October is the month for terror, and at the Weekly Triple Feature we have you covered. Each week we’re offering up horror selections from throughout film history that range from spine-tingling to bloody, to downright hilarious. Whatever your particular flavor of horror is, you’ll find it here this month.
THIS WEEK: FIVE FINGERS OF FRIGHT!
THE FILMS: The Hand (1981, Oliver Stone), Demonoid (1981, Alfredo Zacarías), Carnival of Sinners (La Main du Diable) (1941, Maurice Tourneur)
No body part has proven more consistently terrifying throughout film history than the severed hand. It’s often a character in itself, thinking and acting seemingly of its own volition as it crawls across the screen, leaving a trail of bodies in its wake. The hand is all powerful as appendages go: it helps us drive a car; it holds our babies; it can punch a man in the nose. So maybe the idea of something so strong being untethered from its safe place at the end of our wrist its what makes it such a frightening idea. Like we’re preventing it from acting on its true, murderous nature—like a tiger in a cage. Or maybe it’s just an easy trope because it’s the simplest thing to lop off in a film.
This week we look at three films that explore the ways a disembodied hand can be used to scare audiences. Two of them—The Hand and Demonoid—were released in the same year (1981), but tell very different stories. One is relatively straightforward American horror, which portrays the hand as a murderous villain, while the other is a Mexican genre film where the hand carries an ancient curse from person to person. The third film, Carnival of Sinners, is a 1941 French film in the vein of “The Monkey’s Paw.” In this, the hand is a magic-filled totem that grants wishes . . . for a price.
Each of these films brings its own fun perspective to the severed hand genre, and the three of them together make a great anthology that’s perfect for the spooky month of October.
The Hand, Oliver Stone, 1981
Of the three films this week, The Hand is the most obvious “hand horror.” In it, the main character, Jon Lansdale (Michael Caine), is a successful comic strip illustrator whose drawing hand is severed in a freak auto accident. The appendage proceeds to terrorize only the people in its owner’s life with whom he experiences anger (but represses it). The hand is the real-life embodiment of “Mandro,” the main character in Jon’s comic strip—a rage-filled, all-action-no-introspection embodiment of American masculinity.
With a lost career and a failing marriage, Jon moves from the East Coast to Northern California to teach at a small college. He brings his repression and the hand along with him and the terror continues in a setting that most assuredly inspired Evil Dead 2 on some level.
Whether the hand is real or just a manifestation of Jon’s repressed anger is a question central to the story. But one thing that does seem certain, at least to this reviewer, is that the hand is a metaphor for conservative ideas during the Reagan Era. The hand’s victims include analogues for ideas about mental health, the New Age movement, homelessness, and promiscuity. Director Oliver Stone is an outspoken liberal (who admits to having voted for Reagan), but this all-doing-no-thinking hand squeezing the life from these progressive issues is an interesting one—perhaps something created by author Marc Brandell in The Lizard’s Tail, the novel from which The Hand was adapted.
Speculated to be a cash grab after having no success getting his scripts for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July made in the late seventies, this was only Stone’s second feature as a director. One can see early iterations of his tight, metaphorical scriptwriting and the playful cinematography that would permeate his subsequent works and become his trademark. The film wasn’t as well-received as he hoped for, but it’s a lot of fun and a solid swing at “hand horror” in the tradition of The Beast With Five Fingers.
Demonoid, Alfredo Zacarías, 1981
Released in the same year as The Hand, Demonoid is wildly different and, in some ways, very alike. It’s a half campy, half serious film from Mexican writer/director Alfredo Zacarías that tells the story of Jennifer (Samantha Eggar) and Mark (Roy Jenson), an explorer couple who uncover an ancient tomb and subsequently set free a demon that takes shelter in a severed hand (which rests peacefully in a little hand casket when it happens!). Once free, the hand jumps from person to person, absorbing itself into them, and leaving behind a trail of carnage. In that sense it’s much like Oliver Stone’s film, but this hand has been around for centuries and is more a force of evil than a manifestation of one man’s rage. Whoever the hand has attached itself to finds themselves with super strength and a lot of anger. But they also want to rid themselves of it, which leads to a lot of fun and gory scenes of hand-chopping, hand-stabbing, hand-burning, and other creative adventures—one even involving a train.
Abroad the film is known as Macabra, and its gruesome scenes are much less graphic than in the U.S. release. In 1981, America was deep into its slasher era with releases like My Bloody Valentine, Friday the 13th Part 2, Halloween II, and Happy Birthday to Me, so Zacarías essentially shot two films, to appease audiences everywhere. It didn’t really work though, because both versions did pretty poor business. However, even though this is something that could end up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 someday, it’s very well made with great cinematography, a fun script, and some good acting, especially from Samantha Eggar. These elements have turned it into a bit of a cult classic with an evergrowing audience. It doesn’t take itself as seriously as The Hand, but it is just serious enough to be a really entertaining watch.
Carnival of Sinners (La Main du Diable), Maurice Tourneur, 1943
While his son Jacques was in America working on Cat People with producer Val Lewton for RKO, silent film director Maurice Tourneut was in France putting his own stamp on the horror genre with this gem of a film.
Carnival of Sinners (La Main du Diable), is the most artistic of this week’s three films, and it uses the idea of the hand in quite a unique way. Here it’s a talisman, a wish-granting monkey’s paw of fortune that offers great fortune, but at a cost.
The story’s protagonist, Roland Brissot (Pierre Fresnay), is a down-on-his-luck painter who longs for success and the adoring eye of his wavering girlfriend Irene (Josseline Gaël). When she leaves him high and dry in a bistro, the establishment’s owner offers Roland the solution to all his problems. All he has to do is buy a severed hand from the man for one franc (a totally normal request!), which he does after some coercing. Upon completion of the transaction Roland is informed that after one year the devil will come and collect his due for use of the hand unless it’s sold at a loss, which cannot happen. Great success follows, as does the expected consequence of making a deal with the devil. Roland must sell the hand back to the devil at an exponential cost or turn over his soul forever.
Carnival of Sinners is a beautiful film to watch, filled with rich, dream-like sequences and wonderful cinematography. It’s easy to see that Tourneut brought his silent film sensibilities to it with all its visual storytelling, especially in the third act. The story itself is familiar, but the way it’s told is unusual and interesting; it’s like an arty episode of The Twilight Zone. And unlike The Hand or Demonoid, the hand is more of a MacGuffin than a character. Together the three of them show that there are quite a few ways to tell a scary story that revolves around a severed limb, and that makes this a really fun triple feature—especially for the month of October.
FURTHER READING (AND LISTENING):
- Excerpt on The Hand from The Oliver Stone Experience by Matt Zoller Seitz
- Cinema Crazed on Demonoid
- Demonoid on the Video Archives podcast
WHERE TO WATCH: