Page 194 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Stephen Marcus has applied Freud's beating scenario to Victorian flagellation literature, which
brings us closer to the disciplinary spectacle of Bloody Pit of Horror. 'The sexual identity of the figure-
being beaten', Marcus suggests, 'is remarkably labile. Sometimes he is represented as a boy, sometimes
as a girl, sometimes as a combination of the two - a boy dressed as a girl, or the reverse.'41 Stories about
boys being beaten by women remain within a heterosexual scenario, but gender seems to be more fluid
in those stories where girls are beaten by men - the 'girls' are strikingly androgynous (with names like
'Georgy' and 'Willie'), sufficiently so for Marcus to discern an elaborate drag act:
The heterosexual relation has been abandoned and a homosexual one substituted for it - the
little boy has transformed himself into a girl. Yet this transformation is itself both a defense
against and a disavowal of the fantasy it is simultaneously expressing. That fantasy is a
homosexual one: a little boy is being beaten - that is, loved - by another man. 4 2

This substitution is made particularly explicit in Bloody Pit of Horror when Travis tries to force Annie
into the 'poisonous clutches of the lover of death', the male figure who will embrace - and, indeed,
penetrate - him in the final scene. If Ttavis looks distinctly surprised when he is 'contaminated' (and
feminised), he is also, in a sense, getting exactly what he wants, which is to be fucked by the Crimson
Executioner.
At one level, this does still leave the male viewer out of the homosexual 'circuit of desire', which is
both open and closed by Travis, ultimately another example of what Harry Benshoff calls the 'Monster
Queer'. 43 But because the 'beating' phantasy keeps identification and gender in a state of flux, it also
does not; Carol J. Clover and Rhona J. Berenstein offer interesting accounts of spectatorial 'drag' in
(American) Horror, borh suggesring rhe complexity of gender identification within the genre.4"1 In
Bloody Pit of Horror, the 'Cover Girls' do the exact opposite of what the Aurum Film Encyclopedic!
claims by facilitating another libidinous route into this perverse scenario. Frank Heinenlotter recalls
seeing the film for the first time in a cinema on 42nd Street 'where the bloodthirsty crowd wildly
cheered Hargitay on, obviously recognising a role model when they saw one'. 45 Quite what such
identification involves is by no means straightforward - as Heinenlottet humorously signs off his liner
notes to the recent D V D , he promises the viewer, 'now you too will be punished for your lechery!'41'
Maybe the viewer will (silently) cheer that proposition, too.

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