of the more plausible i: Browning sees Sorel's Frankenstein and raises him . . . a Mabuse. Different Mabuse, Frankenstein, it will be remembered, was never much of a team histrion, and in the Hammer films he tends to sit down uneasily either inside, at the head of, or at the edges of institutional frameworks. Mabuse, on the other hand, as you all are discovering, is all well-nigh institutions, he'south all almost massive vertically integrated criminal organizations at the acme of which sits him and him alone. In short, Dr. Sorel's failure to interpret the sort of horror movie that Dr. Browning and he are in corresponds with his failure to grasp more fully the newly totalizing dimension of the trouble he now faces. If just things were as simple as they frequently are in a Frankenstein moving picture, if only the problem were that of one caput likewise many or one head too few, so maybe Dr. Sorel could throw together some sort of jerky solution that would satisfactorily patch things upwards until the sequel. After all, Frankenstein himself really is the individual well-nigh responsible for the trouble with the surplus heads and bodies, information technology is he who is singularly responsible for all this cinematic over-generativity or surplus-productivity, so all you need to do is lop off his head, or maybe just await until he and the motion picture he is in gets bored with the mere fact of product, right? As I said earlier, however, Dr. Mabuse is a lot more than glace a figure, not least of all because he progressively evaporates as Lang'southward three films keep, and his subject-position increasingly becomes occupiable past whatsoever and all comers clever plenty and bureaucratically-minded plenty to put into play globe-encompassing conspiracies involving petty theft, blackmail, terrorism, speculative finance, explosive feats of engineering, and closed circuit tv surveillance systems. Moreover, Scream and Scream Again presents the states the frightening prospect in which humans every bit such exercise next to nothing. You'll remember that the climactic fight involves three superhuman Mabuses facing off confronting each other while our 2 humans make their escape.

Parenthetically, I want to interrupt myself hither in order to point out that the interesting affair nearly this confusing-Frankenstein-with-Mabuse business is that information technology besides gets at an interesting feature of the formal limerick of Scream and Scream Again, which has to do with its witty use of match cuts. Y'all all volition remember from Evan's lecture on the Hammer Frankenstein films that match cuts in those films provide a model for assembly. Conversely, the Fritz Lang Mabuse movies tend to operate by the disorienting utilize of cross-cutting, whereby you are plopped downwards in one narrative merely to be jerked abruptly from it and thrown into another narrative already in progress, significant you're constantly difficult-at-work bringing yourself upwardly to speed, trying to figure who's who and what this story has to exercise with the other story you were just in. The great affair virtually Scream and Scream Again is that information technology does both of these things: half the fun is trying to figure out where you are in a given plot and what that has to do with the other plots already presented, much like in a Mabuse film; the balance of the fun comes from the smart and silly editing tying these various plots together from scene-to-scene. Consider, in this respect, this foreign (but typical) scrap of cross- and match-cutting in Scream and Scream Over again:

I don't have the time to practise justice to this characteristic of the film, though maybe Marsh or Evan will follow through on it come Thursday. For our purposes today, let it suffice to say that compositionally or formally, the film takes the composite-ness of a Hammer Frankenstein motion picture stitched together with a Dr. Mabuse movie very, very seriously and in ways that reach down much deeper than its surface loopiness might otherwise advise. Merely I digress.

Before I build a bit more on this in terms of Mabuse and bureaucracies, I ought to briefly point out here a final affair, which is that information technology should be of interest to all of us that Mabuse gets confused with just some other mad scientist in the first place. That is to say, it is not a fault that Germany's biggest horror icon gets mis-identified equally one of Uk's biggest horror icons in a film that actively seeks to negotiate the film traditions and cultural properties of these two nation-states. I would farther annotation that the presence of Vincent Price here muddies things fifty-fifty more because what we effectively have here is a effigy who's part-Frankenstein, part-Mabuse, and part-Edgar-Allan-Poe-villain (if nosotros accept Price'southward wildly successful run as the villains in AIP's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations of the early on 1960s as the horror roles with which Toll likely would have been virtually popularly associated at this time). In short, Price'south Dr. Browning certainly is a composite himself, not simply in terms of the picture's plot but also in terms of the film'southward utilise of horror iconography, which mashes together a airheaded concoction of times, places, and figures that are non at all reducible to each other. In that location's patently a lot more to be said on this point, but I just don't have the fourth dimension to say it.

