HOUSE OF PAIN
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This 1916 script, originally titled The Laboratory of Hallucinations, is a rather mild but still representative sample of the Grand Guignol’s repertoire. The brilliant surgeon Dr. Gorlitz, director of his own hospital/asylum, is so obsessed with his research on the brain that he’s indifferent to pain or suffering, in himself and others. Not surprisingly, his lovely, gentle wife, Sonia, prefers the company of the cheerful and handsome archaeologist John De Mora. Dr. Gorlitz learns of his wife’s infidelity at the same moment that an automobile accident delivers his rival into his hands with a severe head injury requiring immediate surgery.
House of Pain includes several accoutrements mandatory to the genre: eerily deformed servants (most notably the hideously maimed Mitchinn, Gorlitz’s lab assistant), a slow-witted underling with a speech defect for comic relief, brutalized patients cringing in terror, Rube Goldberg-like “scientific” apparatus–in this case a primitive X-ray machine powered by, of all things, a bicycle generator–and of course gallons of blood to be splashed about a sickeningly septic operating amphitheater (an effect intensified by the smell of fresh paint in the Splinter Group’s newly renovated space).
