Hellbound Hearts (3 page)

The Cabinet of Doctor Coppelius
US/UK 1932 71 minutes. Dominion Pictures. Alice Lavender, Catherine Hobson, Kurt Crandall, David Batchelor. Dir: Thomas Rheimer, Scr: Patrick Adams, Pr: Carl Bowman, Conrad Fisher.
Less expressionist than the
Caligari
nod in the title might suggest, this low-budget programmer offers instead the kind of unblinking gaze at body-horror that wouldn't become common until after Franju's verité approach many years later. Crandall's mad doctor—hilariously obsessed with Flecker's noted line from
Hassan
, “For lust of knowing what should not be known,” which he intones several times with an almost Barrymore level of hammy gravitas—teams with Batchelor's alcoholic toymaker to construct a “cabinet of transmutation” that transforms several cast members into life-sized dolls who wreak impressively vicious mayhem on several unsuspecting day players. Lavender, in her only movie, impresses as the plucky gal reporter swept into the lunacy.

Jack had let himself be drawn in to a couple of message board back-and-forths but the Cap'n—Colonel Carrion, was it? Corporal Carnal?—had stopped posting after several people had called him on his crap, and without a whipping boy to target, the activity on the boards had petered out.

“No,” Carducci said to Jack, with the fervency of a true believer—and there'd certainly been some of them, including a handful of hipper-than-thous who claimed to have actually seen a print in revival houses in the seventies. “Not a ghost film. A lost film. I mean,
really
lost. Makes
London After Midnight
look like something that gets played every other day on TCM.”

Jack took the picture back, pretending not to notice how reluctant Carducci's fingers were to let it go. “All right,” he said. “Even if
that's
true, I never heard this
Prisoners of the Inferno
title mentioned in any of the forums. Why was it recut? Why was it retitled? How do you know it's the same movie?”

“Oh, it
isn't
the same movie,” Carducci said. “They cut it a
lot
. The
Coppelius
version never killed anyone.”

The website was still there—nothing ever really goes away on the net—but it was pretty damn dormant. The last update, according to the home page, was a long time ago and the last entry on the forum even older. Jack was more than half convinced that he was wasting his time when he posted a fairly long open inquiry on the thread about
Coppelius
. He mentioned the original title, even said he'd recently come into possession of an image from the film, but decided not to scan the picture and upload it. For all he knew, he had the last surviving artifact of a truly lost thing and he wasn't going to give it away to bootleggers, even if he doubted that anyone other than him was ever going to visit this site again.

He'd put the still in a Mylar sleeve and perched it in front of his Mr. Coffee so that he could keep looking at it while he nuked himself an excuse for dinner. His computer pinged at him and he wandered from the kitchenette to the main room. He had mail.

The subject heading was
Prisoners of the Inferno
.

He'd expected no response at all, certainly not this fast and certainly not by e-mail. He'd had to fill out a user profile to post on the site and the e-dress was a required field but, come on, who sends an e-mail instead of just posting on the thread?

The text wasn't as carefully worded as his own, and nowhere near as long-winded.

Very direct in fact. Just six words.

Do you want to see it?

Unlikely to be popcorn, then
, Jack thought as he pressed the doorbell on the gone-to-shit bungalow in the middle of a tract at the ass end of Van Nuys.

The door was opened by a woman. She looked about sixty, and like she'd decided not to fight it; muumuu, carpet slippers, can of Molson. She looked at Jack for less than a second, then turned her head and shouted back into the house, “Walter!”

There was no reply. The woman walked away from the door without saying anything to Jack and he wasn't sure whether to step inside or not. After a moment, a heavyset man in an islands shirt appeared from a door toward the rear of the house. “JRosen101?” he called to Jack without bothering to come to the front door.

Jack nodded. “Jack,” he clarified, stepping inside.

“Walter,” the guy said. Thirty, maybe older. Hard to tell because the fat of his face kept it wrinkle free. “Come on.” He sounded a little put out, as if Jack was late or something, keeping people waiting.

