FAO CGAA YEAR 1 - UNIT 3/ENVIRONMENT - Effigy Anxiety Continued...

Very occasionally, I contribute articles for Bite Me! - a magazine aimed at readers interested in all things vampiric - though more Hammer, than Twilight. Having no particular interest in vampires myself, my stuff is more generalised, ranging from book reviews to an interview with the founder of the International Black Plant Society - yes really. Back in 2008, issue 20 of the magazine ran an article of mine entitled Effigy Anxiety, accompanied by a series of photographs I'd generated as part of my Masters degree back in 1998. In light of your environment project and your investigations of the uncanny, I reproduce the article and images here for your perusal. The photographs were taken using 1600 black and white film for that rich, granular aesthetic. I've hyperlinked the various film references etc.

Effigy Anxiety

Phil Gomm 1998

As anyone reading this magazine will know, a vampire may only enter your home if first asked to wipe its feet on your welcome mat. Evil needs an invitation – unless, of course, your houseguest is Michael Myers, when chances are he’ll have arrived unnoticed via the back door and already have his hands in your cutlery drawer... 

The threat of much-sequelised serial killers aside, you could be forgiven for thinking you’re safe from malign forces in your own home. After all, your postal address doesn’t read Hill House, Amityville or Elm Street; your planchette, Ouija board and Pazuzu paper-weight went for a couple of quid at last Saturday’s car-boot sale, and that suspicious-looking encyclopedia salesman with the filed incisors and widow’s peak didn’t so much as get his foot on your shag-pile. 

Perhaps you’re reading this latest edition of Bite Me! sprawled on your bed, content, free of qualm, surrounded by the friendly, cherubic faces of favourite childhood toys; the white-faced china doll with the big,blue eyes given you years back by the great aunt with the hairy mole; the charming hand-crafted marionette made for you by your eccentric Uncle Gepetto, when what you really wanted for Christmas that year was a Sony PlayStation and a copy of Grand Theft Auto… 

What was that? A sudden shudder? An unexpected outbreak of gooseflesh? Whatever is the matter with you? What? You don’t like the way the doll is looking at you? You thought you saw the marionette move? Impossible! 

Or is it?

Phil Gomm 1998

You wouldn’t be the first to suspect your dolls, puppets and related effigy-objects of sharing secret exchanges and clandestine animation. There are many such examples of ‘effigy-anxiety’ - both literary and filmic - adding credence to the idea that, far from being safe in our homes, we may already be sharing them with little assassins. 

Dolls, puppets and their diminutive kin are inanimate objects given motion by human interaction. As such they should constitute exemplars of human control. Peculiarly, they do not. They are uncanny objects. 

‘Uncanny’ isn’t easy to define. Its meaning is perhaps best expressed by listing all the things ‘uncanny’ is not. ‘Uncanny’ doesn’t mean ‘horrible’, ‘terrible’, ‘disgusting’, or ‘grotesque’. Neither is ‘uncanny’ the same as ‘gruesome’, ‘fantastic’, ‘whimsical’, or ‘gothic’. ‘Uncanny’ is more closely related to ‘unsettling’, ‘discomforting’, or ‘unease’. It is similar to ‘unnerving’. An experience of the uncanny begins at the point where what is familiar becomes strange suddenly or disorientating. Effigy-objects perfect this uniquely disturbing inversion for they are at once ‘like us’, but also ‘other’. 

Dolls are objects designed primarily for children, belonging by association to a period of innocence and safety. To play with dolls is to partake in role-play of protection and comfort, satisfying a need for benevolent control. Dolls reassure us because they confirm our authority – except, of course, when they’re trying to kill you!

Phil Gomm 1998

While poor Carol-Anne Freeling battles with her Sarlak-Pit-come-closet at the coffin-tossing climax to Tobe Hooper’s 1982 film, Poltergeist, her brother, Robbie Freeling, finally confronts the malevolent clown doll that has been spooking him - and us - throughout the movie. By day, the clown is inert, sitting on the chair at the end of Robbie’s bed as if butter wouldn’t melt. By night, the doll becomes something else – a horribly imminent object, its potential for coming-to-life intolerable. Robbie’s worst fears – and ours - are finally confirmed when the clown doll tries to throttle him.

Spare a thought too for little Andy Barclay, the unfortunate owner of Chucky – a charmless hunk of freckled plastic possessed by the soul of serial killer, Charles Lee Ray. Andy soon figures out his ‘Good Guy’ doll is nothing of the sort and is gleefully killing people, but is routinely disbelieved by the sorts of numbskull adults who obviously never watched Poltergeist. Chucky’s ultimate goal is the transfer of its own malignant mojo into the living, breathing body of Andy Barclay, swapping sexless, anodyne plastic for the thrall of flesh and blood.

Naked ambition for a more human lifeforce is not exclusive to the franchise-friendly Chucky; effigy-objects have been hankering after a bigger slice of soul-pie ever since Pinocchio wanted to be a ‘real boy’. 

