10-30-2024 4:17am

A 100 YEAR

The Hands of Orlac / Orlacs Hände (1924/1928) ***

If you’re a lifelong fan of horror movies, and any significant fraction of your childhood fell between the early 1970’s and the mid-1980’s, then there’s an excellent chance that you spent a lot of time poring over the tantalizing text and imagery of Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. You might not remember it by name (I didn’t until I stumbled upon a copy in a used bookstore in Baltimore in the summer of 2003), but it was ubiquitous in the film sections of public libraries in those days, and together with the more narrowly focused Monster Series published by Crestwood, Gifford’s tome did for my generation of horror nuts what the Warren Group’s Famous Monsters of Filmland did for our parents. I bring this up because it was in the pages of A Pictorial History of Horror Movies that I first encountered a film that would beckon to me across the ages for some 25 years— Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac.

Part of The Hands of Orlac’s allure for the eight-year-old El Santo was simply a matter of the title, with its strong (if probably also coincidental) phonetic echo of the villain from the comparably ancient and even more enticing Nosferatu. But mostly it was the exquisitely ghoulish notion of a man whose transplanted hands may be driving him to kill— and if the prodigious number of remakes and rip-offs this movie spawned is any indication, I was by no means alone in recognizing the appeal of that premise. Having now seen it, I suppose I have to admit that The Hands of Orlac didn’t quite live up to the fevered anticipation of a quarter-century. Like Mad Love, the more accessible American remake from 1935, the original film is undercut to some extent FINISH READING HERE