Interior—Interior - SCP Foundation

INTERIOR—INTERIOR:

A History of Dimensional Space in Anomalous Cinema

Dr. Arthur Windruff, Associate Professor Film History, Deer College.

Excerpted from The Wild Normal: Essays on Paranormal Media

One of the key formal elements of the anomalous cinema is the use of the dimensional interior as a foundation of the text. Widely known, the process of “sucking” the viewer in to a fully realized alternative world is profoundly important to understanding the history of the art form. Various technical scholars and specialists of anomalous physics have ruminated at length on the exact methods each director uses to create the spatial anomaly in question, but for the purposes of this text we will disregard the actual transportation, for as a cinematic device capable of thematic heft it is functionally useless. The process of moving from screening room to pocket dimension imparts nothing of worth, at least for this scholar (although Sherman Foy has proposed a marvelous argument in their favor for Cahiers du Cinema). Instead, we will consider how the actual dimensional interior itself, the “space,” functions as the foremost element by which these films conduct their artistic intentions. This process, by means of which the mis-en-scéne of each work is transformed into a three-dimensional space, surrounding the viewer in a (usually skewed) version of the diegesis in question, creates a tactile space that holds the viewer as more than a mere voyeur in the dark, but an active participant in the storytelling language of the piece, able to engage with the narrative on a level not too dissimilar from various nonanomalous strains of art, including video games, promenade theatre, and the haunted house.

The practice can be dated back to the earliest days of kinetoscopes, specifically involving Nikola Tesla’s ill-fated forays into the motion picture business, all reels of which were sadly lost in the “Death Ray” incident of 1943. These attempts to rival The Edison Company’s work reportedly involved the creation of a “parallel world” by means of a Mr. Alley, a New York thaumaturgist of some note employed by Tesla. Sadly for film history, we have no clear ideas of what these films contained, but the dimension in question could not have been terribly thematically rich considering the primitive state of cinematic storytelling, and might have contributed to the reported “shock and terror” present at the first pitch to investors. Tesla shelved the project not long after. George Méliès reportedly experimented with the technology as well, but the rumors of madness, violence, and insanity associated with the 1902 short La rage du Démon/Fury of the Demon were discovered to be an elaborate hoax undertaken by the French filmmaker Fabien Delage. Notably, this led cinephiles within the anomalous rights group known as The Serpent’s Hand to publicly stage a protest outside his Paris home, as well as the homes of participants. These included Méliès’ granddaughter Pauline and the directors Alexandre Aja (Piranha 3D) and Christophe Gans (Silent Hill), all of whom had conspired with Delage from the 2016 Festival de Gérardmer premiere onwards to present the film as real to the extent that various containment organizations were involved.

The true beginning of the device as a foundational technique lies with Jakob Nkurunziza’s 1928 masterpiece Seven Strangers at a Feast, which stands not only as the grandfather of all future uses of the technique but a key text in this history of anomalous cinema, not to mention African cinema and antiracist/anticolonialist anart. Initially loathed by the Surrealists in Nkurunziza’s then-native France, the film has little in common with seminal films of the movement like Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, presenting its impossible scenario with precise linear progression despite the abstract storyline, as well as a commitment to a realism that presages many future genres. These include the slow cinema of Béla Tarr, Kelly Reichardt and Michelangelo Frammartino in its combination of languorous running time and simple plot (six humans perform an elaborate ritual at an isolated cottage that summons an otherworldly figure), but also the prolonged graphic violence that points the way not only the future of certain horror texts in this field but also relatively mainstream genres like “torture porn” and the so-called New French Extremity (to which Aja and Gans, mentioned above, belong).

The film’s “space” is remarkably well-developed. Consisting of a representation of Burundi’s Rusizi National Park that is tuned precisely to the diegesis of the narrative, including time of day, the viewer-participant may explore the isolated house that is the central location of the film. The location behaves precisely as it would on-screen, without decay or damage that would be notable or visible within a real place. But, of course, as a film location, the “MacGuffins” of the mis-en-scéne also prove transmissible into a third-dimensional space. Two elements of this setting which are crucial to the film’s narrative include a hearth, and a nearby chest, from which the supernatural entity emerges. It is impossible to interact with these two items, the viewer-participant can neither open the chest nor light the fire, and thusly cannot disturb the storytelling mechanics of the scene. As L. Andra Sokolhov notes

“It is crucial to Seven Strangers that the supernatural entity steps out of the chest charred and burned, as if it emerged from the fire. Indeed, the notion of roasting flesh is central to the film’s thematic preoccupations; a character is skinned and the skin prepared for consumption in a ghastly parody of a family cooking scene. Combined with [Nkurunziza’s] use of temporal actor displacement to cast real figures of future European military colonialism as the six ritual performers, these two objects suggest a powerful critique of foreign policy in Africa, wherein the entity, representing the African Continental Spirit, arrives wounded yet thankful for the meal built on the torture of Europe’s elderly (Sokolhov 46).”

