It was once said of 18th Century gothic writer Anne Radcliffe that the real heroes of her tales were the readers who were able to withstand their terrors, and I think a similar dynamic must inform modern-day trash-film fanatics, as reflected in the often masochistic rhetoric of some of their writings. The Flagellants and Penitents of the 13th Century had much the same idea, believing the true path to enlightenment to lay not in pain, necessarily, but in the transcendence of it, excoriating the flesh until there is nothing left but spirit: "beating the Truth out" of oneself. It’s the essence of philosophy, as well – deconstructing the finite exterior to reach or discover the infinite within. (Sometimes I think this is what I also am doing to the movies I write on: "torturing" the material until its genius shines through.) So in some respects, the Bad Film enthusiast’s project is a religious one, too – to find a divine transcendence through the systematic obliviation of traditional film values and expectations, a Rimbaudian sort of disordering of the senses. Perhaps fittingly, there’s a form of sadism built into their commentary too, their condescending tone suggestive of a resistance to the realization to which the best of the "Loser" films so liberatingly abandon themselves: that we are diseased – yet, diseased, we can prevail.

I first caught Pat Boyette’s sublime 1962 Texas-made no-budget gothic The Dungeon of Harrow on mid-sixties latenight TV and

have never been able to forget it since, though it hasn’t been rebroadcast in decades. Thirty years on from those initial flickerings, however, the film’s sense of contamination, of an endemic, systemic impurity, bears a renewed significance, as the entire contemporary culture at the turn of the recent century seemed to evidence a similar sense of the self-loathing in which Boyette, who wrote, produced, edited and scored the feature, often pseudonymously, steeped his cheap, dark dialogue and set-pieces.

Its story of an insane 19th Century count, his leprous bride, her atrophied nurse, and the hapless nobleman who arrives on their island seems in striking accord with the recent Outbreak of virus-paranoia thrillers in the movies, in books and on TV – ostensibly elicited by a fear of AIDS and other illnesses but arriving so tardily as to suggest a less immediate, or literal, motivation. With a corporate culture as well (Dungeon’s castle as oppressive multinational) rife with talk about trade secrets and line contamination and the

with the ethnic cleansings that posed a mirror to the continued activities of our own White Supremacist and other hate-group movements – reminding us that the disease in Outbreak was brought by an African primate, while the posters for two contemporaneous pictures, Congo and Species, respectively, warned impressionable audiences of young white males that "the endangered species is you" and "Our time is up" – this masochism now seems doubly significant, as though emblematic of a need to rid the filmic, personal and political organisms of some very real impurities. So maybe it’s time the universality in this once outcast example of Southern grotesquery be acknowledged and its implications reassumed into the mass consciousness like the film’s hero himself, who prepares to go down into the title dungeon in the end to meet the dis-ease he now accepts as his mate.

No wonder trash-film aficionados have latched onto the movie: its dialogue, acting,

cinematography and score – mostly a blaring, halting collection of overheated suspense and romance cues from unidentifiable pictures past, often inappropriately placed and augmented by a primitive synthesizer – are pitched so highly as to produce an atmosphere of disorientation from which relief is fleeting, and futile; even the film’s ennui "goes to eleven." Yet neither should one

oneself to one’s fate is what distinguishes Dungeon from the main stream of Hollywood fare most alternazines themselves decry, and may be the key to its own particular form of genius.

As Lyn Cowan describes him in MASOCHISM: A Jungian View (1969, Spring Publications; p.87), the masochist, "In his heroic stance,

derives, perhaps, from 1947’s Foxes of Harrow, its protagonist’s name from the similarly taciturn wanderer of 1945’s The Vampire’s Ghost.) Everything in the film plays like a giant fatalistic machine destroying each glimmer of chance it sets up for itself: the happiest character here is the terminal countess-to-be, and she is totally insane, the relationship between the hero and heroine one of the most passionless and rote as has been committed to film. Far from conveying any presence or allure, they are two unattractive and withdrawn neurotics who, for all their high-blown dialogue and heroic stances, shrink from the screen and each other, so devoid of stamina that, after narrowly escaping rescue from their effeminate old captor, the Count Lorente de Sade, they almost deserve the sorry fate they come to. Next to Dungeon, film noir really is, as has been argued, just an intellectual pose.