The next thing that we would want to note concerning Dr. Mabuse and Scream and Scream Again is that the sort of utopian fantasy that Dr. Mabuse names is that there is such a matter as a smoothly performance bureaucracy. To put it more pithily, to believe in the threat that Dr. Mabuse poses is to believe that somewhere in the world in that location'southward a bureaucracy that's working—perchance not flawlessly, merely more efficiently than any other bureaucratic construction ever yet realized in the history of flesh. It'southward an entirely illegal and shadow bureaucracy meant to overthrow existing social structures and their attendant bureaucratic arrangements, to exist sure, but that shadowy and shady hierarchy of Mabuse's is a bureaucracy all the same, which is to say that Dr. Mabuse (or rather the person occupying the Mabuse bailiwick-position) spends a damn awful lot of time coordinating the efforts of his criminal underlings and lackeys, who for the most part follow through quite well in carrying out the Mabuse figure's demands. Consider, in this respect, all the work that goes into conveying out a campaign of terrorism in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse:

At present compare this to another Mabuse-figure from Scream and Scream Again, Fremont, who seems to exist a college-upward in the British authorities:

Ii things are worth zippo hither. For starters, I would argue that these two scenes (when coupled with the ending of the film) call into question the Westward High german distributors decision to make Vincent Price's Dr. Browning their Dr. Mabuse considering a proficient deal of the pleasance in watching this film is the guessing game one has to play in guild to effigy out who is the "real" Mabuse, and a rather significant part of the wit of the film derives from its smart extrapolation from the Fritz Lang films, meaning that Scream and Scream Again takes seriously the possibility that there probable isn't a Mabuse anymore but increasingly a planet (or at the very least a whole slew of governments) overrun with all sorts of men who would be Dr. Mabuse. Sven Lütticken's "Planet of the Remakes" has already been remade into a planet of the Mabuses, as it were. That'due south my start signal.

My 2d indicate would be to notation that Scream and Scream Again seems committed to removing the differences between the West and the East that Fremont discusses here in a shared bureaucratic solvent. That is to say, both of our Mabuses here, Fremont and Konrad, are quite adept at working their mode upward the organizational ladder given their seemingly very different social environments, with the result that all this Common cold State of war business involving spy planes and captured pilots gets belied past the fact that at the end of the day what really unites Due east and Westward into a unified world system is the fact that in that location is a super-race of Mabuses probable at the head of both. Hence Fremont'due south succinct reply to Dr. Sorel's question at the end of the movie:

"Is it all over, sir?"

"It's only simply outset."

In short, the moving-picture show seems to exist saying at that place really is no Common cold State of war because there is no systemic departure between E and West; both are recuperable under a totalizing and shared vision of a modernity-to-come marked by impeccably and technocratically managed societies belonging to the new race of suped-up Mabuses.

Another manner of coming at this would be to say that beingness an anarcho-fascist committed to a campaign of mass terror and horror in Nazi Frg and being a group of genetically-modified technocrats committed to taking the reins of globe ability firmly in their collective hands takes a lot more organization effort to pull off than it does if you're the Joker in the Gotham City of The Nighttime Knight (2008), where there'southward plainly a pretty big system behind the Joker's terrorist acts, only we're never shown the difficulties of keeping that organization in line. Instead, everything operates seamlessly, as if all the Joker has to practise is will it and it is then. Against this vision of the seeming effortlessness of an anarchic overturning of Gotham City, we take in the Mabuse films and in Scream and Scream Again a counter-utopian vision of institutions that finally piece of work. Fremont, information technology will be remembered, can't even get the British government to make planes that cocky-destruct when they're supposed to, which is precisely the sort of affair that Dr. Browning waxes misty-eyed over the passing of in his final spoken language to Dr. Sorel as he prospectively describes how the non-evil super-race volition run things on e'er more smoothly functioning institutional grounds: when the Mabuses of the globe gear up a plane to self-destruct, presumably information technology will self-destruct and kill the pilot while it's at it too. Similarly, it ought to be noted that despite the investigative efforts of Inspector Lohmann in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, the explosion of a chemical establish and the spread of deadly gas from this explosion practice in fact have place in that picture. In other words, a terrible and very mortiferous terrorist attack is successfully carried out, and nothing Lohmann or a traitor from within Mabuse's system practise ends up preventing this from taking identify, which begs the question:Well, if Mabuse is such a criminal mastermind, and then how does he end up getting his comeuppance?

