Demons of the Mind: Shakespearean, Freudian Frankenstein

 

Demons of the Mind is a 1972 film which in its essence is a Shakespearean drama and Freudian Frankenstein. The attacked and crippled man from A Clockwork Orange plays a medieval man of medicine, science and the occult study variety— called a charlatan, among other things by many— is hired to aid a Duke in curing some hereditary ailment; or as the balding Gandalf-esque character deemed it, a disorder which drives unsavory tendencies amongst the specific, familial gene pool. 

Namely and central to the plot are incestuous lacings where the Duke’s two children, Emil and Elizabeth, are shown to have quite a deep and seemingly very sensual attachment to one another. As it would seem and be realized through the course of his looking for an aid to the intergenerational malaise reported to him by the Duke, what disorder existed largely sprung of the Duke’s own devising and willing it to occur— in a mix of both unconscious and conscious course of doing so. Transpiring apparently as a result of grief due to witnessing his wife commit suicide and eventually developed attraction to his daughter. 

Ultimately he decides his bloodline can no longer continue, and sets out to end his ‘genetic curse’ and in the process shoots the hired wizard with his rifle on a mission to eliminate his two remaining kin and offspring. Following in close pursuit he manages to succeed in shooting Emil his son; but before he could then do away with an increasingly distraught Elizabeth, is engulfed by an angry mob of peasants and workers under his jurisdiction. Already agitated but then stirred up into a religious frenzy by a wandering, raving preacher they witness his familial transgression, and in quick action pin him to the ground to hack a hand off the Duke then finish the execution via planting a flaming crucifix into his torso with his daughter onlooking. 

Like Hamlet, the film focuses on the decay and ‘depravity’ of what those in the Marxist lineage would call the bourgeois’, or ruling class— as observed by the incoming attacking peasants. In that it resolves in a minor familial bloodbath as a result of its psychological decay beginning when Emil winds up killing his Aunt in order to get to his beloved sister after being induced into a psychotic episode where he also killed another girl— believing it was Elizabeth then resulting in aforementioned murder of his aunt. Similar to separated star-crossed lovers in Romeo & Juliet intentionally separated by familial disputes; nonetheless ending like Macbeth in masterminding oligarchs murder in a Frankenstein flash-mob fashion. 

Coming from the 1970s and the innate overtones of incest and projected pedophilic wishes from the Duke, I have to wonder how much takes inspiration from or in connection to a movement in the same decade— namely in France— of prominent intellectuals and figures moving to a more open consideration of the tendency. The French Petition against age of consent laws however did not come to until 1977 while the movie hit theaters in 1972.