Coming from Texas, a former slave state contiguous to and often identified with the

breeding that resulted from the isolation of the early settlers in the mountains and forests to the nature of the aristocracy that had quickly taken root in that soil, manufacturing another sort of isolation for themselves at least as corrosive as that of the lower classes’. Arising from a vestigial attachment to Old England by way of the more established plantations to the north and based largely on a social ideal inspired by the romances of Sir Walter Scott, this aristocracy was from the first an imitation of an imitation, an affectation of those who had attained their station not by breeding or bloodline but from a few fortunate land claims and on the sweat of a horde of African backs.

This atmosphere lends resonance to Sade’s portrayal by a crashingly fey and campy Englishman, Bill McNulty: He is, in fact, a parody, an idea of nobility projected by the very "common whites," as Cash describes them, from which he arose and from whom he

was often only a relative or two removed. As Cash has it, "the individualistic outlook" that made possible their expansion in the first place as well as "the lack of class pressure from below" those new barons; "the divorce of pride from the idea of effort and achievement" wrought by slavery (p.48); "the very conviction that they were already fully developed aristocrats – all this, [combined] with their natural unrealism of temperament, bred in them a thoroughgoing self-satisfaction, the most complete blindness to the true facts of the world" (pg.77-78). As a result of the "tragic descent into unreality" that was the South’s

inheritance, the often hysterical wrongness of Cassandra’s degradation and her patient's derangement, as well as the count’s arrogance and Fallon’s affected noblesse ("that subconscious sense of inadequacy which from the beginning had been the concomitant of the claim to aristocratic grandeur," p.126) – the very tone of the movie itself – achieves a dreamlike rightness, an accurate approximation of Cash’s self-described MIND, if not of an actual movie.

The presence of the count’s Nubian servant Mantis, however, indicates the most manifest form of the leprosy destroying this faux-aristocratic world, the slavery which Faulkner considered a curse upon the Southern temperament and which was partly to reason for its own brand of Flagellant religion, the evangelical and revivalist traditions. Consequently, the elevation of the Southern Belle – symbolic of the land the pioneers had fought for and tamed along their expansionist destiny and so representative also of the

was eroding. Likewise, the "rape complex" – the insistence that the newly freed Negro posed a a threat to Southern womanhood – betrayed a similar sense of corruption, the metaphoric "black man," or shadow, a projection of the white man’s guilty conscience. In this light, we consider Fallon’s "fall" – after the fashion of the House of another fallen gentleman who must have been Boyette’s model for all this lurid activity, Poe’s Roderick Usher and his similarly in-bred ancestry – as reflective of not only this disease in the blood but also a psychic shaming after the defeat of Dixie.

After the Civil War (a perfect symbol for all the cognitive dissonance within the Southern mind) and Reconstruction, the region’s "march toward aristocracy" came to a halt, as reflected in the traditional Gothic end-of-the-family-line motif that reverberates everywhere throughout Dungeon, from the figure of the unregenerate Sade to his nurse’s failure to midwife his inheritance, and the entire "terminal" feel of the movie

also proved to literally poison the land via its pollution of the air and waterways, doubling the effect of the diseased countess as a Gaia figure reaching out from her position of incarceration and repressed shame to poison us as well, as in Boyette’s key sequence, where Fallon, chained outside her cell, watches as her diseased arm reaches through the window to unlock her door, accompanied by the creepiest cackling ever put on film.

The air of loss and decay inhabiting such lines as "We’re in exile, sir; we’ve been severed from humanity. We’re a disease; we’ve been cut out," however, delivered in the drabbest of monotones, bespeaks more than regional or individual experience; it also reflects the inmost doubts of a country during one of its most prosperous eras, questions so threatening to the national ego they had to be relegated to the lowest budgetary and geographic quarters of the entertainment world. When Sade proposes "a conversation –

an exchange of personalities," you know that this is no physical wreck or island; it’s the psychological crash of an illusion – of purity, privilege and priority: Our freedom fighters brought with them a propensity toward slavery; our Eden was watered by the blood of its natives. When the countess makes her escape, it’s a document of not so much a physical illness invading the body as it is a psychic one emerging into consciousness. It was only a matter of time before the malaise was to creep out of Boyette’s cinematic Third World and into the larger culture too busy then celebrating its own optimistic Youth Explosion in anticipation of some storied Age of Aquarius to notice this new thing sneaking out and slouching toward My Lai. The countess finally does get out, of course, and for the spoiled, aristocratic Fallon it’s the emergence from his subconscious of the leper within – the moment at which he becomes "fallen." He arises from the dungeon with the count’s own shocked-white hair (the latter character later to echo his "damn you to hell," indicating that the "exchange of personalities" has indeed taken place), an indication of the new purity he has found on this confrontation and submission.

