HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959; d. Arthur Crabtree, w. Aben Kandel + Herman Cohen)

Wow.

Female gaze (cf Laura Mulvey, VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES, 1989 Indiana UP) negated in 1st scene (this 2B man’s story), w/ gorgeous woman (self-destructive need to eradicate beauty) gored by spiked binoculars (instrument of enhanced vision doing reverse: all act of repressed "invert") from unseen, anonymous gifter (Self invisible in dream), next victim losing entire head (systematic elimination of senses/consciousness): title museum (unconscious storehouse of imgs/data – evidence of man’s inhumanity)-owner Bancroft (curator of horrors guilty conscience, pathologically replaying wartime violence to anima/sensitivities)’s golddigging girlfriend (own voracious/vivacious fem side for raging queen), who makes spectacle of self (opening execution will to not-see [pun intended] alluring other, keeping stunted self in innocent/impotent preoedipal condition) nightclub-dancing to juke jazz (the loose, improvisational unconscious of which she muse) + blueballing suitors (refusing both passive exhibitionism + active voyeurs eternally frustrating essence of Surrealism + chivalry), guillotined (enacting B’s own dualistic, self-defeating separation of mind from body; cf scrw’s same-yr Headless Ghost) when threatened w/ exposure (being made object of others’ gaze: passive, feminized).

Next victim similarly blackmailing (paranoia o/t repressed mind) curio dealer (fem mirror of self, making available objects he only offers for view: threat of experience for the committed puer/eternal child) who sold him weapons (mother-source of anxiety, having given him "instrument/s" he obliged to use), only male vic (doc he visits after each killing – body manifesting stress ego cannot – a la cops’ shellshocked compulsive confessor, chronically "exposing" self a la girlfriend) only one murdered by non-penetrative means (disinclination to pierce superficial "skin" of dream/pathology) + one of two by own hands (as antiquer: destroying parents/originator, as flunky does peers/symptoms, victims going from random to specific zeroing in on malaise); Bancroft middle-aged end of family line (as all Gothic monsters; if only there weren’t so many "families" ie complexes) wiping out imgs of fecundity in world (so as not to regenerate own masculine horror), assistant Rick (acting out Banc’s orders a la actor/dir) indoctrinated into his perverse habits (sins-o/t-fathers style; cf scrw’s 1963 Black Zoo, also starring Michael Gough) via controlling injections (only way invert Banc can conceive offspring: film’s phobic extrapolation of all perversion + unregeneracy into homosexuality) at indefinite point in past (familial, institutional corruption, as in similar backroom-evil Brit horrors of time Cat Girl, WomanEater, Plague o/t Zombies, Craze + related Shuttered Room + Beast i/t Cellar).

Climaxes at BM-opposite (hetero) funfair (cf producers Nat Cohen + Stuart Levy’s same-yr Circus of Horrors) where Rick takes (+ kills! – similar downbeat surprise as Zoo ending, all title locations nightmare studios/business world) proscribed love interest Banks (not-Bancroft: disavowed fem persona on mother-separation + anima which war kills in men + they kill in life) discovered earlier in Rick-clinch in Banc’s backroom (reverse-primal scene, where boy witnesses parents' lovemaking so to recognize own status outside family romance, stunting not-the-father viewing children’s sexual activity inspiring more rapid deterioration), strangled in Tunnel of Love (birth canal, where boy/male separates from mother/fem; aka Eden) where he transforms Teenage Werewolf style (also scrw Kandel); kills Banc by leaping off stalled Ferris wheel (interrupting mandalic cycle of violence; another yoni a la Tunnel) + stabbing him w/ own knife/phallus ("homo" villain getting poking he inflicts on others [vide Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mademoiselle Fifi, Reign of Terror, et al]), camera’s strange slow pan back into crowd (similarly mournful mvmt to Zoo end) as out of closed, homo/nymous dreamworld into conscious/communal/hetero.