If the viewer-participant were to disrupt these specific objects, the entire setup of the film is now pointless and null, a parade of meaningless gore and chaotic action. And disrupt he may, for other actions besides these, like digging into the ground beneath the cabin or stumbling upon the performers in stasis, produce new symbolic resonances of their own.

Long thought to be the sole directorial work by the enigmatic Nkurunziza, the discovery of his immortality in 2014 produced the key to the trajectory of the film’s method across the generations. Believed to have left France in 1930 in the wake of the global stock market crash, we can trace his path through various cinematic circles throughout the 1950s and 1960s by noting what anartists were using his techniques, and thusly who were his students. Although the estimable filmography of Josef Hellmuth solely kickstarted a 1950s underground cinema in West Germany, which was paralyzed artistically by an economic reconstruction that turned a blind-eye to the Nazi past, his scathing critiques of Nazism and the notion of God only bear the slightest resemblance to the Nkurunzizan dimensional interior, whose closest use may be the impossible hall of mirrors in 1953’s Doppelgänger. The anomalies present in the work achieve the path of a dimensional interior in a way that does not rely on the use of a thaumaturgy bounded to the filmstrip at all, instead using memetic elements to create heightened emotional states, altered perceptions, and psyche-implanted thematic understandings that achieve the same effect. The key theme through which his body of work is oft seen is rejection, rejection of ignorance, rejection of authorship, and perhaps rejection of the dimensional interior. The camera records and sees alone, and only what is in the film itself matters. In the midcentury, his new style of memetic triggers and compositional-emotional anomalies dominate in Eastern Europe, remaining prominent throughout the Soviet Union and socialist territories (following the 1962 release of Abwesenheit, Hellmuth emigrated to East Germany and took up teaching), where the form reached its zenith in Czechslovakia’s The Cars Run on Time, from 1970, and then again in Bulgaria’s Antrum, from 1979. Both contain deep uses of subliminal memetic imagery during disturbing scenes, while themselves containing disturbing scenes, all designed to provoke powerful reactions in an audience. Surprisingly, this style of anomalous filmmaking was also popular in Hollywood, where it even penetrated the Veil in the quick frame imagery of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, a Hellmuthian mainstream film if ever there was one. It is arguable that this Western variant of the Hellmuth method reached its own zenith in Anders Karl Beckmann’s American-Canadian extreme horror freakout Tenebras Occulta (otherwise known as The Last Movie, and not to be confused with the 1971 Dennis Hopper vehicle of the same name), a film whose star and eventual uncredited ghost-director, the Hellmuthian scholar Marguerite LeFay, pioneered what Jay Anton calls “perhaps the most complex example of memetic trigger density in the history of the medium (Anton 56).” We must look for Nkurunziza’s elegant internal spaces elsewhere.

As the panic surrounding subliminal images continued to steadily build throughout the 1980s, American film executives at the handful of companies or divisions operating behind the Veil grew steadily worried about a controversy exposing them. As Sarah W. Werner writes in Anomedia: The Complete History of the Supernatural on Film,

“The trend towards extreme horror was dying out. Specifically as a commercial cinematic application of anomalous techniques, it was on borrowed time. Although those who had either studied under Hellmuth or merely studied his work had tended towards the bridge between art and terror that he practiced, executives were now leaning heavily away from such tactics. To scare was overplayed, and the 1970s were frightening enough on their own. (Werner 180).”

Following the disastrous mainstream flop of Heaven’s Gate, the kibosh on the auteurist era had come, and the corporate executives were now in charge. Anomalous films with a softer heart became the norm. The Georgia-based independent outlet Jasper Hill Pictures released 1982’s A Dinosaur in New York, which was a handsomely mounted production for anomalous cinema standards. A children’s film with distribution from 20th Century Fox, it featured a cast of professional actors of varying fame, including Terence Stamp, Laraine Newman, Jason Wingreen, Art Mundy, and the nonagenarian Classic Hollywood character actor Sam Jaffe. Versions of the film released in Behind-The-Veil markets used Nkurunzizan transportation to suggest the titular apatosaur Bronky (the voice of Garrett Morris) was actually walking around the movie theatre auditorium, interacting with delighted children. The auditorium became a space, and the children unaware viewer-participants. It was the first true example of the dimensional interior since Seven Strangers, all the more remarkable for the film’s gentle nature. Reportedly, the Paramount Pictures executive Jeff Ewing pushed director Martha Herilhy and her producer, the legendary documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, to include dimensional anomalies in the making of the 1980 concert film Cher: Live from the Hollywood Palladium, a rarity for documentaries. We now know that Ewing’s time in the underground film scene of 1960s New York had brought him into close contact with Nkurunziza via their mutual friend Andy Warhol, and that Ewing’s major work Parathan stands as a powerful oddball example of the dimensional interior in that time and place, Nkurunziza having largely moved on from cinema at that point. The techniques used would have brought the audience to the Palladium itself, enveloping them in Cher’s concert fully for an extended encore. Alas, it was not to be. Cher’s outrage at the matter following disastrous test screenings has contributed to the film’s legendary unreleased status, a cult following compounded by the facts of Herilhy’s shocking murder in 1985.

