Book Club of Desolation #22: Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres (1971), by Paul Bera

Last year I took a look at the first of the French Frankenstein pulps. This year, I figured it would be nice to have the Book Club of Desolation return to similar waters--only this time, the book I read was untranslated. That's why I failed in my promise to have a monthly Book Club review up for January (on top of being sick as shit). It took me quite some time to read my way through Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres, the first of Paul Bera's six-volume series chronicling the eternal war between the avatars of cosmic forces known as Leonox and Lisa, but I found it a fulfilling experience, to say nothing of the wonders it did for restoring my knowledge of French. Even with the language barrier in place, Bera's prose reads smoothly and thrillingly, with enough pulp action and supernaturalism to make me seriously consider tracking down the rest of the series, before all the remaining rare copies are snatched up.

Our protagonist is Lacana, a ten-time serial killer constantly on the run from the police. While hiding out in Paris, he feels a compulsion to enter a building, which seemingly contains more on the inside than it does on the outside. This is the headquarters of the mysterious organization known as "Leonox and Co." headed by, as you may expect, a man named Leonox. But Leonox is less a man than he is a demon; he possesses supernatural powers, and is in fact the embittered slave of what may or may not be the cosmic embodiment of evil, known as "the Master" or "He Who Controls Leonox." In exchange for his service, Leonox offers Lacana a new identity, including a new face and set of fingerprints--he'll accomplish this by giving him a whole new body. The first of many catches in this deal is that in order to get this body, he has to share a coffin with it. The process is a success, however, and Lacana becomes instead Francis Dalvant, a famous journalist killed in Vietnam. As part of his operations, "Dalvant" next comes in contact with the mysterious Lisa, a young woman who claims to be able to see Lacana's soul in Dalvant's body. Lisa has frequent clashes with the police for her strange statements and behavior; they think she's a drug addict. Slowly, however, Lacana/Dalvant will learn that she is Leonox's spiritual opposite, a servant of a more benevolent cosmic force known as "He Who Controls Lisa." (It's worth noting that neither of these cosmic forces are truly good or evil, it's just that Lisa is beautiful and Leonox is monstrous, both in a variety of ways.) His encounters with Lisa "reunite" him with Dalvant's old friend, the Principal of Police Princex. In the end, Lisa and Princex reform Lacana, who ultimately takes on the mental traits of Dalvant, who was an intrinsically good man. He and Lisa go after Leonox and successfully kill him after he takes control of the body of Dr. Satelm, who has the power to unleash a world-destroying plague. Lisa takes the rap for the murder, claiming she was Satelm's jealous mistress, and goes to jail--but to Lacana/Dalvant's delight, she escapes, and he begins traveling the world in search of her.

It's amazing how well Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres fits the formula of English pulp stories, and how well it pulls it off too. It's something of a random events plot, yes--now Lacana is poisoned with curare! Now Leonox is trying to unleash a plague!--but it also taps into the vein of worldbuilding which is so vital to pulp storytelling. So many ideas whiz past us at once. Just pages after revealing that our narrator-protagonist is a serial murderer, we are dragged into a world of the magical and inexplicable with the cosmic distortions of Leonox's headquarters. From there we have body-swapping, celestial war, and living burials. Oftentimes, the descriptions of the spiritual aspects of Leonox and Lisa come across as Lovecraft-lite, or Lovecraft processed through fairy-tales--sparkling and glittering, but also vast, unknowable, and perhaps most properly, incomprehensible. All of this is presented in a style which is both simple and compelling.

I really should say how grateful I am for the simplicity of the style. A lot of key points are repeated again and again, which helped me get through the plot in the case of my translations failing the first time around. (I'm still embarrassingly vulnerable to false cognates.) However, this style is also probably the book's greatest weakness--as compelling as it is, the tendency to repeat does get a little silly at times. "It was incredible that I, Lacana, ten-time killer, could be standing here in the presence of the police!" is a phrase that comes up over time and time again. Yeah, I imagine most serial killers would be shocked at rubbing elbows with the cops after making their faces known, but we don't need to be told that so often. Lacana also has a tendency to forget that he is now Francis Dalvant for too much of the book, and he keeps chanting that he has new fingerprints over and over again. These parts can be glazed over once you get the rhythm of things, though.

