Director: Javier Aguirre
Country: Spain
Year of Release: 1973
Runtime: 82 mins.
Other Titles: El Jorobado de la Morgue, The Hunchback of the Rue Morgue, Rue Morgue Massacres
This has been a week of firsts. My first Blind Dead sequel. My first Jess Franco movie. And now my first Paul Naschy movie, too. And boy it is a brilliant cornucopia of weirdness. Some consider it his best film. But ultimately it's a movie I can't offer unqualified love.
And Hunchback of the Morgue gives you a lot to love. It's got slime monster frankensteins, gratuitous dismemberment, foot kissing, atmospheric crypts, ancient ruins, head-eating protoplasm, weird acid zombies tied together, and ridiculously oversized beers.
But it also has something a lot more difficult to watch. I know horror movies are about horror. But there is a difference between the horror film and real-life horror. Its the reason the violence in a movie like Hunchback can be fun, or in a movie like Taxi Driver, disturbing but poetic -- but terrorist snuff propaganda where soldiers are decapitated isn't either. It's just cold violence that ends a life or causes pain. We know when something is fake. And part of what art does is put mediating layers between us and its subject. It shapes how we experience it.
Hunchback's most infamous scene comes when Gotho (Paul Naschy as our titular hunchback), returns to the crypt where he is preserving (hopeful of future reanimation) the body of the dead woman he loves. He is horrified to find her covered in ravenous rats. The scene culminates in Gotho burning the rats alive.
The problem is that these were actual rats and they were actually burned alive.
And it really is an incredibly difficult scene to watch. I don't think it takes an "animal activist" to feel the horror in this scene, as some reviewers seem to think. Poking around online, I'm frustrated to see many reviewers say something to the effect of: "PETA members beware," or "Don't watch this with an animal activist, you'll never hear the end of it." As if only hardcore animal rights activists are human beings capable of sympathy for other living creatures.
And dammit, the scene takes me right out of the movie. It is a blemish on an otherwise stellar film. A film which is paced well, acted well, set well, and plotted well. Its makeup is excellent. Naschy is wonderful. But the rat scene presents, for me at least, an inescapable problem.
It's much like Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas." The story presents this scenario. Imagine if society were eternal delight and happiness, perfect and without problems, save one: the reason this happiness can exist is because one child must stay in darkness, filth, and misery. Would you stay or would you go?
And really, this movie poses the same question. And for far less reward. It is merely an excellent weird film.
I can't enjoy the scene. I can as fiction. In imagination. But not knowing that real creatures were tortured to make it happen. Its powerful visuals and bizarre set-piece, aren't worth any deaths, no matter how small. Saying they are "just animals" does nothing to excuse it or lessen the pain of watching it. Saying it happened a long time ago doesn't either. Italy, in the same era, had animal protection laws for films. And effects people found ways around it. Lucio Fulci's effects in Lizard in a Woman's Skin, famously, were so effective that he had to testify in court that he had hadn't broken the laws (he hadn't).
I can admire the dedication of the team to their art (Naschy, by his own account, suffered numerous bite wounds). It takes a certain level of dedication to enter a room full of literally starving, dangerous rats. But I think its clear who got the short end of the stick here. And that's why this movie will be great but flawed for me. Unlike Naschy, those animals couldn't know their involvement or what was happening to them. It sets a dangerous precedent for us to let it slide.
This is all underscored, ironically, by a script, which is surprisingly effective in eliciting real emotion. We feel for Gotho. Naschy is able to take the Fritz/Igor/Morpho archetypes and imbue them with real warmth and a good deal of complexity. Rarely do characters of this type elicit actual sympathy (see Murdo in Return of the Blind Dead). Gotho is at once a genuine outcast, with whom we feel sympathy, a lover, and a brutish, and at times sadistic, butcher. Naschy makes the hunchback a legitimate hero. Not to mention that this film features probably the only hunchback *ahem* love scene in existence.
Ultimately, the film's subtexts -- that abusing those beneath our power is wrong (Gotho's plight), or likewise, that sacrificing innocents for a greater cause is wrong (as in the case of Dr. Orla) -- are rendered slightly ironic and less effective as a result of the unfortunate rat scene, which is shame given how well they're handled otherwise.
Some might say I'm overreacting. But to provide another example: there's a reason that for many people the most memorable scene in Renoir's The Rules of the Game is a particular rabbit's death. It instantly pierces the fourth wall, reaches out and grabs us. As its paws curl inwards toward its body, something profound happens to us. We might consider this scene the crux of the film. As Julie Heywerd suggests, the death of real animals on screen "rupture[s] the fictional space," and transforms the fictional into the documentary.
It is deeply painful watching a rat leap desperately to escape the flames engulfing its tiny body. And it subsumes the entirety of the surrounding work of art to its profound reality. The rest of the film's powerful imagery cannot match the effect this scene has on us.
This movies documents the ending of real lives, and there is no way around that.
Here are some stills to cheer you up:
At first I was like...
Then I was like...
And, at first I was like...
Then I was like...
These really tell you nothing about the movie
And yet, here they are...
One of numerous amazing sets...
Only one of the skeletons wasn't a nudist.
Yeah, they don't really explain this.
This one, of course, makes perfect sense.
Baaaarrrrrfffffff.
Casting Notes: Everything comes full circle. Look for Maria Elena Arpon (Virginia in Tombs of the Blind Dead) as Ilse, Gotho's love early love interest, and Alberto Dalbes (Dr. Seward in The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein), as our mad Dr. Orla.
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