The short answer is that Mabuse always does himself in, which is to say that there is an arbitrary self-subversive streak in Mabuse, which is a pretty unsettling prospect when you recollect about it. That is to say, the bulletin of the showtime 3 Lang Mabuse films tends to be that yous tin can't do much to stop Mabuse—all y'all tin practise is expect and see how long it takes before he drives himself insane or he "accidentally" drives himself off a bridge. Hither's how Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler ends. While holed upwards in a secret hide-out where his counterfeit money functioning is based, Mabuse gets visited by the ghosts of all the people he's killed in the picture show and starts to go mad only every bit the police descend upon his hide-out:

And hither's how The Attestation of Dr. Mabuse ends, with Dr. Baum, our surrogate Dr. Mabuse, going mad and checking himself into his own mental establishment, where he sedulously begins tearing up non apocryphal coin but rather the terminal will and testament of Dr. Mabuse himself:

And here's how The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse ends: in a v-infinitesimal-long automobile hunt that (much like the ane in Scream and Scream Again) stands out both for its capricious length and for its arbitrary ending. That is to say, the very belated hailstorm of bullets that greet Mabuse on the bridge seem hardly to justify the over-zealous curlicues and over-cosmetic steering that leads to his motorcar plummeting into the river. Take a look (it'due south a longer clip, but that's because information technology'south worth reflecting upon its relationship to the fifteen-infinitesimal chase scene involving Keith in Scream and Scream Again):

Now compare Mabuse's death here to Keith'due south in Scream and Scream Again:

If nosotros take seriously this self-destructive streak in the Mabuse films and its continuation into Scream and Scream Again, then nosotros're now left with the problem posed by the ending, in which we have 3 Mabuses face up off against each other, just non all 3 Mabuses die. If Mabuse is supposed to kill himself (like Keith faithfully did), and then why do we stop upwards with i more Mabuse than we need at the finish of the motion picture? The answer to my mind is elementary provided we approach the matter of Mabuse's cocky-destructive streak in the following terms: information technology takes a Mabuse to kill a Mabuse, and if yous alive in a world where there's more than 1 Mabuse, then your film need non end with all the Mabuses dispatched to an early grave or an early trip to the insane asylum. That is to say, Scream and Scream Again very cleverly follows out the logic of Lang'south Mabuse trilogy into an ending that that trilogy cannot quite seem to imagine as a possibility, even though information technology is a conclusion that is entirely thinkable in the terms gear up and described in those 3 films. If Mabuse's self-subversive tendencies just mean information technology takes a Mabuse to kill a Mabuse, then Scream and Scream Over again'southward Mabuses are easily as cocky-destructive equally any to be constitute in Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, or The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.

What also interests me about this ending to Scream and Scream Over again is the way in which it strangely overlays British horror iconography onto High german horror iconography, peculiarly in Dr. Browning's death scene, which I very much believe is an uncanny composite of moves cribbed from Dracula films (both British and American) and Mabuse films. Accept a look to refresh your memories:

This is a pretty weird moment and an inscrutable death scene if you don't have Mabuse and Dracula movies to give you lot some orienting cues to follow out in interpreting it. If I had the time, I would get-go by showing you lot some shots of glowing hypnotic optics from 1930s American horror films, like Dracula (1931) or The Most Dangerous Game (1932), but I think I can get my signal across by sticking with Christopher Lee's Dracula, who (equally you all well know) likes to make people do his behest seemingly through the hypnotizing ability of his gaze. There are countless examples of this, only here's one of the snazzier ones in which the eyes of Lee'southward Dracula mesmerizingly depict a young adult female to him on the rooftops of a small Middle European town in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968):

Now compare this spellbinding gaze with that deployed by Dr. Mabuse in Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler. In this scene, Mabuse is disguised as Sandor Weltmann, a world-famous hypnotist, who uses his powers of mesmerism to bring Police Inspector von Wenck under his control:

Afterward having von Wenck do his bidding in front of the gathered oversupply to prove his control over him, Mabuse nigh successfully has von Wenck kill himself in a horrific auto crash (the but matter that saves the police inspector are his beau cops who forcibly pull him from his speeding automobile just earlier it goes over a cliff).

