Hell Is for Angels: The Tragedy of Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel

Hell is for angels.
Only the mighty are fallen
Only the sun-touched can plummet
to these depths.

– Lenore Kandel

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Something drove producer Herman Cohen and his screenwriting partner Aben Kandel. Revving up with the 1952 boxing drama Kid Monk Baroni, they then careered through the 11 horror and suspense thrillers that followed, from I Was a Teenage Werewolf in 1957 to the dead stop for both of them of Craze in 1974.

The later run of melodramas were all of a sort, each featuring an opinionated and headstrong idealogue with charismatic pull over a younger consort and often a toady inveigled into their high-minded but ultimately idiotic plans for humanity (or just themselves), the results of which always come crashing about their heads in abrupt, apocalyptic conclusions. Most often playing like tragedies more than horrors, they’re devoid of heroes of any sort, privileging their villains instead, whose bloviation of high-octane, actor-proof dialog makes them more compelling presences anyway and leaves the shock of their conclusions the more indelible. Like cars hitting a wall.

It’s hard telling which of the creatives carries which aspect of their creations. Cohen assigned relatives’ names to several of his characters and made cameo appearances in each film up till Craze, inviting a personal reading of (or at least investment in) the pictures. A self-promoter if ever there was one, he could easily fit the model of ambitious climber for the characters he wrote with Kandel, most carrying an inflated sense of their genius and invaluability to a wanting humankind, from Werewolf and his Teenage Frankenstein cousin’s doctors and Blood of Dracula’s headmistress who all ostensibly hope to save man from himself, to Trog’s research lab doyenne who sees her title missing-link discovery as an opportunity to rain down the world’s acclaim. Kandel, whose novelist career kicked into high gear with City for Conquest in 1936 (made into a rousing 1940 movie by Anatole Litvak and starring Jimmy Cagney), often wrote about similar strivers, like the ones populating his novel’s circa-1910 New York City and right up to the pulp philosophizing gambler of 1961 literary capper The Strip, about a writer hacking out tawdry scripts for the cash. Their characters’ windbagging, through the offices of honeybaked hams like Robert H. Harris, Michael Gough, Joan Crawford, and Jack Palance, is often the only thing that keeps their scenarios racing along between shocks.

Each Cohen-Kandel is a tragedy in that each ends in disaster, with no descending action to lessen the sense of defeat of what was never a moral universe. Part of the force of tragedy is in the irreversibility of actions and events: their villains will never, because they can never, see the fallacy in their arguments, they’re so caught up in the immediacy of their aims, so there’s no hope for reflection or regret. Even when Gough’s Dr. Charles Decker is carried by his giant-ape creation in Konga on a rampage through London, all he can do is bellow “Let me down, you fool!” in a tape-loop of un-self-awareness; it’s an echo of deranged movie makeup artist Pete Dumond’s invective while his home studio burns in How to Make a Monster as well as template for Gough’s blaming of his blithering idiot son/assistant in Black Zoo and Palance’s idol-worshiping antiques dealer his bloody bastard shopkeep-cum-rentboy in Craze. In the end the real tragedy lies not with their villain-protagonists, who’re also their antagonists, but with the people they take down with them, in those instances anybody’s left at all.

Kandel wove tragedy, in the form of misfortune, into his independent works, but always with a positive outcome; even the Death of Mr. Marco – a Romanian American immigrant like his author – in his 1942 novel The Stones Begin Singing is welcomed by its benevolent street-corner ambassador as an honored emissary. It was only in his alliance with Cohen, the most fruitful of his career, that this as well as a certain other theme came to predominate, though it flies in the face of the public personality of the gung-ho producer and his perennial professional optimism. Is there something about the nature of the horror genre (or the tragic form) they came together on as true collaborators that enabled the release of otherwise obscure and occult sentiment on the part of their imaginators?

A bit of background on both.

