Tuesday, August 19, 2014

THE B-LIST: 11 MOVIES FEATURING EVIL SEVERED HANDS

I’ll admit, even on a good day, the humor on this site can be a bit obscure. For example, last week I posted a cartoon about religious prejudice and crawling severed hands. Definitely not an SEO post.

The reason for the religious angle you can probably guess pretty easily. But as for why the hands, well, that depends on whether or not you know you’re familiar with all the killer hand flicks released throughout the decades. Let’s take a tour of that particular genre’s cinematic history with 11 movies featuring evil severed hands.

Beast With Five Fingers, The

The Beast With Five Fingers (1946)

The granddaddy of all crawling hand movies! Peter Lorre chews up the screen in this tale of a deceased pianist whose hand isn’t ready to stop playing yet.

Invasion Of The Saucer Men

Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)

A needle sprouting severed hand AND little green men with bulbous heads who kill their victims with alcohol poisoning? Yes, please!

Crawling Hand, The

The Crawling Hand (1963)

Okay, so it’s actually an astronaut’s whole arm crawling around instead of just his hand, but that only makes this MST3K staple all the more silly.

Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors (2)

Dr. Terrors House of Horrors (1966)

One of the stories in this venerable anthology features Christopher Lee as an art critic tormented by the disembodied hand of the artist he drove to suicide. A bit of wish fulfillment fantasy from the writers of bad movies perhaps?

And Now The Screaming Starts

And Now the Screaming Starts (1973)

The poster prominently features the “dead hand that crawls”, but most folks just seem to remember the woman who gets assaulted and impregnated by a ghost. Go figure.

Hand, The

The Hand (1981)

A film about a cartoonist’s severed hand putting the squeeze on people starring Michael Caine and directed by Oliver Stone? Yes, it happened. And oddly enough, it’s not considered Stone’s worst film.

Evil Dead 2 Dead By Dawn

Evil Dead 2 (1987)

If you don’t already know about the evil crawling hand in this film, you probably arrived at this site by accident.

Severed Ties

Severed Ties (1992)

Another film with a full arm, but this time the experiment gone wrong grows a tail as well. Scientists never learn, do they?

Waxwork II Lost In Time

Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992)

Technically, the sinister severed hand in this story made it’s debut in the first Waxwork, but it gets a lot more screen time in this one. Bruce Campbell shows up for a few minutes, as well. Guess he likes these hand movies.

Quicksilver Highway

Quicksilver Highway (1997)

An anthology composed of stories by Stephen King and Clive Barker sounds like a no-brainer, right? It would, if  only those stories didn’t feature a set of killer chattering teeth and a bunch of hands that rise up against their oppressive human overlords.

Idle Hands

Idle Hands (1999)

And finally, it’s the part killer hand/part 90s stoner horror comedy that no one was asking for. It always reaches this point, doesn’t it? If this setup had been done in the 40’s when the whole crawling hand business had just gotten started, it would have been an Abbot & Costello movie. Without all the marijuana, obviously.

So, as you can see, the severed hand genre has been around for a while. Still, we haven’t seen any new evil crawling hands at the theater for some time now. Where’s our reboot of The Beast With Five Fingers? Maybe the lack of dastardly digits in cinemas is because modern writers haven’t figured out an angle to approach the subject matter yet. I mean, what is it about disembodied hands that is supposed to be so unnerving anyway?

It’s possible the whole genre could just be filmmakers playing around with the notion of “Limb Phobia”, the irrational, constant fear of losing a part of your body (not to be confused with Apotemnophobia, the fear of people with amputations). The problem with that is Limb Phobia would account for the horror in seeing the hand cut off, but not so much in its coming back.

Another psychological explanation might lie in Freudian analysis. In his work, The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud discussed Wilhelm Hauff’s fairytale, The Story of the Severed Hand. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that the good doctor reached the conclusion that the amputation in that story “certainly has an uncanny effect, and we have traced that effect back to the castration complex.” Basically, anytime a body part comes off in a story, Freud blames it on the author’s unconscious fear of castration as punishment for inappropriate sexual urges. That’s our Freud (cue laugh track). Again, though, the problem with that hypothesis (one of the problems anyway) is that it only accounts for the fear of losing the appendage, not in having it return.

To get to an idea that includes both separation and return, it might be helpful to look in the Bible. Jesus is quoted in a couple of places as saying, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.” He was speaking metaphorically, of course (only certain atheists take stuff like that literally). It was a clever way of telling us we need to completely detach ourselves from whatever sinful habits we may have or immediately remove ourselves from occasions of sin we may find ourselves in.

But as anybody who has ever tried to kick a habit or break an addiction can tell you, that’s not the easiest thing in the world to do. Whatever sins troubled us in the past always seem to find a way to come back and try to snare us again. As the Catechism puts it, “If we do not allow the Spirit to lead us, we fall back into the slavery of sin.”

And that’s the subtext likely to be found in a number of these movies. Evil Dead 2 and Idle Hands are the most obvious examples, with demon possessed paws coming back to cause more trouble even after their owners have lopped off the offending appendages. But it works for most of the others as well, with miffed off mitts returning to exact a toll for past sins. Oh sure, you get the occasional social allegory such as with Barker’s story in Quicksilver Highway, but for the most part, crawling hand movies do a fine job of visualizing the difficulty in escaping those parts of our inner selves we’d be better off leaving behind.

All those who agree, please raise your hands. If you’ve still got them, that is.

14 comments:

Larry Denninger said...

I know it's not a movie, but there was a Tom Baker Dr Who episode called "The Hand Of Fear".

Xena Catolica said...

ooo! That's quite the rundown! There's also a cameo(?)crawling hand in "PoC: Curse of the Black Pearl"...

thanks!

EegahInc said...

Good suggestions. Of course, you could easily double the list if you included evil hand transplants, movies about people who lose their own hands and get killer's hands sown onto their stumps.

Unknown said...

i watched a movie also about a hand when i was a kid. i dunno. this hand goes killing people around. it even sharpened its fingers on an electric sharpener. can't remember the title. i wanna watch it again. and that's the only scene i remember.

EegahInc said...

I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that happens in Idle Hands, which is one of the movies mentioned above. Hope that helps.

Unknown said...

There is a movie where a hand kills people and its soul is on a paper. Burning the paper will kil the hand. I watched it as kid and don't know the name

Unknown said...

The Body Politic by Clive Barker,maybe?

EegahInc said...

I don't remember. Did the hands separate from the body in that one or just cause him trouble?

Anonymous said...

There is this movie, a man inside a mansion for a night. The house was stupidly alive. All the things were trying to kill the man. There was a hand there as well and a moose head who kept shouting and spewed blood(?). I was a kid when I watched it, all I remember was the hand choked the guy etc. He escaped by sunrise and went through a bridge whichi is the only way out only to find the bridge was cut down. Old movie probably as I watched it early 2000's and seemed pretty old back then.

EegahInc said...

The mansion part doesn't jive, but everything else sounds exactly like Evil Dead 2, which is mentioned above.

Unknown said...

Way way back in the 1959's..I remember a black & white horror film about a hand that crawl along the floor..it just freaked me out as a child

EegahInc said...

It's funny the power these older movies had, even with their low budgets. For me it was the thing behind the door in The Brain That Wouldn't Die. Scared me witless.

Unknown said...

This list of movies really helped me because I was just thinking about the hand movie the other day. I remember it from when I was a kid

EegahInc said...

Glad I could lend a... naw, I'm not going there.