After, in the second half of the 1950s, the Hammer production company aesthetically renewed the Gothic potential of the domestic heritage and demonstrated that the horror genre was commercially and more than attractive, in the following decade, English authors, from different positions, treated horror as an indicative field that enables an analytical discussion of the very structure of mise-en-scène and the relationship between the real world and the fictional text.
It is no coincidence that this debate was opened at that very moment by the most important English author, Michael powell with spectacular and scandalous Peeping Tom (Voyeur, 1960). The director masterfully conceived the film as a far-reaching metatextual commentary and a kind of autopoietic reflection on the (inevitable) dangers of the job he was doing: Peeping Tom speaks of scopophilia as the ultimate structural principle on which all cinema rests. But voyeurism is not only an epistemological organization of the gaze, but also a violent, perverse game with fatal consequences, and this constellation inherent in the seventh art is embodied in Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a photographer who uses the sharp tripod of his camera to kill women.
In the last moments of their lives, women see their own distorted face in the camera: this terrifying representation - in all its true and falsifying potential - which is the consequence of both the victim's fear and the photographic illusion, also points to the dangerous, sadistic power of the film image. The camera that creates i horrifies, represents i deforms/destroys, observes i aggressively penetrates: the act of photographing, of recording, is never and can never be harmless. Powell precisely uses positive and negative connotations to Peeping Tom defined as both melodrama and horror: the same structures of (super)viewing can be both a beneficial stimulus to philosophical contemplation on the very nature of media and an occasion for pure violence.
This profound aporia is remarkably evoked, among other things, due to Powell's ambiguous cameo: he appears here, in domestic documentaries, as a doctor who subjected his young son Mark to scientific experiments to investigate the effects of fear, where the boy was - constantly observed and filmed.
Although it starts from an extremely problematic plot assumption, The Skull (Skull, 1965) Freddie Francis develops into an unusually complex film that, in underlining aporias, seeks the source of horror and cultural discomfort. A pervasive ambivalence The Skull, a play on the very border that separates the metaphysical, the diabolical and the psychotic, is achieved through purely visual means: the last half hour of the film is almost devoid of dialogue, so there is no clear explanation for what happens to the main character, and everything is left to float - like the notorious horror object from the title - in connotation, in a phantasmagoric interspace where repressed desires are inscribed.
Even the special effects do not resolve the polemical relationship that the film establishes towards internal and external reality: the hypnotic design is constantly increasing, but its location - the subjective shot from the skull, a counterweight in the 'objective' staging of events, the face Peter Cushinga which may suffer from external influence, or may be merely an expression of internalized tensions - remains obscured.
This ambiguous referentiality turns The Skull in Francis's study of the magical power of film itself, of the impact it has on the viewer, of the dangers of what is seen and what is not seen in the frame, of what the camera reveals and what it conspiratorially conceals.
Just before making his best film, Rosemary's Baby (1968), which offered an instructive dose of new, necessary energy for the genre's prosperity in the seventies, Roman Polanski decided to Dance of the vampires (The Vampire's Ball, 1967) is profiled as a very benevolent parody - we have both criticism and homage - of Hammer's vampire works with an irresistible metapoetic charm. The generic mixing of humor and horror serves the director not only for a witty stylization of the recognizable vampire iconography, but also to show that the frameworks of horror and comedy can be pervasively corresponding.
On the other hand, created just before the turning point in the ideological year, The Sorcerers (The Doctors, 1967) Michaela Reevesa could have served - if anyone had even wanted to deal with a 'minor' director who, moreover, worked in low-budget horror - as one of the most important films that embodied, with unexpected brutality and realistic irony, the conflict between generations, the older ones who look with envy and hatred at what is inaccessible to them, and the younger ones who cannot realize their own capacities, primarily because of their own stupidity.
However, The Sorcerers - through the story of an elderly couple, Marcus (Boris Karloff) and his wife Estelle (Catherine lacey), who, with the help of the professor's machine, manage to enter Mike's consciousness (Ian Ogilvy) and thus telepathically command him, as well as experience his sensory sensations - does not stop only at the social depiction of the conditioning and dependence of the younger generation, but Reeves also, brilliantly engaging the inherent potential of the genre, emphasizes that the relationship established between Marcus and Estelle, on the one hand, and Mike on the other, can be taken as a pregnant metaphor for the relationship between the viewer and the film as a projection of desire and compensation for what is missed in reality.
Namely, the way in which Marcus and, especially, Estelle identify with Mike corresponds to the mode in which the viewer participates in the events on the big screen, where they invest their own desires in the expected outcome. However, The Sorcerers It gains full force when the aforementioned relationship becomes strained, when Estelle decides to bring the excitement of being able to participate in other people's feelings and experiences to a paroxysm, that is, to 'magnifie' them to the limit when she forces Mike to commit the murders.
If, in classic horror films, the constitutional, perverse character of voyeurism organized with the help of the cinematographic apparatus itself was pointed out, then Reeves in The Sorcerers It testifies that the viewer himself possesses an equally perverse character, who greatly influences the shaping of the film text.
By the end of the decade, and Terence Fisher will offer his version of metapoetic horror as a commentary on Hammer's Frankenstein series, which the author himself shaped. In the previous Frankenstein Created Woman (And Frankenstein created a woman, 1967), the director gave a slightly more sympathetic portrayal of the Baron (Cushing), as the plot was about revenge that didn't really concern the diabolical scientist. The fact that in Fisher's interpretation the monster is actually a poor victim is definitely embodied in the brilliant Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, 1969): of course, this arrangement also meant that the Baron would appear in his most negative, most corrupt form to date.
In the very opening of the film, in the scene where Frankenstein commits murder, he wears a monster mask, which precisely signals monstrosity his transgression. Rationality is in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed reduces to unscrupulousness, the desire for knowledge to complete insensitivity. Already in the founding The Curse of Frankenstein (The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957), Fisher pointed out the pathological essence of such a situation, while Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed brings to an end the trajectory where rationalistic excess turns into sexual excess in the most disturbing scene of the director's entire oeuvre, in which Frankenstein rapes Anna (Veronica carlson) eda would 'discipline' her.
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