Kandel arrived in New York at age three in 1901, graduated from the law school at NYU, and knocked around from the Army during WWI to Alaska by way of Cleveland, where he went from newspaper work to mucking in a gold mine, sailing awhile before returning to NY and the news, with a stint in LA working publicity for the Jewish Federation. His first novel, Vaudeville, came in 1927, after a round or two in boxing. That year also saw the birth of son Stephen, later a prolific writer and producer of TV action drama and a late anti-Trump screed in verse, The Lyin’ King. More novels and a couple of plays followed for Aben before Hollywood came calling with an adaptation of one, Hot Money, in 1932, the year his daughter Lenore was born. Lenore, at various times an artist’s model, folksinger and belly dancer, would go on to literary note of her own when her volume of erotically themed Beat poetry, The Love Book, inspired more than one bookstore raid when published in 1966. She was further immortalized in Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur as Romana Swartz; that’s her, too, as the Deaconess in Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother. She died of lung cancer in 2009 after 39 years an invalid when her Hells Angel husband crashed their bike, but not before reciting her work at the event that’d go on to be known as The Band’s Last Waltz. Fire runs through each Kandel’s work, and life. (Judith, Aben’s wife and their surgeon granddaughter’s namesake, also wrote a comedic play that ran to six performances in 1935, Play, Genius, Play, and published a short story in 1943, “Old Man Moyers Buys a New Car,” about which little is known.)

Aben’s novels are filled with obsessives similar to his horror villains and share a profound sense of Individuals vs. the Normals. They’re a stew of pungent observation, grating whimsy, and crackpot theorizing, layered with a profound humanism as well as frosting of schmaltz. He was a ham novelist, the writer as thespian, his prose going from purple like a bruise to purple like grape soda. His characters across his career are given to endless discourses and pontification; types, not persons, often represented by raw dialect (“It’s nuttin’. But you shouldn’t tell mudder.”) and ethnic epithets (wop, guinee, Eyetalian, Polack, walyo, sheeney, mick, kyke; Black people are spared mainly by virtue of virtual non-presence) probably seen as “daring” and “honest” in their day but not so lustrous now. You can guess why his writing was well received, though. It’s muscular, energetic, and driven by something inside, characteristics present into his later days; to a fault. His scripts do not bore, except down.

Cohen was born in Detroit in 1926, the year before Kandel’s first novel’s publication, and began working as a gofer and usher in a movie house there at age 12. He rose in the business quickly, eventually managing the city’s Fox Theatre and advancing to Regional Sales Manager for Columbia Pictures following a tour in the Marines. Publicity work for the studio began on his move to Hollywood in the ’40s, where he proceeded to produce low-grade movies like Bride of the Gorilla and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla for Jack Broder’s Realart Pictures, where he met Kandel in the early ’50s. His only other genre credit before launching his series of tragedies at American International later in the decade was the fast-moving robot-invasion thriller Target Earth in 1954.

Legend, mostly spun by Cohen himself, has it that after a disastrous experience with what should have been a career high, the Barbara Stanwyck noir Crime of Passion (1956), he headed into the wilderness, where he had a revelation of the vast exploitation possibilities of the American adolescent. Reconnecting with Baroni cohort Kandel, likely seeing the resonances between their young pugilist title character and his generation’s feeling of being held back by an adversarial older one, he inaugurated the teen drive-in horror cycle with Teenage Werewolf, co-written with Kandel and making an instant star of its unknown lead, Michael Landon. Frankenstein, Dracula, and Monster soon followed. Then, possibly sensing he’d milked the formula in the States, he pulled up stakes in 1959 and continued with the slightly aged-up collegiate second- and occasional leads of the seven features he mostly made in Britain now, Horrors of the Black Museum, The Headless Ghost, Konga, Black Zoo, Berserk!, Trog, and Craze, all with their fans and all again with co-writer Kandel. Afterward, following the lead of fellow drive-in supplier Roger Corman, a shift away from creative activity and production saw Cohen turn to distribution alone through his Cobra Media firm, whose products were surprisingly few and undistinguished. Kandel, similarly, never produced another word for either the big or small screen, possibly the result of his daughter’s accident in 1970. It was four years till Craze; more of a postscript than a valedictory. American International, where the duo made their teen tragedies, likewise abandoned that cycle post-Monster to pursue the gothic strain inaugurated by Corman’s House of Usher. Their careers, like their movies, seemed to hit a wall.

