aka Dr Tarr’s Torture Dungeon
(La Mansion de la Locura)
Mexico. 1973.
Crew
Director – Juan Lopez Moctezuma, Screenplay – Carlos Illescas & Juan Lopez Moctezuma, Additional Text – Raul Ortiz y Ortiz & Gabriel Weiss, Based on the Short Story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether by Edgar Allan Poe, Producer – Roberto Viskin, Photography – Rafael Corkidi, Music – Nacho Mendez, Special Effects – Process Opticos Cinematograficas, Art Direction – Gabriel Weiss. Production Company – Prisma Productions.
Cast
Claudio Brook (Dr Maillard), Arthur Hansel (Gaston LeBlanc), Ellen Sherman (Eugenie), Martin LaSalle (Julien Couvier), Monica Serna (Blanche), Jordan Bekris (Henri)
Plot
19th Century France. The journalist Gaston LeBlanc travels to visit the asylum run by Dr Maillard to write about his radical techniques. Welcomed inside, he is given a tour by Maillard and gets to see how the inmates are allowed to roam free and encouraged to playact their delusions in costume. As becomes apparent, the inmates have escaped and the real Dr Maillard has been imprisoned and his place taken by one of the lunatics.
The Mansion of Madness is an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story The System of Dr Tarr and Professor Fether (1845). In the story a visitor to an asylum is welcomed in only to then discover that the lunatics have taken over and are posing as the doctors. (It is from here that we get the common saying “lunatics running the asylum”). The Poe story has been filmed several times – the lost silent short Lunatics in Power (1909), as Maurice Tourneur’s silent The Lunatics (1913), as an episode of the German anthology Tales of the Uncanny (1931), Claude Chabrol’s French tv adaptation The System of Dr Goudron and Professor Fether (1981), Jan Svankmajer’s Lunacy (2005 ) and as Brad Andersons’s Eliza Graves/Stonehearst Asylum (2014), while the basic idea has been uncreditedly used in films like Don’t Look in the Basement (1973), Silent Night, Bloody Night (1974) and Committed (1991).
The Mansion of Madness was the first of only six films made by Mexican director Juan Lopez Moctezuma (1932-95). Elsewhere, Moctezuma made the horror films Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975), Alucarda (1977) and The Food of Fear (1994), along with two other non-genre works.
The 1960s brought a huge spate of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations following the success of Roger Corman’s The House of Usher (1960) starring Vincent Price. Corman and Price went on to a string of other Poe films and there were a great many Poe imitators made over the next decade-and-a-half, even films that were sold with Poe titles but were different works altogether. The Mansion of Madness was clearly conceived as being one of these Poe copies to the extent that it was even shot in English.
The lunatics taken over the asylum
I went in with no expectations and was surprised what a good film The Mansion of Madness was. Juan Lopez Moctezuma has reasonable resources to hand and outfits his cast in period costuming. One of the most impressive parts of the film is the location where Moctezuma appears to have had the use of some kind of factory and so we see a mad circus of random costumed figures dancing around the grounds and narrow streets of the facility, even one lunatic that appear to live inside a boiler (one that is lit too).
It all adds up to an immensely colourful and splendidly caterwauling mardi gras, including trials and elaborate costumed rituals being placed on. In fact, this is one of the best filmed versions of The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether I have seen. All of the abovementioned other versions expand out on the story and add backstory or complicated twists about what happens in the asylum, or having Poe’s unnamed visitor imprisoned himself, but this just keeps to the slim basics of the story and tells them well.