Now the gist and pith of all this laborious edifice upwardly of a mesmeric citational network established past what looks to exist a clumsily-put-together throwaway anticlimax is to say that these remaindered $.25 of Mabuse movies and Dracula flicks aren't simply leftovers, they're obstinate willful parts that reject to be incorporated into an integral whole. That it is to say, simply because Mabuse and Dracula make heavy use of the power of the gaze to curve people to their will, nosotros're still left with the seeming irreducibility of those powers (or, more particularly, of the meaning of those powers) to each other. Dracula isn't Mabuse after all, right?

Well, actually, Dracula is a Mabuse figure, depending on what Dracula motion picture you're talking about and when that film is fix. Then long as the Hammer Dracula films takes identify in some indistinct nineteenth-century neverneverland, Dracula very much runs a i-man performance of sorts entirely dependent on his face-to-confront encounters with his victims, minions, and enemies. Whatever organizational structure might be found here is just nascent—it's early on modernistic as it were. Interestingly, notwithstanding, of the 1970s Hammer attempts to bring Dracula into the late twentieth century, the only film to somewhat successfully pull that off was the last ane, The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), which got rid of all the gothic minion nonsense of Dracula A.D. 1972 and realized that the really scary prospect of a Dracula in the late twentieth century is the possibility that he would integrate far also well into existing society such that he could exist both a multi-millionaire property developer (operating under the alias of D.D. Denham) and the head of a multi-billion dollar foundation without anyone beingness any the wiser. That is to say, what Scream and Scream Again anticipates is that Dracula really is a sort of Mabuse-figure in potential, and all that held him back from becoming 1 and the just thing that held us, the viewers, back from recognizing as much is the story of capitalist development itself. In other words, with the onset of something like modernity throughout all the zones of Europe (East, Middle, and West), Dracula has to become his human activity together, put together an alias, stop relying on fourth dimension-consuming face-to-face encounters, and start putting his plans into move through massive corporate structures that permit him to get at millions of people and at a distance instead of a scattering of people and far-too-up-shut.

In short, the argument I'm trying to map out here is that Scream and Scream Once more suggests that Dr. Mabuse may take been in drag as Dracula all along. Who's to say otherwise, peculiarly when you get taken to the law station and the bobbies showtime asking y'all to help them to put together a composite sketch of villain? Don't all men start to expect alike? Doesn't Scream and Scream Again's composite nature brand the blended image of the threat information technology presents start to await e'er and e'er similar Mabuse?

I want to end this lecture past pointing out the problem with this reading and by pointing to what the next motility an interpretation of this film would accept to make. In a nutshell, the manifest shortcoming with a Mabuse-explains-it-all reading is that it buys a bit too much into a progressive philosophy of history. That is to say, if we stay stuck reading Scream and Scream Over again in terms of Dr. Mabuse tropes and moves that ever and always trump pre-existing British horror movie ones, then nosotros're basically reading this film far besides teleologically, as if Mabuse were at the end of every horror road in Europe. As much I see the film doing something like this, I don't entirely purchase a reading of Scream and Scream Again in which all Frankensteins and Draculas are Mabuses-in-potential that only need to exist brought into the twentieth century for that relationship to exist unveiled for in one case and for all. The obvious limitation with this interpretation is that it is still besides personal. If Mabuse really is supposed to be some sort of "epitome of the times" for much of the twentieth century, and then information technology'southward an image that eventually starts to get things more than wrong than right near those times by insisting far also much on the figure of Mabuse itself, which is hardly consonant with the globe we all live in and accept all lived in since at least the 1970s, for in this earth at that place is no magic name we can incantatorily invoke to draw (much less solve) all our issues.

Saying Mabuse or, for example, J. Edgar Hoover is the person listening in on your phone calls or filming yous in your hotel room is almost a non sequitur considering the category of privacy itself had already started to evaporate by the time of Scream and Scream Once again such that the question of the subject-position at the caput of the organization carrying out these unseemly surveillance operations was altogether moot. In short, the problem was no longer who was surveilling united states but rather that there was surveillance of everyone everywhere all the time in potential. That is to say, the epistemological problems sketched in by Fritz Lang's first iii Dr. Mabuse movies (which can be re-phrased as the question, Who is the real Dr. Mabuse?) go ontological ones by the early 1970s (in other words, the subjugation of masses of people in the West to invasive organizational forms that maybe mean them no good simply became a condition of being or of being for those masses by the 1970s such that the revelation of who was behind it all became a silly thing to undertake considering no one really believes any i person is behind annihilation anymore actually because the trouble has get global and information technology has become securely structural in nature).