In Ealing Studio’s classic 1945 portmanteau piece, Dead of Night, Michael Redgrave plays Maxwell Frere, a highly-strung ventriloquist whose dummy, Hugo, boasts its own much more dominant personality. Ventriloquism makes explicit that secret, half-formed concern that effigy-objects covet the freedoms of the flesh enjoyed by their masters. Here, the ‘dummy’ sitting on the puppeteer's knee is irreverent, locked into a struggle for greater autonomy and control. The film’s creepiest moment comes when Frere attempts to silence Hugo, only to have the dummy bite his hand and draw blood. Unlike Child’s Play’s animatronic Chucky, Dead of Night refuses to confirm whether Hugo is ‘alive’ and the film is all the more disturbing for it. Chucky manages to be ‘gruesome’, and Hooper’s clown makes us jump, but only Hugo affects the uncanny. 

An effigy-object needn’t stab, throttle or bite to bring about pain, suffering and an untimely demise. A voodoo doll is made into the likeness of another human being so that the doll's possessor might exert a terrible and pernicious control over the person depicted. When the Graham Greene story, The Comedians, was made into a movie with Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Alec Guinness, Papa Doc – president of Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971 – reputedly stuck pins into effigies of the three actors because he disapproved of the film’s depiction of Haiti, his dictatorship and his involvement with black magic. 

While a mirror isn’t an effigy-object, it certainly generates an associated unease. A mirror should be the most benevolent of artefacts because it literally reflects us, and yet, like a hexing doll fashioned after our own image, this ‘picture’ of ourselves may leave us just as vulnerable. One of the oldest and most widely held superstitions warns that to break a mirror will result in seven years' bad luck. The origins of this belief stem from the ancient idea that the reflection of a person seen in a glass is actually their soul, and if this reflection should be shattered the soul is broken too and augurs death. In many countries it is not unusual to find the mirrors in a room where someone has died covered with cloths, as it is believed anyone who sees their reflection in this mirror at this particular time is similarly doomed. As widespread is the claim that if a mirror falls and breaks for no apparent reason, then someone is going to die, while if a mirror shatters while hanging on the wall, a relative or close friend is near death. During one of his campaigns, Napoleon Bonaparte accidentally broke the glass on a portrait of Josephine. Napoleon couldn’t sleep until a messenger had been dispatched and returned with tidings that his beloved wasn’t pushing up daisies. 

Virginia Madsen soon learns to be as wary of reflective surfaces, when, in Bernard Rose’s masterful 1992 adaptation of Clive Barker’s short story, Candyman, she conjures the film’s titular hook-handed bogeyman into life by unwisely flouting mirror superstition.

Superstitions concerning portraiture and photography are similarly ominous; if a portrait or picture of someone falls off a wall for no apparent reason, this is said to be an omen the person depicted will die shortly after. It is also considered unlucky to turn a portrait upside down, for this will bring disaster upon its subject. No one appreciates this relationship between depiction and death better than David Warner’s photographer in Richard Donner’s 1976 film, The Omen. His black and white photographs actually prefigure the grisly and freakish deaths of their various subjects – including his own spectacular slo-mo beheading via a sheet of plate glass.

In The Omen, Gregory Peck and Lee Remick are afraid of their own child; in this instance, they have good cause; Damien Thorn is the Anti-Christ, but Damien isn’t alone in putting the wind up mum and dad. There is an established tradition of angelic-looking children spooking their elders and betters, as in Henry James’s novel, Turn of the Screw, which features two immaculate moppets who may, or may not be possessed by malign spirits, and its 1961 film adaptation, The Innocents, featuring Deborah Kerr as the repressed, Victorian governess terrorised by them. 

In the 1960 movie, Village of the Damned, Barbara Shelley tries cuddling up to her remote and implacable son, little suspecting he is a hive-minded alien with glowing eyes and telepathic powers. The anxiety expressed by Barbara Shelly in regard to the ‘otherness’ of her offspring is no different to Robbie Freeling’s fear of his toy clown; part indignation, part estrangement, it is the realisation that, while you might be in charge, you are not in control. Indeed, what all of these examples share – the dolls, the dummies, the mirrors, the portraits, the moppets – is there especial gift for making us uncomfortable because they are supposed to function as comforters, their principle role to reassure. You don’t like the way that doll is looking at you? You thought you saw the marionette move? Your own reflection unnerves you? You think your child is the Anti-Christ? The truth is you’re scared of the self same thing – your own representation. To fear our effigies is the subtle subjugation of ourselves before our own creations. Worse than this, and uncannier still, to be afraid of dolls, dummies, puppets and our doubles is to confront your own image and discover that it, and not you, is pulling the strings...

Phil Gomm 1998

And just incase you still had any doubts that dolls etc. are simply not to be trusted, meet Alma...

Alma from Rodrigo Blaas on Vimeo.