I keep thinking about how cool it is to have the main character of the book be a serial killer who slowly redeems himself as pieces of another man merge with his persona. I'm pretty sure that Dalvant's spirit is actually coming back and that's what's causing Lacana to take on his traits--eventually their reference to themselves as two people seems to transcend metaphor. Lacana/Dalvant is thus of dual nature, good and evil--though Dalvant wasn't purely good, nor was Lacana purely evil. Setting up this dichotomy furthers the book's themes of good and evil by making our lead(s?) into parallel(s?) of Leonox and Lisa, albeit with human drives that the reader can understand. Bera seems to believe that Good and Evil are important concepts to mankind, but they also have gray areas and spots where they blend--how very '70s of him! It's notable too that Christianity doesn't enter the picture at all; neither of the forces behind Leonox and Lisa are aligned with God or Satan in any way.

I say this is a book that reflects the '70s, but it's also French in a way that reminds me of why I love French media. It makes sense to title the series after Leonox, and to have the protagonist be a reforming serial killer, when this is a story coming from the same country that created not only the Grand Guignol, but Fantomas, the ultimate villain-pulp protagonist and grandpappy to Diabolik, Killing, Kriminal, and all those other groovy, creepy masked thieves and killers who spread through Europe and the Middle East throughout the middle of the 20th Century. France loves its villains, and Leonox was no exception...even if he's largely forgotten today.

The chronicles of Lisa and Leonox are practically begging for English translations, and I would eagerly snap those up if/when they ever came along. Despite some minor flaws, this was an awesome read and I would love to see what happened next to these characters. Longue vie à Leonox!

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I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993), by Sarah Jacobson

At long last, the I Was a Teenage [X] series is complete. We've come a long way from I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and we've suffered long through the nuances of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, but at long last the wait is over. Now we can finally--

I can't do it. This movie deserves better than a lame joke like that. It's just that this movie puts me in such a good mood. Which is odd, given that it's about murder. But it explores murder in a way that a lot of people can relate to, which is something I never thought I'd say. I Was a Teenage Serial Killer is Third Wave feminism pioneer Sarah Jacobson's 25-minute video essay on the history of violence against women, both "passive" and aggressive. It's a fantasy exercise in homicide and thus we can't take it overly seriously--but if you're a woman, at least one of its brief scenes will remind you of some peril in your life. It is a movie which very much panders to its audience, but the question raised then is: why is it still so compelling?

Mary comes home to spend time with her brother. She's just been with their mom, stopping by their dad's funeral. "Too bad about that accident," Mary's brother says, but she replies, "Yeah, but at least Mom got a big insurance settlement out of it." Hmm...that's odd. Are you really that surprised when moments later, Bro starts garbling poison, courtesy of sister Mary? Dude probably would've been fine if he hadn't started giving her a racism-laden talk about how she needs to settle down with a man, or she'll end up homeless and pregnant. Then, a guy on the street comments on her ass, and she shoves him into traffic; and she is forced to strangle her boyfriend to death when it is revealed he faked putting on the condom. As in Ogroff, our narrative is suddenly broken by romance, when Mary meets a man who also enjoys killing men--specifically straight white men. They enjoy brief domestic bliss, but then he decides to threaten a woman, too, and then the deal's off. We eventually learn that Mary is the way she is because she was molested by her father, tying back to the film's beginning. She is seemingly thwarted, but in the end, she vows to tell her stories, and that act will make her valid even in a society that strips her of her validation.

