1. Humanity Is The Devil
LORD HORROR, and much of the so-called transgressive literature that emerged around the turn of the millennium, can be said to have its roots in the decadent and proto-surrealist writings of that previous fin de siècle, the 19th century. Modern American bizarro author Jordan Krall has combined these traditions with the frequently nasty emissions of late-20th century apocalypse culture, which often made a virtue of saying the unsayable for its own sake. His HUMANITY IS THE DEVIL takes its premise from the Gnostic Christian heresy which claims mankind and the material world as the handiwork of Satan, rather than God. His title phrase was also an article of faith for 1960s occultist group the Process Church of the Final Judgement who sued Ed Sanders and his publisher for associating them with the Manson cult in THE FAMILY. Kralls novel (one of several, and one of his most extreme) presents some of the most nauseating violence, both sexual and desexualised, in a viscerally surrealistic setting. This aestheticising of the worst horrors owes something to a book previously considered one of the great unfilmables, MALDOROR by the Comte de Lautréamont which has now actually been filmed several times. According to Lautréamont (in reality a Parisian student named Isidore Ducasse, who died very young and of whom little is known), his long 1868 prose-poem consistsexclusively of attacks on man, that wild beast, and the Creator, who ought never to have bred such vermin.This inversion of conventional morality presenting murder as a necessary good, in a surreal context which, in Lautréamont, often transforms his main character into wild animal life survives in HUMANITY IS THE DEVIL, albeit with much more gory description. As for MALDOROR itself, this vivid text was confined, in cinematic terms, to the art-film ghetto: in 2000, a Super-8 Anglo-German version featured 12 different underground filmmakers adapting a similar number of the books chapters (chants de Maldoror); though some of the no-budget animation aspects are said to be impressive, its been little seen since. But it was back in 1977 that two different versions of the classic decadent work were filmed continents apart: one was by Japanese art filmmaker Shuji Terayama, but perhaps most interesting is the version filmed in Turkey by Alberto Cavallone. The Italian directors career tended to veer abruptly between socio-psychological works and sexploitation, two elements which might have complemented each other in MALDOROR though its hard to say as, in keeping with the mystique of the whole story, it was never released and is now a lost film. So will a bizarro work like HUMANITY IS THE DEVIL be subject to similar cinematic adaptations? Well, as we said back at the beginning, this is the age when nothing seems to be off limits for cinema, and theres certainly scope for an ambitious animator (or indeed anime maker) to try to capture its wildness. As for a live-action version, that may be further off in the future: it would take some kind of budget to realise the books wilder images, and its doubtful that Hollywood is ready for surreal, psychosexual gore-nihilism yet. But it may come. Certainly, in contrast with more realistic transgressive writers that hes been compared to, Krall is cinematic; Peter Sotoss infamous TOOL, for example, is fixated on the sexual murder of children and young women, of which it expresses approval throughout. If that ever sees a faithful film adaptation then you and your neighbours will probably be killing and eating each other anyway, as everything will be all over by then...
A vividly surreal location shot from Cavallones lost MALDOROR (1977).