Monday, October 10, 2022

The Ninth Night of Halloween 2022



ON THE NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched another ‘80’s creature feature: Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage (1988).

Henenlotter also made one of the greatest works of twins horror cinema ever, Basket Case (1982). Basket Case is not about identical twins but rather about a man born with a highly deformed parasitic twin. This creature somehow survives being surgically removed from him. The man then spends his life carrying his little brother around in a picnic basket. Unfortunately, the brother turns out to be a wicked little goblin that thirsts for human blood. The dramatic horror of this exploitation classic is driven by the man’s unconditional love for his brother, despite his appearance and repeated misdeeds.

But back to Brain Damage: like Basket Case, this is a movie about a parasitic twin, of sorts. Here the parasite is a slug-like creature with human eyes and a big toothy mouth. It speaks in the incongruously velvety voice of a jazz station DJ. Its name is Elmer. We are introduced to Elmer when it escapes into an apartment building and attaches itself to a young man. Elmer excretes a highly addictive hallucinogenic drug that it hooks its hosts on to make them dependent on it, so that it can control their bodies and force them to help it find further victims. For, you see, Elmer only eats human brains. The young man soon finds himself in a lethal struggle between his debilitating addiction to Elmer’s juice and his moral abhorrence of what Elmer makes him do. 

While this struggle is interesting, and there are excellent moments of grotesque comedy and delightfully goopy gore, Brain Damage is awkwardly paced, with many shots that go on for far too long. I still enjoyed it, but I think it would have worked better as one chapter of a horror anthology film.

“He needs his brains, but I need his juice, it’s as simple as that,” the protagonist explains. As for how this fits in with our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme, we can say that Elmer is a doppelgänger in a different sense. Literally, the German word Doppelgänger means “double walker.” Elmer is a double walker in that it is a second personality that walks (or rides) with the young man and sometimes takes him over and controls his actions. Elmer clearly represents the alien self that comes to inhabit the addict, both when the addict is high and when the addict needs another fix. Thus, the addict self, personified here by a vicious slug creature, wears the sober self’s face and walks the streets as its double. In many lesser forms, we all carry with us such double personalities, in our compelling desires and fixations, and sometimes these doubles take on a life of their own and try to smooth-talk us into otherwise foreign behavior.

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