By the time Cohen met Kandel, the latter’s days of collaborating with the likes of Robert Rossen, Dalton Trumbo, George Cukor, and Mervyn LeRoy were over. He’d been doing mostly television for the last two years, and by the time they reteamed for Werewolf had only a couple more credits to his name. Conquest was his last published novel; he wouldn’t have another in the shops till The Strip, clearly influenced by Walter Tevis’s 1959 novel The Hustler, which Rossen lensed in ’61. Claiming he didn’t want to tarnish his prestigious reputation, Kandel used a pseudonym on the first four of their later collaborations, sometimes standing in for the pair (“Ralph Thornton” for Werewolf and Dracula, “Kenneth Langry” for Frankenstein) and sometimes himself alone (Langtry for Monster and Ghost, sharing credit now with an eponymous Cohen). Likely following Cohen’s reasoning when the films started proving a sensation, he began signing his own name on the producer’s move to England. No matter the attribution, the films are all theirs. There’s nothing else like them.

You can boil the formula down to this: adult professional (doctor / manager / scientist / makeup artist / nobleman / headmistress / zookeeper / ringleader / antiquer) enlists a younger associate he or she has some pull or influence on (drugs / hypnosis / blackmail / sponsorship / romance / simpatico / entrapment) into their cockamamie scheme (de-evolution / revenge / redemption / mutation / animal or devil worship), inflaming the jealousies of an incumbent flunky often carrying queer inferences. The milieu (academia / Hollywood / British castle / zoo / circus / curiosities) may shift, but the police are inevitably drawn in, though they remain ineffectual till the last entry. Similarly, the director’s chair may be a musical one – newbies, in former editors Gene Fowler for Werewolf and Herbert Strock for Frankenstein, Dracula and Monster, and everything-but-director Jim O’Connolly for Berserk!; undistinguished end-of-the-line veterans Arthur Crabtree for Horrors and John Lemont for Konga; Zoo’s Robert Gordon had another couple in him, after a run going back 15 years, with cinematographer Freddie Francis closing them out with Trog and Craze – but Cohen’s production hand is visible in each and Kandel’s self-parodic hyperbole loud and clear despite even Fowler’s asserted toning-down of his material.

The template was set in their boxing picture, a distillation of the Joey-Bella arc from Conquest. Here hoodlum Paul Baroni (a putty-nosed Leonard Nimoy) is taken under the wing of benevolent Father Callahan and groomed into a phenom whose head gets a little too big for his long-suffering girlfriend when plastic surgery transforms him into his own Lothario nemesis from the earlier novel and film. Besides plot outline, Baroni features the same actor-challenging dialog (“It’s the key to a number of good pleasures”), though without the tendency toward speechifying, as well as films-within-films (as in Trog and Konga), transformation (Werewolf, Frankenstein, Horrors, and Konga), the theme of authenticity (“You don’t have to wear a mask with me”) a tacit carryover from Kandel’s assimilationist ethnic-tableau stock-in-trade. In fact, the horrors seem a travesty of the optimism-to-the-point-of-inanity of the human dramas that made his name, as if he’d had enough of himself already and begun a program of self-obliteration through his characters. Like coming out from behind a pseudonym.

Speaking of coming out. That the films’ “grooming” subthemes practically howl off the screen is not new information, though it apparently was to the producer, who bemusedly notes it being pointed out to him in his commentary to the VCI Horrors DVD before moving on to other matters. Given what we know today about the Catholic Church’s struggles with pederasty among its clergy, an immersion in the later films may cast Father Callahan’s interest in his protégé in a different light altogether, although the kindly, altruistic managers in his other boxing stories, Conquest and The Fighter (released the same year as Baroni), say maybe not. While commentators like Wheeler Winston Dixon in “Fear and Self-Loathing: Horror and Homophobia in the Films of Herman Cohen” and Harry Benshoff in Monsters in the Closet note the motif in terms of a coded phobia, they’re not wrong, but they’re off the mark. You could make a drinking game of reading their peculiarities through a queer magnifying glass, but that would distract you from what’s going on beneath all that. You could equally read them as expressive of a juvenile attitude toward women and sexuality, as reflected in the regressive focus of their villains’ preoccupations. Several, from Frankenstein’s scientist to Craze’s curiosity-shop owner, have an expressed interest in female romantic partners, while Konga’s botanist has unambiguously lustful intentions toward a co-ed, to the rage and envy of his live-in lady admirer. Polymorphous in their perversity, each protagonist is an explosion of Freud’s concept of innate bisexuality without the filter of propriety to mask them. The futility of their schemes to return themselves or society to a theorized lost innocence is what makes their actions and rhetoric the more desperate and poignant the further you remove yourself from their surface illogic.