What I am trying to sketch in here is not the Mabuse-like progress narrative described by Scream and Scream Over again's ending but rather a mutation in narrative itself. Instead of creating a new villainous figure to take over the reins of Mabuse, Frankenstein, and Dracula, films of the 1970s (particularly American films— Parallax View[1974], The Conversation[1974], Three Days of the Condor[1975], All the President's Men[1976], Marathon Man[1976], Invasion of the Body Snatchers[1978], Wintertime Kills[1979], Blow Out[1981]) start to focus instead on the ontological obstinacy of the conspiracy form itself. Instead of becoming invested in unveiling the puppetmaster pulling the strings behind the scenes, these films go increasingly committed to exploring the texture of social feel and sociability itself in a world where everything (even the virtually intimate moment) is a public matter and can be made to stand up in for something else in style not of your ain choosing.

I desire to close with that signal past suggesting that Scream and Scream Again isn't quite as Mabuse-crazy as I might have led you lot to believe because at that place are moments throughout the flick that manage to call back outside the Mabuse-box and envision something like these American conspiracy films that were but around the corner in 1969 and 1970. Compare, for instance, this scene from Scream and Scream Again with the opening of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation. Showtime, the coming together of Fremont and Konrad in Trafalgar Square:

The sorts of things I desire you lot all to detect here are the long-range, high bending-shots of Konrad crossing the square to the fountain and the long-range shots of Fremont coming down the stairs because they open up up an eerie space in which high-level transactions between Cold War enemies unfold in plainly view of an unsuspecting public that yet may be listening in (for case, the question here that near gets raised past the film is, Who's operating that rooftop camera that zooms in on Konrad? Is it the film itself or is it someone/something from within the diegesis of the film?). To be sure, this disquieting framing of the meeting of Fremont with Konrad quickly enough breaks downward into the more than familiar two-shots that re-instigate something similar a private space in the middle of Trafalgar Square, simply the looming openness and permeability of the infinite effectually them which gets set upwards in the establishing shots doesn't entirely go away.

For one matter, Coppola's The Conversation picks up on it and decides to shoot its credit sequence and much of the sequence that follows using similar loftier-angle long shots showing united states of america a diversity of people (only more often than not one man and 1 adult female) walking around Union Square in San Francisco while a grouping of men with surveillance equipment endeavor to record their conversation from rooftops and open windows around this very public space:

The rest of the moving-picture show ramifies outward from one garbled sentence that the couple afterwards substitution ("He'd impale united states of america if he got the adventure"), which Gene Hackman'due south character interprets and re-interprets and misinterprets in a variety of self-destructive ways. That is to say, this moving-picture show (like most American conspiracy movies of the 1970s) does non intendance all that much with who's responsible for mass surveillance. We already know who'due south doing it hither: Gene Hackman'southward company. To be sure, there's the question of who hired them to exercise it, but The Conversation doesn't much care virtually that either. Instead, it'due south invested in the problems raised past hermeneutics itself, which is to say, if everything nosotros say and exercise is a public matter, so there'south withal the trouble of interpretation, of someone sifting through all we do and say and making heads or tails of it somehow.

Which is a long roundabout way of saying we're back where we started with Scream and Scream Over again, faced with the problem of making heads or tails of a film at least every bit ambiguous as a barely-heard sentence uttered in an undertone next to a blaring street musician in Matrimony Foursquare in 1974. Mabuse won't help yous find a style into The Conversation, and he won't help you later on a certain point with Scream and Scream Once again. What volition, notwithstanding, is the uncomplicated fact of the conspiracy itself and its earth-encompassing ramifications, which elusively promise to tell you something well-nigh the world you alive in, even if that world is a pop cultural composite fabricated upwards of indistinctly placed totalitarian regimes, of vampire serial killers, of bad pop bands who only know how to write one kind of bland pop song, and of superhuman technocrats secretly embedded in positions of ability. What else does this blended name if not the problem of trying to give it a name in the first identify, like that of Mabuse, who by the late 1960s is no longer able to necktie all the detritus of social and cultural life together into a cohesive and life-threatening whole. Y'all don't need to go to movies to experience that anymore. All you demand to do is go for a walk in a park or stroll effectually Union Foursquare on your luncheon intermission.

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Source: https://erikmbachman.org/2018/04/13/scream-and-scream-again-or-mabuse-aint-what-he-used-to-be/

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