That year, 1985, is crucial in other ways, for the reemergence of the dimensional interior. As the legendary (and legendarily demonic-influenced) video game company Arcadia was reaching its low point, reeling from the video game market crash of 1983 and the crumbling of the company’s creative heights, the executive Dan "Wolf" Dunn hires another one-time underground filmmaker-turned-executive, Parker Winwood, to run a new film division, hoping to save the company from its death spiral. A genre geek, Winwood had developed a fondness for giallo, that particularly gory subgenre of Italian horror, and had been instrumental in working with several Italian studios like Cineriz to distribute various Lucio Fulci films in the United States, culminating in his negotiation for the United Artists Europa release of Cannibal Holocaust, a business move that cost him his position in the wake of the post-Heaven’s Gate reshuffling. By all accounts, he was eager to get back on his feet professionally. Interviewed in the late 1980s for Three Portlands television, he remembered his hopefulness at being back in the avant-garde once again. “I belong in fringe institutions, more often than not wobbly ones, (Shults 3),” he quipped. Not coincidentally, he was also a friend and collaborator of Jeff Ewing in the 1960s, running through the same artistic circles as disciples of Nkurunziza. And, both sensing the powerful tide change in studio ownership, he also made the trek with him to California to remake Hollywood in their image. He and Nkurunziza remained extraordinarily close across the 1970s, corresponding frequently even as his mentor expressed a certain disgust at Winwood’s corporate position. Oddly enough, Ewing, despite arguably the more successful career running the anomalous film divisions of various major studios, never received the same scorn. The nature of Nkurunziza’s unusual interest and suggested animus towards his one-time pupil remains a mystery.

The purchase of the popular Italian novel La festa dei cadaveri — written by vacationing American horror author Glen Weaver — brought new hope to Winwood and Arcadia, and indeed not a minute too soon, for the anomalous cinema community remained shocked by the mysterious underground horror of Crystal Elms Productions, a direct-to-VHS outlet with a propensity for immense control of dimensional interior. Although best known for the shocking Sunday Dinner, the 1983 release Return of the Suburb Slasher (a misdirection, as it is not a sequel to a film titled The Suburb Slasher by any means) showed the clear hand of an Nkurunzizan student building off of Seven Strangers at a Feast in fascinating ways, by bypassing the need for a defined “break” in spatial narrative by incorporating the shift within the screen itself. The spatial transformation from cinematic to interactive space transforms what is otherwise a fairly standard Halloween ripoff, with sub-Carpenter synth score, to a serious examination of the viewer’s role in the voyeuristic consumption of horror films. No matter how the viewer tries to help protagonist Heather Campbell, she resolutely cannot be saved. This proto-Michael Haneke examination of media violence is profoundly affecting as a narrative device, ensuring a variable cinematic plot with absolute purity of theme. No wonder Winwood was affected. Although Crystal Elms’ roster remains anonymous, the work clearly shows the hand of an Nkurunzizan anartist, and possibly even Nkurunziza himself. Enraged and excited, Winwood wrote many furious letters to Nkurunziza, accusing him of betraying his artistic standards and their friendship, absolutely convinced he had directed Return of the Suburb Slasher to meddle with the box office of this new film. Despite sending dozens of letters, he received no response, and began to make impulsive business decisions to get La festa dei cadaveri, now called Corpse Club, off the ground. He fired first choice Lucio Fulci from the picture and instead installed a director he could more easily control, the Franco-Italian Jaques Caulli, a well-liked if obscure director of police thrillers under Cagliostro Pictures, the new co-producer. In 1984, the film was put into production in Italy with a screenplay by Dunn, Winwood (writing under the pseudonym Matt Nadeus) and Caulli (writing under the pseudonym Jack Kull).