Consider these couplings, often throuplings. Frankenstein adds a love interest for the title half of its pair, but the interest is all hers; no Cohen-Kandel villain cares for anything but their manias; that is, themselves. Poor, aging wallflower Margaret is little more than a green card for the visiting scientist, anyway, a beard. When she coaxes her reluctant beau to take her to Lover’s Lane, his discomfort is comically plain, the fade to black less a narrative ellipsis than a mind blocking out the experience (like a kid covering his eyes during the mushy parts), which the bad doctor only uses as a casing exercise for young male parts later; when she starts to gain too much of an upper hand, it’s the gator pit for her. Both heavy and flunky have women on the side in Horrors, and though Black Zoo’s keeper is twice-married, the first ended in her murder and the current one is hardly a fulfilling partnership, he more devoted to his animals the way Konga’s doctor is his plants and chimp. Both men’s amours in Horrors are inexplicably vowed to secrecy, as though not only the relationships but the relations themselves were verboten, possibly a first in mainstream film, where it’s the hetero inclinations that need to be hidden or coded. That’s how loopy, baffling, misdirecting, or simply, gloriously non-normative the Cohen-Kandel universe is.

The team flipped the script for the 1967 Crawford vehicle Berserk! (also the actress’s second-to-last, before hanging up her jersey with Trog), where circus impresaria Monica Rivers eagerly trades in her submissive accountant Durando for hunky new acrobat Frank Hawkins (my god, check out Ty Hardin’s Wikipedia page) – who she similarly shuts down out of hand, denying both men her sexual favors. After three starring roles for Cohen, Michael Gough was relegated to the back seat as Durando, as he would be again to Crawford in Trog, before being replaced entirely by Palance for Craze. In each of his roles for Cohen, it’s impossible to tell whether he’s attacking his lines with brio or not even trying to conceal his contempt for the material. (The same year he appeared in Trog he featured as Tom Brangwen in Ken Russell’s D. H. Lawrence adaptation Women in Love.) Like many of Cohen’s collaborators, he too had some choice words for the producer years later.

Such duos are clear analogs for the filmmaking partners. Werewolf’s doctors Brandon and Wagner, who the former berates as “an old woman” and “never more than an assistant,” appear to be bound by past indiscretion. (Kid Monk Baroni, perhaps? Freddie Francis, in conversation with Christopher Ketting, characterized Kandel as “this old” guy who “would do anything Herman told him.”) When they attempt to film Tony’s transformation, as also happens in the finale of Jack Arnold’s similarly de-evolutionary Monster on the Campus a year later, it’s as much as saying that the duo on either side of the screen are one and the same; the setup is superfluous otherwise. Their sequel’s Dr. Frankenstein echoes the analogy when he and Karlton – an apparent nod to Karloff, as Wagner may devolve from Wolf Man director George WagGner (sic) – fix a set of klieg lights, a staple of studio lighting, on their subject. How to Make a Monster is set entirely in a movie studio.

Look beyond the tension between surrogates and you’ll see a showdown too between Kandel Senior’s Thanatos and the Eros that got daughter Lenore in trouble in the ’60s. The failure or lack of successful love in any of these pictures goes against generic convention, where a budding romance prefigures and ensures the return of Eros to a world threatened by Thanatos in the form of the monster or other antagonist; hence their popularity especially in postwar times or other moments of cultural upheaval. The perversity that defines Aben’s villains in the end points not so much to deviancy as to sexual nihilism. It’s not them against the world, but them against the very principles life on earth is founded on. This brings them closer to the catastrophic cosmic dimension of tragedy, where they’re more than the hapless or flawed recipients of cruel fate or inimical gods; their character is their fate. It goes a way too in explaining the cockamamie nature of their preoccupations: they don’t make sense because they’re driven by something other than logic; by the pure insane necessity of nature.

Kandel’s dialogue is so overripe, especially when coming out of his heavies, you have to imagine it’s meant to be arch and outrageous in a tradition Ryan Murphy would take into the 21st century (Dr. Frankenstein to his monster: “Speak, boy; you have a civilized tongue in your head. I know because I sewed it there myself”) but that neither Cohen nor his parade of journeyman directors likely read as such. (It’s instructive to note that son Stephen went on to write for the Batman and McGyver TV series.) The thoughts and words he puts into his characters’ mouths are so preposterous you can’t believe they, much less their creators, buy any of it. And though the ebullient Cohen was much loved by interviewers and friends and family alike, that love wasn’t shared by his players like Gough or his directors, making it possible Kandel was lampooning him under his nose with his egotistical villains’ grandiose proclamations.

