"Hands have not always been relegated to supporting roles. A number of times they've walked off on their own to take center stage unencumbered..." |
Man's first weapon was no doubt the hand, and that appendage has lefts its bloody mark in the history of horror...and the horror cinema as well. Read all about it in...
If there is any piece of human anatomy that can rival the brain for pure villainy, it is the hand. As I've noted previously, most body parts can be trusted to do their jobs, or at least to do no evil, when separated from the rest of the human animal. During the heyday of scientific inquiry into the phenomenon of malevolent organs (i.e., the Fifties, via numerous low-budget films, most of which seem to have been written by Curt Siodmak), no link was ever discovered between mysterious deaths and amputated noses, severed ears or sentient gall bladders.
Hands are a different matter. Consider the 1924 silent classic The Hands of Orlac (directed by Robert Wiene, based on the book The Hands of Orlac by Maurice Renard). Conrad Veidt stars as Stephen Orlac, classical pianist. When Orlac's hands are crushed in a train accident, a scientist replaces them with the hands of a killer. Orlac soon finds his hands drawn more to throats than to the keyboard.
This expressionistic silent film from the director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) set the mold for a number of remakes, none of which quite measures up to the original. The least of the The Hands of Orlac remakes was committed in 1960 starring Mel Ferrar as the digitally-challenged Orlac (this time, maimed in an airplane crash) and Christopher Lee as a magician determined to take advantage of Orlac's descent into madness as the pianist's digits engage in the expected strangle-a-thon.
Sandwiched between these two Orlacs came the delicious 1935 Peter Lorre starrer, Mad Love, directed by Karl Freund (The Mummy, 1932). Same ivory-tickling Stephen Orlac, another train accident, once again it's the hands of a killer that are grafted onto Orlac's wrists (what...saints never lose their hands?). This time the killer preferred knives and Orlac finds himself hurling cutlery with deadly abandon. Lorre steals the show, however, as the demented, lovestruck surgeon Dr. Gogol. By the time he dons his neck brace and steel-fingered gloves to make Orlac's wife believe Lorre is a serial murderer (don't ask), the movie belongs to him, hence the title change.
Hands have not always been relegated to supporting roles. A number of times they've walked off on their own to take center stage unencumbered. The classic disembodied hand movie is The Beast With Five Fingers from 1946. The hand in this account was once attached to a pianist played by Victor Francen.
I have to digress for one moment to register a complaint. Do hands have no other worthwhile function than to play the piano? As if surgeons could operate just as well with bloody stumps! And what about all the other musical instruments that require nimble fingers, such as the flute, the violin and the banjo? Well, Hollywood has rarely been known for innovation. Anyway, various nefarious goings-on go on in Francen's household and play themselves out in typical murder mystery fashion. Most of it is pretty forgettable but it all leads up to Francen's hand attacking Peter Lorre, a sequence that is well worth the wait.
Shortly after this horrific scene the movie descends into a lot of mumbo-jumbo about whether the hand was real or not, right through an embarrassing epilogue that can be found under the dictionary definition of "lame." This same ambivalence is found in the 1981 film The Hand, written and directed by Oliver Stone before he got all high and mighty and paranoid, starring Michael Caine. Caine plays a comic book artist (thank God, not another pianist!) whose parents never warned him to keep his hands inside the car. Caine's severed appendage embarks on a killing spree, getting even with all of Caine's detractors...or does it? Could it all be happening in Caine's mind, which has no doubt been warped by decades of low-brow entertainment?
At least 1963's The Crawling Hand has the courage to accept its premise: An astronaut possessed by an evil alien entity begs for his returning rocket to be blown up in mid-air. Socially handicapped scientists comply and the astronaut is killed, but his hand lives on. Naturally the hand proceeds to engage in a series of murders, annoyed perhaps by the bad acting of its fellow players. The ultimate hand-vs.-human scene can be found in 1987's Evil Dead II. Possessed by evil spirits, Bruce Campbell battles his own hand as it drags him along the ground, punches him in the face and smashes plates over his head. Finally Campbell takes a chainsaw to his wrist and the hand skitters away to continue its assault on Campbell and our sensibilities. 1991 brought us Body Parts, in which several parts of a serial killer are grafted onto various victims. This film has been criticized for its lack of credibility. Although I haven't seen Body Parts, I have to wonder if "credibility" isn't a wayward criterion when applied to any severed-appendage movie.
That same year brought us the ultimate incarnation of the most famous Hand of all time that wasn't attached to Senor Wences: Thing, created by Charles Addams for his series of cartoons starring The Addams Family. Fresh from the pages of The New Yorker, Thing finger-snapped his way to stardom in 1964 as The Addams Family migrated to television. His performance was limited to popping out of a box until 1991's A-list film, The Addams Family, liberated him from his wooden container with then-state-of-the-art computer effects.
Thing remains indisputably the best-loved disembodied hand of all time, due, in my opinion, to the fact that he's never engaged in a killing spree. Finally, there's the sine qua non of disembodied hand movies, Appendages. In this tale of warring lovers, a sleight-of-hand artist vies with a prominent dancer for the attentions of a winsome lass. The dancer eliminates his competition by arranging an accident that costs the magician his hand and his livelihood.
The hand takes revenge by stalking the dancer and eventually severing his foot. In the film's climactic battle, the hand and foot engage in an action-packed free-for-all. The hand punches the foot, the foot kicks the hand and together they lay waste to the house which, of course, goes up in flames, taking both appendages with it. Maybe. Maybe not. The lass? She ends up with a brainy scientist. Can a brain in a fish tank be far behind?
Okay, I made that last movie up. Sorry if I got you all worked up over nothing, but maybe we can start a grassroots campaign to bring Appendages to the screen. Hollywood, I'm ready when you are. (J. Knight lives and writes in Los Angeles, CA. He's written comic books, cartoons and live action television and has worked for most of the major studios. He has a long- standing love for Fifties B-films, particularly those featuring brains, mad scientists and nature gone berserk. His supernatural thriller Risen is published by Time Warner Books and may be sampled at his Website.) Of course, this is just a "hand"-ful of horror films in which the hand provides the thrills and chills. Who could forget Bela Lugosi's hypnotic hands in the original Dracula or Boris Karloff's questioning hands in the original Frankenstein? Article copyright © J. Knight |