Crystal Elms Productions are known for their fidelity, the anonymity of the filmmakers producing a curious effect wherein the films they produced seem to operate as a perfect whole, an elegant extrapolation of content into form, even as the subject matters become quite grisly. This, in turn, allows them a flexibility of nonlinear or variable storytelling, for a Crystal Elms film can drastically vary in content between viewings yet remain beautifully thematically simple (see the Sunday Dinner “bodies” that accompany differing plotlines). Not so with Corpse Club. The story of a Roman cop hunting the mysterious serial killer Bauta in the small seaside town of Seveka, it bears a marked resemblance to Fulci’s 1972 Don't Torture a Duckling, which surely cannot be unintentional, right down to the Riz Ortolani score. But one can feel a tension between the giallo worship brought on by the demon-and-drug influenced Dunn and Winwood, and the lyricism of Caulli’s traditional policiers. As Vladimir Chubakoff writes in Cinema Fantastique,

“[Caulli] brings a disturbing refinement to the film, perhaps inspired by Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Carol Reed’s The Third Man, culminating in the ambiguous cliffside confrontation between the cop Tadeo and the film’s secondary villain Armstrong. The acting is profoundly moving in its noirish fatalism, compounded by the sumptuous cinematography of Dardano Gallotti, who combines stylish, vivid colors with deep-focus landscapes (Chubakoff 10).”

Unfortunately, it must be acknowledged that the dimensional interior, the piece that makes this film worthy of discussion in this essay, suffers in comparison. It's clear that Winwood's talent, represented here, lies in technically extraordinary thaumaturgy, while Caulli is more suited to excellent cinematic craftsmanship. Strongly indebted to Seven Strangers, the viewer-participant find themselves in a mostly empty simulacrum of Seveka, able to be explored and manipulated to their heart’s content excepting capture by Bauta, played here as in the film by a Tartarean entity with the stage name of Damien Pan. Death is rather likely for the viewer-participant if one does not have a pataphysical shield-suit, which makes the entire enterprise rather meaningless as a commercial endeavor and quite shallow as an artistic one. Although the viewer can converse with the Bauta performer, the conversation usually ends in an exhortation of “join me,” betraying a cheap obsession with demonology that was Dunn’s focus for many years. The space has no tactile motifs, no controlled directorial design, and is much rather like a sandbox-style video game before such a term was invented. Ultimately, the viewer-participant can affect the narrative on no level, able to be murdered by the character without gaining a deeper understanding of the narrative or themes. All of this speaks to heavy creative meddling from Arcadia with Caulli’s vision. The film was ultimately not successful upon VHS release in 1985 despite a small following who enjoyed the dimensional interior as a thrill-seeking endeavor, but Return of the Suburb Slasher’s more safe, down-home American thrills outpaced it in sales. Following which, the burgeoning film division slipped under the radar with Arcadia’s corporate cleaning and restructuring that same year, upon which Winwood was fired, bringing future projects in development to Jasper Hill in Georgia.

Despite the film’s failure, both it and its rival had an outsize effect on future filmmakers’ work. The grainy images and tortured fatalism of Michael Almereyda’s 1995 Desperate Effects bear the influence of the Gallotti cinematography for Corpse Club in the black-and-white digital noise of the nearly unpassable dimensional space, which, when combined with Jared Harris’s solipsistic monologue, makes for a profound emotional experience. And who can forget how director Shaun Paloty’s 2007 grindhouse homage Blood Finger directly plays with the culpability of the choose-your-own-ending maze of Return of the Suburb Slasher, only with a fuller Nkurunzizan immersion involving a literal dimension transport? Paloty even worked with specialty distributor Vinegar Syndrome to release the first nonanomalous copy of Return of the Suburb Slasher on Blu-Ray, playing off the interactive ending with a cover story of a unique cinematic trick involving a set of multiple reels and projected voice responses. Lola Schwein’s German lesbian romance Fraulein Madame combines Hellmuthian memetic triggers with Nkurunzizan dimensional manipulation for a full sensory immersion, coupled by the in-joke casting of Corpse Club actor Sophia Petrov as Heather C. E. Campbell, a riff on Crystal Elms’ most famous heroine. Unfortunately, neither Winwood nor his mysterious corporate rival survived the 80s to view the fruits of their two projects. Crystal Elms vanished as mysteriously as they arrived thanks to the 1986 FBI investigations into Sunday Dinner, nearly three years after the film’s release. Winwood fell into the thrall of a worsening cocaine addiction, and died at his home in Atlanta in 1990.

In 1991, under the name “Jacob Winwood,” Nkurunziza released a nonanomalous short film, titled Blame, which played at several behind-the-Veil film festivals. In it, four figures resembling Bauta are burned atop a funeral pyre as a solitary figure dressed as the killer from Sunday Dinner watches below. At the film’s end, the figure removes its burlap hood, revealing itself as played by Jeff Ewing. This clear riff on Josef Hellmuth’s 1953 film Schuld was Nkurunziza’s first cinematic work in 64 years.