Duplicity is a common theme throughout the films; their characters’ inconsistency has the whiff of ulterior motives. For Branding it’s the lesbian subtext that so fairly screams its presence it becomes more compelling than the excuses she makes for it; same with Dr. Frankenstein and his focus on surgically procreating his muscleboy scion with fellow Dr. Karlton despite the love and admiration of his nurse-assistant. Ditto Konga’s Dr. Decker’s jilting of his devoted friend while pursuing his mission to prove the evolutionary connection between animal and vegetable life by transforming his chimp into a gorilla by injecting him with serum from one of his exotic plants. (“Whaaaat?” is right.) The desperation to preserve childhood fancies has truly muddled their minds.

In each film, the tragic force burns spectacularly. Say what you will about literary quality, there’s an emotional charge driving them it’d be useless to deny, even if it’s an absurd one. If Timothy Reiss is right in calling tragedy a machine for making sense of things, probably we should follow his lead in deciding what to make of these films. When people yell at you it’s because they need to be heard.

The purpose of Greek tragedy circa the 4th and 5th centuries was, as Jean-Pierre Vernant has said, not to reflect reality but to call it into question, its intent less revelation than katharsis. (This can certainly be said of the works at hand.) More than one writer, Raymond Williams and Jennifer Wallace among them, has situated the tragedy inside the revolutionary realm; the katharsis they embody is a social one, a drama of expiation of one order to make room for the next. Compare this with the teenage milieu of early Cohen-Kandel; in this light, Werewolf is a Rebel with a Lotta Claws variation on the adolescent in conflict with an un-understanding status quo. Lenore Kandel’s “Were-Poem,” no doubt inspired by her father’s mid-career triumph (her “Circus” appeared the same year as the similarly set Berserk!), provides interesting counterpoint, exalting the beast breaking free in “EXPLOSIONS OF BEING!” Father and daughter had a shared taste for the audacious.

The forces arrayed against the tragic hero mutated or evolved along the development of the form, from the gods, fate, or cosmos, as in Oedipus Rex, to society and other man-made institutions (An Enemy of the People), finally the family (Chekhov), and individual persons against themselves (Death of a Salesman). In virtually every case the protagonist is brought down by a character flaw or fatal mistake that undermines his (and it’s usually a he) heroic qualities. If the hero is taken to embody the spirit of the time, and it’s a convulsive time, we can assume this flaw to be society’s, the torment and tribulations visited on him meant to bring him to a point of meltdown, thus to cleanse the audience, or body politic, of that weakness, delusion, vanity, or whatever aspect it can’t resolve or expel through rational means. So the scorched-earth character of much Cohen-Kandel; whatever the malaise, it has to be bleached from the system, like a cancer.

What then could be the great modern tragedy informing these howls of angst? Well, for a couple of Jews post-World War II that’s obvious enough. Several Cohen-Kandel villains are little Hitlers with their own formula for eugenics, from Werewolf’s Dr. Brandon, hypnotically regressing teen Tony to “save the human race by hurling it back to its primitive dawn” – a “voyage of discovery” that’d reveal the true Tony, as though the transformation were a transitioning, too – through follow-up Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments to reactivate dead tissue like some neo-Mengele hoping to reinstate the Reich to its former glory. (See the contemporary Madmen of Mandoras, aka They Saved Hitler’s Brain.) The doctor even likens his project to selective breeding.

As with architects of the Reich, several villains’ schemes are intended to improve the race by means of mass murder. As headmistress Dr. Branding (retreading Werewolf’s Brandon) puts it in Blood of Dracula,

I can release the destructive power in a human being that would make the split atom seem like a blessing, and after I’ve done that, after I’ve demonstrated clearly that there’s more terrible power in us than man can create, scientists will give up their destructive experiments.