Y'know, this story is sort of like Robin Hood, but with murder instead of robbery. This is about someone who slaughters the "rich" in the name of the "poor"--Mary refuses to kill people who aren't privileged, apparently refusing to kill men of color or queer men, despite the fact that both can be misogynistic. This is a joke I make only hesitantly--because it's ground already fatally overtrodden--but this is the sort of thing that modern day Tumblr users could identify with. It really is interesting to see a reflection of "Internet feminism" in a movie that's almost twenty-five years old...this really does feel like the sort of movie my friends and I would make if we were feeling particularly bitchy about men on a summer afternoon. I don't know how I feel about the impression I'm left with, however, that Third Wave feminism has gone on relatively unchanged in all those years. Has it been sufficient for us, I wonder, or will our future be tasked with making a fourth wave? I'm just glad that we were concerned with queer issues in the early '90s. This movie doesn't namedrop trans people, so that's one change at least between and now. Trans rights as a thing seem so comparatively new--especially when you're trans.

Speaking, then, as someone with the double whammy of being trans and female, I can tell you now why there's this anger in the air, that's been lurking for at least twenty-five years...once, I would have thought it unnecessary to share my beliefs on the world, but my experiences with the privileged have taught me otherwise. I believe, in essence, that we have never fully left the Dark Ages--and that's a statement I make often, however pompous and windbaggy it makes me sound. It's true. Having spent the first chunk of my life identifying as a white straight cis man, followed by a second chunk as I am today, I've felt the difference firsthand. I know that nostalgia tints all, but even in my worst moments, the world seemed a sunnier place than how I see it today. For women, for queer people, for people of color, there is a second world, and it is prioritized second. And it is subject to frequent violent incursion from the world that exiled its inhabitants to its surface. Sometimes, that violence gets to be too much. Some people do kill. Others--like Sarah Jacobson--make movies. They change the shape of that beautiful crystalline world, the third continuum: fiction. And in doing so, they change both worlds, both privileged and oppressed. Encoding your scream in fiction is always a way to get it heard.

Reflecting on that anger: the last scene of this movie, I think, is one of the best, because it shows one of the most insidious ways that men commit social violence against women. An irritatingly-voiced douchebag plops himself down next to Mary as she tries to console herself after murdering her boyfriend. He refuses to leave her alone, and then he decides to make it all about himself, telling a rambling, incredibly tedious story about he and his loser friends hitchhiking down to this city. Nothing that this man indicates that he's halfway as interesting as he thinks he is. When she does open up to him and tells him about her father, he says that she was probably molested because she's so beautiful..."he just couldn't resist." I have heard people tell molestation victims this in real life. It would have been cathartic to see her kill him, but her proclamation that she'll conquer her trauma by telling her stories to people is more satisfying than murder would have been.

Now, like I said, this is a movie which definitely panders. It seemingly cements one of those age-old arguments that liberalism's ideology is only effective if you're already a liberal. Here, children think murder is cool, there are no police authorities, and people don't try to stand up or move when they're thrown in front of a moving truck. Plus, if you're a sexist pig, you probably will hate a movie which shows a woman killing you for your sexism. Yet this movie, I'm sure, is the very story which Mary vows to tell at the end of it, save perhaps for all the death (maybe Sarah Jacobson killed a buncha dudes, I dunno). It is catharsis; self-serving, as catharsis usually is, but no less necessary. And, possibly, no less genuine.

Most of us feminists wouldn't actually kill men. Feminism's about dismantling patriarchy's effects on men, too. But movies like this--an affirmation of the validity of outrage--are satisfying despite their faults, and they will keep on being so, until the problem is finally over. I love low-budget feminist exploitation movies, and I will keep seeking them out till the day I die. And I'll keep fighting for my sisters until the day I die, too. Movies like this help remind me of the complexity of our struggle and the long roads we all have ahead of us.

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The Ghost (1963), by Riccardo Freda

It's weird for me to come back to The Ghost after some of the madness we've been touching on lately. After Gretta and The Telephone Book and all the rest, a middling Euro-Gothic memorable to me chiefly because I enjoyed it as a kid is hardly going to be a good link in our combo chain, to use a fighting game metaphor. Whatever--this is film criticism, and the only rule is that there are no rules. (That and that you must hate every remake without watching it.) The Ghost may be one of the most painfully non-crazy films I happen to like, but I know not everything needs to be the most extravagantly nutty thing on the block. Let's get stuffy.