The room at the back was tiny but had been set up as a minitheater with four easy chairs facing a small free-standing screen. Jack was surprised to see an honest-to-God movie projector behind the chairs—he'd expected to be watching a DVD-R at best—but it was too small for 16mm and too ancient for Super 8.

“Standard eight?” Jack asked, kind of delighted.

Walter shook his head as he gestured for Jack to take one of the chairs. “Nine point five,” he said.

“You're kidding,” Jack said. He'd
heard
of 9.5mm—a home format introduced in the early twenties by Pathé but essentially crushed by Kodak's 8mm just before World War II—but had never seen either films or hardware. Carducci claimed to have a 9.5 print of Hitchcock's
Blackmail
buried somewhere in his storage space, but then, Carducci claimed to have pretty much
everything
buried somewhere.

Another man came into the room. The Stan to Walter's Ollie, he
was five-five and rail thin and sported a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. Jack wondered if he'd already been in the house, or maybe had a key to the front door.

“Hey, Lenny,” Walter said without enthusiasm and glancing at his watch. Jack waited for an introduction that didn't come.

“I'm Jack,” he said as Lenny sat down.

“I know,” Lenny said. “Did you bring it?”

Jack drew the Mylar-housed still from the computer bag he'd brought—it had been either that or a Trader Joe's tote, nobody had briefcases anymore—and Lenny took a cursory glance at it.

“Very nice,” he said and then, half-turning to Walter, who was threading up an oversized reel into the projector, “The one Forry had? You think?”

“Probably,” Walter said, dimming the lights from a remote.

“Stolen,” Lenny said.

“He was so
trusting
.

” “Hey,” Jack said. “I got this at—”

“No, no, no,” Lenny said, interrupting him. “Nobody's accusing
you
. I mean, you
paid
for it, right?”

“Yes, I did,” Jack said, refraining from saying how little it had cost him.

“Then it's yours,” Lenny said in an annoyingly kind tone. Like Jack needed
his
fucking blessing.

Walter had sat down. “It's starting,” he said, which was Walter for Stop talking.

The print was of the later cut, as Walter—he assumed it had been Walter—had told him when he'd replied to Jack's reply and e-mailed him the address. Interestingly, though, the main title card—the one that actually said
The Cabinet of Doctor Coppelius
—was in a font that didn't quite match the cards before and after it, which lent some credence to the idea that the film had once been called something else.

The dupe was a little washed-out—the blacks not really black and the actors' faces occasionally slipping into an unpleasant featurelessness against too bright backgrounds—but was otherwise in remarkably good shape.

The movie itself was worryingly slow paced, even for Jack—and he was a guy who could sit through the flattest Monogram six-reeler without checking his watch even once—and the acting was as alternately amateurish and histrionic as the website critique had suggested. Jack had begun to worry that, as was depressingly often the case, the mystery and intrigue surrounding a thing's loss was far more entertaining than the found artifact itself, but once he'd let himself relax into the film's willfully leisurely pacing, he realized he was starting to enjoy it.

The lead girl—Alice Lavender, the girl from his still—helped a lot. She was just adorable as the feisty little heroine trying to impress both her crusty editor and her policeman boyfriend by cracking the story surrounding the mysterious deaths. And the life-sized dolls produced from the toymaker's Cabinet and sent forth to murder and mutilate anybody dumb enough to piss off Doctor Coppelius were quite successfully creepy. Their skin, post-transmutation, had a pale inhuman smoothness and there was stitching—rather convincing stitching—on their faces and limbs. Their eyes were completely black—the blackness, unfortunately, put in with a traveling ink-out like they'd given Tom Tyler in one of the
Mummy
sequels—but the fact was that, when the actors stood still long enough for the blobs not to move, the effect was surprisingly powerful.

What was really fascinating—and torturously enticing—was how obvious it actually was that the movie had been cut and had had new scenes added, with both the cuts and the additions serving to dilute whatever power the original may have had. Some of the nastier doll-demon murders simply
stopped
midcarnage and jumpcut to the next scene, for example, and there was a higher than usual quota of those annoying bits where an Irving the Explainer figure went to quite ridiculous lengths to explain how what might have appeared to be supernatural was actually a combination of engineering wizardry and showmanship gone all evil-genius.