Like most of her ilk, it’s unclear how she figures to accomplish this by turning her ward Nancy Perkins into a vampire (or at what evolutionary stage the earlier film’s humans might have been werewolves), or how she plans to avoid homicide charges on revealing her “findings,” but that’s part of the comic-book impetus of Kandel’s plotting. (I’m guessing the craftwork was split, with Cohen providing story and plot ideas, with some tweaking along the way like characters’ names, Kandel filling in the structure and details like motivation and dialogue.)

Fittingly, it’s the least of their works that reveals the most. The Headless Ghost, hurriedly concocted as a second feature to Horrors, whose title menagerie of murder implements is an inventory of man’s inhumanity, Ghost finds a trio of exchange students in England, the home of Nazi appeasement as in John Landis’s American Werewolf in London, where they encounter a castleful of wraiths held in the thrall of one of their own number’s adolescent intransigence. Condemned to walk the halls till a live person performs a ritual for hedonist Lord Randolph’s assuaging, they’re the classical Wandering Jews left without a resting place. The dungeon downstairs, scene to legendary tortures á la Horrors, is equivalent to the concentration camps of recent history, the rejoining of title spirit Malcolm’s head with his roving body the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Israel 10 years before. (It’s also an affirmation that Kandel knew his classical theatrics, which dictate that every comedy end in a marriage.) Compare this with the filmmakers’ likely inspiration in the 1943 Mysterious Doctor, about killings by another alleged headless ghost who indeed turns out to be a Nazi physician.

The absence of reason or an effective divine or moral authority in the Cohen-Kandel universe, in the form of the police who never manage to stop their nemeses before they’ve rained down apocalypse already, stands in stark contrast to the humanism of earlier Kandel. You could call it a logical response to the nightmare of recent events, finding logical articulation in horror. Society’s failure left room for these sputtering madmen to do their worst, abetted by such weak-kneed lackeys as Frankenstein’s doddering Dr. Karlton and Craze’s damaged Ronnie. Werewolf’s Dr. Brandon calls his assistant Hugo “more like an accomplice”; we might say collaborationist. Outrageous as they are, the power in these films’ abrupt conclusions leaves you feeling like their entire hamstrung casts, paralyzed by their masters’ loopy charisma. The absence of a traditional attempt to explain the unexplainable, as in your usual drama’s descending action, is a moral statement in itself, any laughter we expel a shock-reaction to the very real insanity of the world around us.

It’s easy to understand today why these charismatics had such pull over the nurses and teens and secretaries and accountants and awed students under their thrall. The worlds they move in are otherwise so featureless and dull (Cohen had a hand in the cartoon-strip plainness of the flat-painted walls on each of his sets) that these oddballs come off as exotic. No matter how patently clueless, grandiose, absurd, vindictive, fraudulent, and phony their plans and ideas, at least they had some aim in life other than marrying and having more drab children to drag to the carnival, zoo, or city council meeting. Even circus life can be a slog from city to city (those Wandering Jews again), but at least with Rivers’s there’s a chance you’ll see a knife thrower missing his mark or an acrobat dangling from his own high wire. There may not have been much prestige in working with or for Herman Cohen, but does anybody talk about Kandel’s literary triumphs anymore?

The author had a tendency to weave contrapuntal narrative threads through his individual stories, as though, to borrow from the title of his first novel, each were a vaudeville offering a succession of entertainment forms and styles. Whether it’s the kaleidoscopic character arcs in Conquest or the alternating North and South Americas of The Fighter, the temptation is to read the device as a recognition of the oscillation in life and the world between fortune and loss, vitality and death, ambition and defeat . . . comedy and tragedy. That’s not to say the blending was always deft. When Gough’s true-crime writer in Horrors is found to have a computer lab adjacent to his personal Black Museum dungeon where he’s devised his own mind-control serum for Rick, the impression is less philosophical balance than pulp-fiction contrivance. Konga’s indecision between wanting to be a carnivorous-plant thriller (borrowing from the recent George Coulouris farrago The Woman Eater) or cut-rate King Kong feels like a late-in-writing realization that neither could support itself or the budget. Likewise the larger take we’re supposed to have on their hero-villains: are we to admire their vision and chutzpah, or wince at the doomed illogic? Rather than offering a paradox, the one inevitably cancels out the other. They cannot live together.