Dr. John Hichcock has been paralyzed, but he and his friend Dr. Charles Livingstone are trying to use poison to cure that. The idea is that they'll expose him to an almost-lethal dose of curare, and then give him the antidote at the last second, so that, ideally, the shock will bring vitality back to his legs. On the side, Hichcock also indulges in seances and other spiritualist fancies with his medium housemaid Catherine. Most people, including Hichcock's wife Margaret, are opposed to such dangerous extravagances. But she loves him all the same...or so it seems. It's still several years before the good doctor would have the chance to read Lady Chatterley's Lover, but let's just say being the man around the house who can't use the lower half of his body is not a good thing when one is a fictional character. Margaret is a good actress, and not just because she's played by horror empress Barbara Steele; she and Charles are having an affair, and she hates John entirely, wanting only his money. You can imagine what happens next--it's just a matter of a little too much curare, or the cure delivered a little too late. Soon the treacherous couple are free, but in truth their troubles are just beginning. After all, this movie ain't called The Ghost for nuthin'. But what's really going on here?

I think what I like the most about The Ghost is that it's one of the most generic movies I can think of. What? No, I'm normal, I swear. I am captivated by The Ghost because it does the exact minimum an atmospheric Gothic spooker about adultery has to do to be a movie, while still being entertaining. Provided, as a kid, I was very much fascinated with horror that I wasn't scared by. I would try to find what people found creepy in horror stories I thought were mundane so as to better understand what scared people. For the benefit of my writing, of course--like I said, I'm absolutely normal. The Ghost touches on the usual Gothic fears: ghosts, obviously, as well as crypts and untrustworthy house staff. And deception, of course. I seem to remember this movie's twist actually getting me as a kid, though I also remember being pissed about the movie's final stance on paranormal activity. As an adult you will probably guess what's up before the finale, especially since there are a few other movies that have very similar premises.

One of them is 1965's Nightmare Castle, a movie which also tends to garnish the public domain collections that The Ghost has a tendency to appear on (and which also stars Barbara Steele). I only saw that recently, under the best possible conditions: a remastered HD print, in its uncut 100+ minute form. And I fell asleep three times. Maybe it was the absence of the nostalgia hook, but there was also the lurking sense that Castle director Mario Caiano was ripping off Riccardo Freda...especially since Nightmare Castle also rips off Freda's The Horrible Dr. Hichcock! (It's okay, they all rip off Les Diaboliques.) Incidentally, The Ghost is often listed as a sequel to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, even though the Dr. Hichcock in that movie is named Bernard, not John. I assume that Bernard and John are brothers and probably blood kin of The Awful Dr. Orlof, which, fittingly, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock shared a double bill with back in the '60s. The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is pretty good as well, definitely more of a B-feature, but it features yet another amazing performance from Barbara Steele so it's worth tracking down.

How does this movie hold up as a trash film, then? Well, it's definitely more to the side of commercial products like Horror Safari than the material I usually like to cover, but there are still some classic bad movie moments. The movie opens strangely, in media res at the end of one of Hichcock's seances, as Charles says, "That's enough for tonight." Operatic music swells and the opening credits play as everyone files away. For years I assumed the public domain DVD I had was cut, but nope, the movie's supposed to play like that. I have no idea why they did this, aside from just having no clue on how to start the movie. But surely you could have had a creepy establishing shot of the house or something...?

This movie is also really melodramatic, sometimes beyond the call of duty required of a Gothic horror movie. Hichcock seeming never notices that his supposedly-doting wife wants to kill him, even when she freezes and stares murderously into the distance for several seconds while holding a straight razor up to his throat during a shaving session. People gasp at the movement of curtains or shadows, and someone actually says, "I had to do it. There will be no witnesses." And of course, everything boils down to a hammy cackling exposition dump at the end. I guess if you want to see Dungeon of Harrow made by Europeans, or a Jess Franco movie without even a hint of ass or pubes, this is the way to go. The Ghost is like a hard pair of shoes, and takes a good breaking in, but once you get it to fit it will bring you some good walking.

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