Freud saw masochism as rooted in a stage of development when the child starts repressing its incestuous inclinations, creating a pull between attraction and restraint and a confusion between the parent (or superego) as both dispenser of love and lordly meter of punishment. Guilt over insufficient resolution of this complex impels the masochist to continue rehearsing such behavior – "You’ve been a very, very bad boy" – throughout life. We see in Fallon’s own sullen gestures and unflagging moroseness a similar adolescent trapped in the void between seeing his father as helper (the shipbuilder, facilitating passage) and oedipal threat to his mobility (the count, whose house breeds only rivalry and repression). The psychic currents which brought him here, however, demand that he encounter the latter image, though this infantile and recalcitrant not-father seems himself stuck in low gear, as is his bride-to-be, who, diagnosed on her wedding day – another rite of passage – was imprisoned in the gown she wears

today, always the bride, never the countess. With the island a foggy, desiccated Eden and the count its lunatic god, she is the barren, suffocating virgin mother-Eve infecting Fallon in their deepest-unconscious mutual cell, Cassandra a Mary Magdalene who cannot properly minister to her failed messiah.

Jung, on the other hand, Freud’s student and later dissenter, believed masochism was a way of connecting us to the collective unconscious and a forgotten animality by stripping away the ego, achieving an intercourse with nature and the archetypes denied many in our alienated modern lives. Indeed this is how the novelist whose name furnished the root of the term, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, saw it, as a liberation of all the pagan (often rooted in a veneration of the Goddess and of Earth), Dionysian imperatives buried in civilized society but still fighting for expression, suggesting the not-countess’s cell as her own dead womb denied the ability to fecundate under the mad

identity – to the vision of servant Little Anne being tortured in a window across from Fallon’s as he sleeps below (foretelling, strangely enough, a similar framing in 1983’s Never Say Never Again; when the lights in the opposite windows go out moments after the hero in each awakes it suggests the episode as a scene from both men’s dreams). Anne’s later emergence from behind a curtain in his room anticipates both the escape of the countess from her cell and the appearance of Cassandra from out of the shadows in the room in which Fallon has been narrating his histoire, to be relegated to the same dungeon as her predecessor – buried, but soon to be rejoined. In this, Cassandra both ascends to the countess’s aristocratic position at the same time as she descends to the role of patient and leper, her body destroyed so that her soul might gain in transcendence.

What all this hidden imagery boils down to is an eruption of a basically noble feminine

effect of patriarchy on not only the females under it but also the males whose inner feminine is being offended as well and the "torturing out" of this quality in Fallon himself, a bringing of Her into the daylight. (It’s also a metaphor for the supposed brutalization of the South – portrayed, again, in terms of its women – by the censorious North.) When Anne offers herself to Fallon in gratitude for her rescue, his demurral is at once a recognition that he is not yet ready to accept this woman as part of himself and also a synecdoche for the entire movie, a dream of control that doesn’t have the will to dream itself triumphant. It’s the dungeon for him next, a confrontation with his essential weakness and corruption and an acceptance of this reality as his spiritual bride.

Since the word "humiliation" shares its root with the nobler "humility," for the arrogant aristocrat this tearing down is in fact an elevation: like the similarly transcendent Incredible Shrinking Man, he becomes, via deterioration, a whole person. Though the

film’s library-music score helps to reinforce the sensation of an inescapable – "programmed" – fate, a reiterative dependence on a circumscribed, closed universe, Fallon’s defeat is Fallon’s triumph, his physical disease a spiritual cure. When he eventually goes down to join Cassandra in the title dungeon – indicating the film itself as a melting pot with the power to reduce all who inhabit it for a while to equals, all similarly "diseased" – as descend he predicts he will do, it will be as the joining of Orpheus with his Eurydice in the underworld from which he has no hopes, this time, of escape. The triumphant music serves to both mock him in this and to honor his acquiescence, as we ourselves are given to do: he has won out in the end over his own most debilitating characteristic, his own sense of well-being. The movie thus proves itself a parable of the simple act of living, a progressive erosion of the body as well as, finally, the spirit, from the opening birth-separation from the father-divine to the leaving behind of

childhood attachments – the loyal ship captain – and defeat of the father-surrogate in order to take a bride and become a sexual being. The Jungian take prevails.

Yet if watching movies like Dungeon of Harrow is a masochistic act, then the question naturally arises, What truth are we seeking to torture out of ourselves in so doing?