The most egregious and frustrating alteration came at the climax. The movie built to the capture of Alice's character by Coppelius and his toymaker and her insertion into the Cabinet. Thrillingly,
unlike every other transformation, the camera followed her in. The Cabinet was bigger on the inside. Much bigger. So much so that it soon became clear that the inside of the Cabinet wasn't the inside of the Cabinet at all. The Cabinet was a portal to Hell and its unlucky entrants were quite literally prisoners of the inferno. This was where Jack's still had come from, this sequence in which the fetishized binding of the girl took on an overwhelming and shaming erotic power. And then, just as she was being dragged from the pillar toward the disturbingly elaborate doll-making machinery, another of those obvious cuts happened and the whole sequence was revealed as being merely the nightmare of the kidnapped girl
before
she was put into the Cabinet. And then, of course, the door burst open and her policeman boyfriend rescued her.

Jack
knew
that it hadn't been a dream in the original and that
Prisoners of the Inferno
must have culminated not only in the activation and operation of the machinery but in the reopening of the Cabinet and the disgorging of whatever doll-demon Alice had been turned into. He ached to see it.

It was starting to rain when they came out, and Jack found himself standing on the curb next to Lenny, both of them looking up at the sky with the vaguely hard-done-to expression common to non-native Angelenos whenever the weather wasn't perfect. As if Southern California had misled them, brought them here under false pretenses, strung them along like a lover who waits till after the wedding to mention that occasional little problem with bipolar disorder.

Lenny caught Jack's eye. “Did you like it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “I did. Overall. How about you?”

“Not as good as the real thing,” Lenny said, almost distractedly, as he pulled his jacket over his head like a makeshift hoodie and ran for his car.

Carducci had a small store in one of the commercial alleys off Hollywood Boulevard. Some nice stuff, but mainly repros and shit for the tourists. Kept the prime material for the conventions and the auctions.

“Oh, right,” he said, when Jack swung by to ask him about Walter. “Fat guy, Hawaiian shirts? Lives with his mother in some piss-poor shack the top of Van Nuys?”

Jack deadpanned him. “Didn't you just describe every one of your customers?” he said. Couldn't help it.

“Oh, really?” Carducci said, looking Jack up and down blankly, like the sneer was implicit. “Who died and made you Johnny fucking Depp?”

Jack grinned, letting it go. “What about his friend Lenny?” he said. “Little guy? Horn-rims?”

“
He
was there?”

“Yeah. Like he had bragging rights. Thought he might have been, you know, the boyfriend or something.”

“Stay the fuck away from
that
guy,” Carducci said. “Seriously. Grade-A creep.”

“What? Like a prick?”

“No. Like a fucking
creep
. As in creeps me out. For real. Him and his whole nasty little crowd. Used to hang around with Kenny Anger and LaVey. Seriously. They're not into this stuff for the same reasons we are. Got their own agenda. Not nice people.”

Carducci's reads on people were usually pretty good, so when Jack got the phone call from Lenny a couple of days later, he wanted to be guarded and careful. But he couldn't be, not when he knew that Lenny—creep or not—could have only one reason for calling, that he was going to offer access to a print of the real thing, to
Prisoners of the Inferno
. He wondered if this was how newly hooked junkies felt when they got the first follow-up call from their dealer. Because that's what he was, Jack realized. Hooked. Hooked from the moment
he'd stared at the still for the first time and felt that intoxicating rush of being allowed to gaze at the forbidden.

He had no doubt that it was going to cost him this time. Wasn't that how it always worked with junkies and their dealers? But he didn't care. He'd empty his fucking savings account if that's what they asked. He wanted to see more. He wanted to see, he wanted to know.
For lust of knowing what should not be known
, he thought, remembering Doctor Coppelius's knee-jerk little mantra.