Beyond the tragedy in these films is the sense that it was all for naught, the feeling in the end of what was that? In the last sequence of Horrors, the carnivalgoers simply disperse after the spectacle of Bancroft being nailed in knife-wielding Rick’s plunge off a ferris wheel, as if having witnessed a curiosity with little causal relation to their lives and not realizing why something like this should have taken place in their midst, like the peasants in Brueghel’s Icarus. It’s a cruel tieback to the infamous opening, where a young woman receives a gift of binoculars she discovers too late feature a pair of spring-loaded spikes in their lenses. Something has blinded them in a way they’ll never even realize, much less learn from.

Consider, then, the importance of suffering and sacrifice to tragedy. The latter term translates from the Greek as “goat song” due to its origins in festivals for Dionysus, god of goats, which in turn were offered in sacrifice at these events. Tied up in this is the concept of the scapegoat, that focus of expiation in ancient societies, where the community’s fears, guilts, shame, and regrets are projected onto a lowly animal either to be slaughtered or at best driven out of their realm. The classic example is Jesus Christ; other marginalized groups, like Jews, may relate. It’s the function of the tragic hero too, to embody the sensitivities of the time in order for the audience to witness their demise, or working-through. He exists for us to watch get beaten up, like one of Kandel’s boxers. This role is diffused in the films at hand between the hero-villain and his stooges, who’re made to suffer the scorn and ridicule their overlords first feel victim to; the sadism they mete out to these underlings is what the traditional tragic protagonist receives from the cosmos. It’s the theater of grievance, where the truly aggrieved are made to feel the passions of the delusional; this displacement is one reason there’s no sense of redemption in either of their passing, only exhaustion and relief. Not content, though, to punish their on-screen targets, the viewer also has to endure their abusive diatribes, breaking down our defenses, as Artaud had it in the Theater of Cruelty.

Adam Phillips, in Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, states that “What we see in tragedy is the worst-case scenario of the need to be right: life as a protracted tantrum” where the heroes “suffer from a lack of skepticism about themselves. . . . Their demand is for collusion, not the voicing of alternatives.” With such removal from reason and order, what more could they expect but failure, pulling everyone and everything in with them in their demise. In Cohen and Kandel, the problem isn’t small thinking, propriety, or convention, it’s reality. Not only do their dramas end abruptly, they begin with their villains’ immolation in process; they don’t go mad during their courses because, standing in for society as they do, the world is already nuts and only waiting for the proper confluence of timing and elements to give it shape. If villain and society reflect each other, it leaves open the question whether normality should be reestablished in the first place.

Cycle closer Craze stands out from the other pictures in that its middle-aged hero-villain Neil Mottram has no illusions about saving the human race, he’s only entirely in it for himself: his ailing antiques shop is in need of juice. (Think in terms of a 76-year-old author and a producer pushing 50 and apparently running out of ideas, Craze, like its predecessor Trog, being the only one of their films not from original source material.) When this influx arrives in the form of a wholly unrelated windfall, Mottram credits it to the benevolence of the African idol he and his group of bourgeois worshipers entertain in the beginning with a voyeuristic fertility dance. Like the former hustler he keeps under his wing, he proceeds to use sex as a method of prolonging his good luck in a series of increasingly bizarre and complicated maneuvers ending in a sacrifice to his god Chuku, which the writer may have typed as his muse. After receiving a hail of bullets in the finale (Kandel’s Hells Angel son-in-law had taken a bullet to the neck himself in a bar brawl four years earlier), he does what no other protagonist in the Cohen-Kandel canon effects and finishes himself off on Chuku’s trident. Enough, the beleaguered murderer as well as filmmakers seem to be saying; enough. The Eros that should have restored his curiosity-shop kingdom has been defamed and defiled, and character and creator can only do what they’ve always done and bring the whole thing down on them Samson-style. No descending action again, because what’s left to say?

If Lenore was right and hell is for angels, what is earth – America, Hollywood – for anyway but to give them the propellant to get there. Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel never hurt anyone in their ascents to the cinematic empyrean, nor did they take anyone down with them after. But if Kandel ever felt he’d sacrificed any principles in the establishing of a fruitful partnership with his producer making films decrying the complacency of people of their time that are still being enjoyed and opened out 50 years later, well, where’s the tragedy in that?

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Note: This article would not have been possible without the diligent and thoughtful work of Tom Weaver, whose volumes of interviews with key players in the Cohen-Kandel universe are a national treasure and who supplied all production stills appearing here. Generous thanks, Tom!

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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots.