In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble,
we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.
Dracula. The Wolf Man. The Frankenstein Monster. If there’s
one thing that all of these fellows have in common, it’s that they all have
heads. Dracula and The Wolf Man use the mouths embedded in their heads to bite
you. The Frankenstein Monster’s head is what houses the abby-normal brain that
sends him on murderous rampages. Without their heads, these guys are much less threatening.
They probably couldn’t do much of anything at all.
This is not true of all monsters. Some manage to accomplish
quite a lot without possessing the most essential of all body parts. Their lack
of heads is precisely what makes them so disturbing. One can survive and love
and kill without one arm, even two. Same goes for the legs. But having no head
is the wrongest of the wrong. Oh, some of them do hold onto their heads, which
remain animated despite no longer being affixed to their necks, but that detail
does little to lessen their horridness.
We need our heads. Without them, there’s nothing to steer
the anatomical ship. Yet headlessness does not necessarily mean death. This
bizarre possibility was offered as far back as 1795 when anatomist S.T. Sömmering published a letter in Le Moniteur describing how witnesses had witnessed heads
decapitated by guillotine grinding their teeth and grimacing. Sömmering was convinced that they could still think,
and if the plumbing was still hooked up, they could talk too. His letter caught
the attention of one Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin, not the man who’d invented
the guillotine, but a guy who’d lobbied so hard for its use as a more “humane”
alternative to the sword or axe that they named it after him. Guillotin was
horrified by Sömmering ‘s letter, and started
lobbying for experiments to test the assertion.
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| Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin: He was for the guillotine before he was against it. |
The project went to Jean Baptiste Vincent Laborde. He
collected some of the plentiful guillotined heads rolling through Paris at the
time and managed to make some move their jaws and eyes with electric currents.
That, of course, is not the same thing as discovering heads actually continued
to live of their own accord after decapitation. Confirmation of Sömmering’s hypothesis would have to wait until 2011,
when Dutch researchers measured the brain waves of freshly decapitated rats and
confirmed that consciousness does continue for as many as fifty seconds after
clean severing by an instrument such as a guillotine. The subjects only died
after losing sufficient amounts of blood.
The concept of headless people goes back a lot further than
1795 (and certainly, a lot further than the headless rats of 2011). The
akephaloi, or Blemmyes, of mythology have no proper heads, though they do keep
their eyes, noses, and mouths planted in their chests. Local myths of headless
people in Guiana were so convincing that explorer Sir Walter Raleigh was
totally convinced of their veracity.
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| Sir Walter Raleigh: sucker. |
What of the headless being’s potential for the sinister?
Well, no one harnessed that quite like Washington Irving. Irving published the
most famous tale of headlessness in his 1820 short story collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, an itinerant and very gawky schoolteacher
named Ichabod Crane vies with a hulking meathead known as Brom Bones for the
affections of Katrina Van Tassel. Ichabod’s encounter with the ghost of a
headless Hessian soldier shaves a corner off that love triangle. Irving heavily
implies that the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow is none other than Brom
Bones in a Halloween costume, and notorious scaredy-cat Ichabod was merely
frightened off by his romantic rival and not spirited to the land of the undead
by a cranially-challenged ghost. No matter. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” would
still stand as the most famous—and frightening—of all headless horror stories,
inspiring an uncountable glut of TV and cinematic interpretations (the best and
most faithful being Disney’s 1949 short in it’s Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad double-feature).
Irving would not publish an unambiguously supernatural tale of headlessness until four years later, when he put his “Geoffrey Crayon” pseudonym behind Tales of a Traveller. This collection includes a short story called “The Adventure of the German Student”, in which the title character meets an apparently mourning woman weeping near the guillotine in Paris. Moving things along at a steady clip, they marry that night. The next day, he finds her dead in his room. The scene confounds the police since the new bride had been guillotined the day before. The student undoes the diamond clasp fastening a black ribbon around her neck, and off rolls her head.
This disturbing story of love gone horribly wrong would be
simplified and enter the oral ghost story tradition as “The Green Ribbon”.
Hearing my mother recite it at a slumber party when I was very, very young
inspired years of nightmares. What so disturbed me? Perhaps it was the
revelation that someone who seemed alive, in love, and healthy in every way had
actually been dead all along. Making this version of the story all the more
disturbing is the fact that the woman is alive right up until the moment her
new husband pulls the ribbon. But a larger factor was the queasy image it conjured
in my mind: her body and head alive one moment, separated the next, her eyes
likely still open as her head slumps forward and plops on the floor.
I wonder how it would have affected my reaction if the body
then grabbed the head and stumbled off for a stroll. Would it have pushed “The
Green Ribbon” from the realm of abject horror into that of comedy? As grotesque
as it is, the headless creature is a fairly silly image too. I’m not the only
one who thinks so, because more often than not, it has been reserved for
horror-comedies and unintentionally funny grade-z camp horrors. Who can forget
the scene in Stuart Gordon’s tongue-in-cheek adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s
“Herbert-West Reanimator” in which a severed head attempts cunnilingus on a
naked Barbara Crampton? Or the one in Sam Raimi’s equally gonzo Evil Dead II in which the head of Bruce
Campbell’s recently deceased girlfriend ends up in his lap and clamps down on
his hand so hard he can’t even get it off by slamming it against a table? How
about Christopher Lloyd’s relentless headless teacher in the classic “Go to the
Head of the Class” episode of “Amazing Stories” or the two head-toting ghosts from the “Cash” episode of “The Young Ones”
(in the previous episode, “Bambi”, it was punk young one Vyvyan who served as
headless monster)? Less conscious of her own hilarity is Virginia Leth’s
motor-mouthed disembodied head in Joseph Green’s camp-classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.
Perhaps the innate goofiness of a monster chatting or running
about without its head attached to its body is why such a creature has never become
pervasive in serious horror. The ambiguity of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is
why that story persists, even inspiring a series currently on Fox TV. It’s also
why adaptations that try to iron out its ambiguity, such as Tim Burton’s 1999
version, fail.
Required Reading
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving (1820)
“The Adventure
of the German Student” by Washington Irving (1824)
“The Green Ribbon” (unknown)
Stiff by Mary Roach (2003) (my main source for the details about
S.T. Sömmering, Joseph Ignace Guillotin, and
Jean Baptiste Vincent Laborde)
“‘Wave of Death’ May Not Be Last Gasp” (Science News) by Laura Sanders (2011) (my source for the 2011
Norwegian study)
Required Viewing
The Adventures of
Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)
The Brain That
Wouldn’t Die (1959)
“The Young Ones”: “Cash” (1984)
Re-Animator (1985)
“Amazing Stories”: “Go to the Head of the Class” (1986)
Evil Dead II
(1987)
