Death Scenes

I don't think I can show you any images from Death Scenes here, not even in the interest of FAIR USE; not even in the interest of "intellectual inquiry," although I don't know who the hell owns the rights to the massive collection of grisly crime scene photos discovered by a widow of a detective, John Huddleston, who served with the LAPD from the Twenties through the late Forties or early Fifties. Feral House published them, edited and restored by Sean Tejaratchi, decades ago. I discovered that book in the collection of Bracken Library on the Ball State Campus, sometime around the Good Year 1998.

The book effected me on so many levels. Changed my view of life, death, tragedy, and hope.

It's a sickening relic. John Huddleston carefully saved the grisliest and most macabre of crime scene photos, the worst examples of the era that he could find, and carefully preserved them as almost his private pornography, pasting them, with occasional snide or humorous quips, into a giant, moldering scrapbook that he carefully hid away. Did he get them out occasionally and gloat over them? Who knows. They were found after his death. The collection changed hands until it ended up with Feral House. Nick Bougas made a documentary about it. The rest is blackly obscure history.

However, the video Death Scenes, narrated perfectly by Herr Doktor Anton Szandor LaVey, makes a succession of still images seem fascinating. Beyond stock footage of the era, this movie doesn't move. But it doesn't need to. A picture's worth a thousand morbid words, perhaps puked up from between the clenched teeth of a freshly made cadaver.

We have accidents, suicides, strange deaths, diseases, and deaths from misadventures. We have vagrants, winos, tattooed men, mental cases, prostitutes, and MURDER MOST FOUL.

We have the photo of the man whose wife calmly blew his brains out while he sat in his recliner one unsuspecting day. The resultant mess spread beneath him, a monochromatic blood pool, pays testament to the fact that death will come in the blink of an eye, rendering all earthly cares, endeavors, or pretensions, a moot, meaningless charade.

We have the man who came home, back to a ratty little apartment, and, tussling with his paramour, killed her before blowing his face away in a dark mask of gore. We have stock market crash losers who jumped from windows. We have crone-faced women with (as Huddleston quipped in his annotations) "a little throat trouble," hanging by the neck until dead. We have mutilated and murdered toddlers, put up on kitchen counters by their psychopathic mothers, and decapitated with kitchen knives. On and on, the Reaper working overtime, non-stop, 24 hours a day, every second of the day, here comes another one.

The late Katherine Dunn, who authored the transgressive cult novel, Geek Love, wrote in her introduction to the BOOK version of Death Scenes something to the effect of: "There's a silver lining to this dark cloud. If your line is so defective that you are murdered by your mother, perhaps you're better off dead." Or something along those lines. That's not an exact quote. But you get the idea. It would send certain people screeching today to have her "canceled"(if she were still living) for advocating what sounds suspiciously like eugenics, but, there it is.

LaVey gets in the occasional quip, referring to one cadaver on the slab, who was exceptionally well-endowed as, the "cock of the walk." Harhar. A bit of levity in the midst of so much horror.

The images and "stories" (scant as they are) that stick out in my mind after all these years are the young boy who is lying there after having blown his brains out. Huddlestone's note about it states: "HE DIED OF A BROKEN HOME AND A BROKEN HEART." I suppose that's true. Also, the weird Ripley's-esque photo of a man decapitated in a motor accident on a lonely road. His severed head landed perfectly upright in the center of the road. The coroner notes that, weirdly, in the glistening gore of his severed stump of a neck, appears to be the reflected image of a screaming ...head. Uncanny. A trick of the light of course, but still, uncanny.

The suicide of lonely men in hotel rooms, having taken all they can, dying nude, are also quite revealing about the nature of human tragedy. The murder-suicides of husbands who calmly killed their wives and then killed themselves. Otto Sanhuber, the famous "Phantom of the Attic" murderer, a man who lived for SEVEN YEARS in the attic of his lover, while her abusive husband suspected nothing, only later to kill the husband in her defense (he was acquitted) is here.

There's a smattering of tinsel-town sleaze, including the suicide of Paul Bern, the murder of Tom Mix, and a few others, but the list of tragic stars and starlets of the early film era is so long we'd be forever here documenting it if we let ourselves, and, well, it only takes up a small portion of the film.

My novelette, Kluge, was inspired by a photo of a crime in which no name is ever given. A mentally ill man was living with his mother and brother in a tenement. One day he walked in on said mother and brother in flagrante delicto if you know what I mean. Outraged, he killed both of them with an axe (he just happened to have one handy?), and later went to the gas chamber at San Quentin. It's a happy story all around, but it tweaked enough neurons to get me to write, and I'm fairly happy with the resultant short book.

Kluge (Audiobook) 2015.

"Steve the Killer," a "Jack the Ripper," leaves behind one of the most sickening images in the entire book, the body of a prostitute he so severely mutilated her cadaver resembles a slick of wet beef. What demon drove the seemingly mundane little man to commit such an act is beyond our knowing. He died in the gas chamber of San Quentin.

This essay was originally longer, but through a technical foul-up, it appears that I have lost the rest of it. However, as great as it was, perhaps words are beyond explaining this document of "tragedy and human folly." I'm feeling steamed presently over that loss, but we sully forth, despite the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," to quote the Immortal Bard. (Trite I know, but what do you expect, you slave-driving sadists?)

You will never forget this book, video, or their indelible images of sadism, horror, despair, and the macabre last moments of life. These are not actors (well, some of them actually were actors, but you know what I mean). These people lived their lives unsuspectingly until that last moment, that final shuffling off of this mortal coil, stopped forever the sands of the hourglass, which had run their course.

All pretensions to beauty, artfulness, and grace were exposed and ripped asunder, in the same manner as "Steve the Killer" ripped his victim until she resembled a butchered rag. No more worrying about attainment, status, or material comfort. Death claims all and ends all, for "every man, every son of thunder," to quote the forbidden wordsmith, Ragnar Redbeard.

Not for children or the faint of heart. But I hardly need to tell you that, do I?

One final thing: The director, Nick Bougas, is kind of a controversial guy. He directed several videos on serial killers as well as a feature-length documentary on Anton LaVey. He likewise has put out an audio album of "stars behaving badly." He's known as an artist. Also, he is credited as being "A. Wyatt Mann" (Har har, get it?), the cartoonist responsible for dozens and dozens of racist, anti-Semitic, and blatantly homophobic cartoons which have been widely distributed online, and been seized upon by various neo-Nazi and White Nationalist groups for their propaganda purposes. It is alleged Feral House publisher, the late Adam Parfrey (who was Jewish), helped him in the endeavor to publish and distribute these. Whatever the motivations for doing this, whether they considered it a cynical joke, or a kind of "cultural terrorism" in an era when PC was just coming into play, we do not know. But, it hardly matters as regards this particular document. This film is not about Nick Bougas or whether or not he has racist beliefs. It is about ALL of us, in our common experience, as we make our way through this unsettling dream of existence, wondering; waiting. For, we never know when the hour will come 'round, we'll be called up, and be presented to the living world as the stars of our own final DEATH SCENE.

Note: I obviously can't link to Death Scenes here, although you can view it on YouTube or at archive.org. However, I have elected to instead include a video interview with host Anton LaVey, which is apparently a part of the DVD special features. As it is Walpurgisnacht (April 30th), it seems to make perfect sense.