Perhaps, if the form of punishment we choose is audio-visual in nature, then the kind of rapture we are seeking is a sensory one, as well: to see and hear represented outside that which we hold to be true within. Like Ray Milland in X – The Man with X-Ray Eyes constantly punishing himself through the use of vision-enhancing chemicals, we are enacting a desire to see until we can see beyond, past the façades which divide and obscure the divine – to see the chaos behind the structure behind the chaos. If we follow Jung through masochism down to the collective unconscious, then perhaps what we

misfits and nerds are all really hoping to find there is that sense of oneness and connection behind our individualizing quirks which can then bring us back into the experiential world from which we feel so alienated.

On John Cale’s 1982 album Music for a New Society there’s a composition called "Risé, Sam and Rimsky-Korsakov," on which his wife recites a Sam Shepard vignette concerning a man who considers the radio "friendly," who feels he communicates with it in a primal, pre-lingual sort of way. Other pop songs such as Thomas Dolby’s "Airwaves" and Kit Hain’s "Danny" paint the radio in similar terms, as a metaphor for telepathic communion and a shared "heritage," as Shepard put it; it emerges, too, in such terms in Cocteau’s Orpheus and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, and in the form of television in Hooper and Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist. You get the same feeling watching some of these "trash" movies late at night, half asleep and only partly registering the impact they will have on you in years to come. Through their inefficiency with some of the most basic tools of

narrative craft, they are able to strip away the artifice of filmmaking, as Godard did in parts of Breathless, to reveal the archetypal material within. As a result, you feel like you’re tapping into a form of collective unconscious Jung didn’t intend in his original coining of the term, as though the images and signs were coming to you via not your sensory apparatus but through the mind directly, in the same sort of wave-form in which they were originally broadcast.

Such nocturnal films are most adept at conveying the frame of mind that only comes on you in the small hours of the night, when the rest of the world is dreaming and your own ego is broken down as well, every rational cell in your brain telling you you should be sleeping, too. At those times, when it’s supernaturally quiet outside and the lack of sleep has you disoriented and hypersensitive, you can get as close to a waking dream-state as possible. It’s then that you need the company of either an old record

(preferably one that reminds you of your adolescence) or a cheap horror movie, because so many of our dreams are horror films, which we watch helplessly yet participate in often at the same time, powerless no matter what we do because we’re at the mercy of our own subconscious.

Some films go further than others in making this connection between their own nature and that of dreams, and not just the experimental works of Surrealist auteurs out to subvert our expectation of visual and narrative flow; rather the sincere efforts of such low-budgeters as Boyette, lacking the technical properties and skills needed to convey a more conventional sense of film reality. The aimlessness and repetitiveness of these films can often enslave you in their illogic so that you have to watch to the end that sometimes seems will never come. (Dreams don’t usually climax; they only stop.) Something about their being broadcast into the vacuum of a 4 a.m. time slot lends them a further if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest air of mystery: you can imagine them playing in their day to some big, empty drive-in (an existential vision of hell on earth, where the bad movies play continuously and there’s nobody there to even watch them), and you have to wonder if some filmmakers didn’t intend them to be shown that way in the

first place. (Tarkovsky’s Stalker in particular seems made to be drifted in and out of, like a dream.) More than most renegade movies, these films can have a disturbing presence that clings to the memory and mirrors the sensation of the dreams you should be having at that hour anyway – movies so cheap and illogical they almost succeed in creating another reality; movies that make their own rules.

Maybe because such trash works on us on such a subliminal level and without any sort of filmic superego to enforce order or sense or even embarrassment on itself, it can become so ingrained in our subconscious that it can either drive us out of the room speechless, as this film did my wife, or stir a helpless fascination – like masochism – akin to Fallon’s as he sat watching the countess reach from that terrible window on his own dark mind. For Dungeon is like a dream, one where you recognize people even though they’re not who they’re supposed to be, because they’re you – they’re just your memory

of the world, divorced from all but its surface images and imbued with your own meaning. That’s why it’s such a powerful narcotic: it’s so far removed from a competent representation of reality that it can only make sense as a dream, a figment of the communal unconscious.

Yet still we watch such movies, because we know that something of us is reaching from that window, too: Something is leaning toward consciousness; something desires recognition. Dungeon is the kind of creation that can evoke that nocturnal feeling no matter when you experience it, but if you do watch it, wait till you’re on the verge of sleep, anyway. Let it become part of your dreams, and then try to deny it, for all its limpness and perversity, its own insensible power.