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Possible Franco's best 1960s Gothic, Nov. 23 2003
The Diabolical Dr Z is one of director Jess Franco's best 1960s Gothics. The film oozes atmosphere and features some lush black-and-white photography, together with threatening shots of darkened corridors (in a prison, in the doctor's mansion, on a train) which feature prominently in Franco's early work (The Awful Dr Orloff, The Sadistic Baron von Klaus) and in many 1950s/1960s horror movies (for example, Riccardo Freda's The Horrible Dr Hitchcock); psychoanalysts would probably explain these shots by relating the use of this type of mise-en-scène to the concept of the 'spider woman' (or the 'monstrous feminine'), which is a central concern of this film and of the films of Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava. Knowing that Franco often borrows ideas from Surrealism, however, it may be self-defeating to try to find this type of 'meaning' in his films: in his 1960s pictures, Franco simply delights in covering the intertextual quotation that takes place in his films with lashings of Gothic atmosphere. Franco's films are an exploration of excess, and could be likened to onions: once one layer of 'meaning' has been peeled away, the viewer is left with an indeterminate number of other layers. The Diabolical Dr Z also highlights Franco's anti-idealism: most of the characters in this film are simply out for revenge, or are seeking to further their careers, and think nothing of trampling on the people in their path. This theme would become more prominent in later Franco films, which expressed it through the metaphor of vampirism (The Female Vampire), the motif of the 'witchhunt' (The Bloody Judge) and the conventions of the Women in Prison film. With hindsight, Franco would have been the ideal candidate to film an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. The Diabolical Dr Z will probably not appeal to those whose interest in horror begins and ends with 'ironic' horror films such as Scream; as with the work of Mario Bava and Terence Fisher, although there is a large amount of intentional humour in Dr Z (via some very witty dialogue, particularly the comments made by Franco-in a cameo as a policeman-in the final scene), modern audiences may poke fun at its predominantly sombre tone, and will probably be alienated by both the use of black-and-white photography and Daniel White's atonal jazz score. This is a shame, because for me, Franco's 1960s films (together with some of his 1970s pictures, such as Exorcism and The Demons) represent some of the highlights of the horror genre.
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