The Head (1959) (Die Nackte und der Satan, or The Naked and the Satan)

A rather salacious and mildly atmospheric film with a silly premise

Directed by Victor Trivas
Music by Willy Mattes
Cinematography: Georg Krause
Distributed by Prisma Film
Running time: 1h 37min
Country: Former West Germany

Cast

Horst Frank as Dr. Brandt - alias Dr. Ood
Karin Kernke as Schwester Irene Sander
Helmut Schmid as Bert Jaeger
Paul Dahlke as Police Commissioner Sturm
Dieter Eppler as Paul Lerner
Kurt Müller-Graf as Dr. Walter Burke
Christiane Maybach as Stella - alias Lilly
Michel Simon as Prof. Dr. Abel

A serum that keeps a dog's head alive after its body dies! 

A mad scientist!! 

Serum’s inventor loses his head – literally!! 

Human experimentation!! 

At what cost?

Film Clip

Read on for more....

Spoilers follow below....

From The Personal Journal Of Dr Brandt / Ood

Entry

It was a night of a full moon whose face shone down through the gaps between black clouds as I first approached under cover of shadows the laboratory of renowned Professor Doktor Abel, the lead scientist of a medical team.

Suddenly a little tortoise caught my attention and as with all living things, I regarded it with a certain…. fascination. I then slipped away into the shadows again upon the arrival of Dr Abel's hunchbacked nurse, Irene Sanders who came to visit Dr. Abel, and her cousin, Dr. Walter Burke. 

I followed the nurse and managed to overhear her conversation with Dr. Burke. She was inquiring whether Able could cure her hunchback deformity with an operation…...

Entry
I discovered that Professor Abel was completely obsessed with perfecting what he called "Serum Z" that was used to keep the severed heads of canines alive. In many ways he may have been a weak old fool but there was no mistaking his genius.

The good doctor had even constructed an automatic operating table that did not required medical assistants! Can you believe that? All that remained for me was to take up a position in the team and convince Abel and Burke that my sole interest involved operations to save live tissues for ailing patients…….

Entry

After Professor Abel accepted the offer of my services, I moved into his laboratory /residence and began work immediately. It turned out that the Professor had a heart condition and was in desperate need of a heart transplant. The professor also had a donor available. For me this seemed like a happy coincidence - along with my interest in his “serum Z”…….

I assisted Dr Burke in the operation but as we began to attempt the heart transplant procedure on Professor Abel, the donor succumbed. That fool, Dr Burke tried to abort the procedure but I was determined to carry on with it. We managed to get into a physical struggle during which I struck Dr Burke and killed him. Burke may not have received a Christian-style burial but he was buried nonetheless……...

Entry

After Burke’s impromptu internment, I continued with the procedure with the assistance of Abel’s somewhat brain-damaged mechanical engineer, Bert. Unfortunately (or perhaps for my purposes, fortunately) the operation was not succeeding. I then had no choice but to sever Professor Abel's head and attach it to the same device that Abel had used to keep the laboratory dog alive. This, together with improvements to the Serum Z formula, the possibilities that opened before me seemed limitless! 

Unfortunately, that sentimental fool Abel was too horrified to find himself sans body upon awakening. There his stupid walrus-like head sat with tubes and wires attached to the back of his skull and all he could do was babble on about it being no life for him and pathetically pleading for death. And this from someone who calls himself a scientist? Bah! I let him slowly stew and simmer in the corner of the laboratory until he decided to see reason and make himself useful to me!

Entry 

My little sojourn to the local “Tam-Tam” club afforded me a wonderful opportunity to put my scientific theories and plans into practice. I thought my eyes were deceiving me when I beheld the sight of a striptease dancer called Lilly dancing with some inconsequential artist or sculptor. For one thing, her near-perfect body would be ideal for the deformed Irene’s body-transplant. It was Irene’s intellect I was drawn to but I thought, why not provide her with an ideal female body into the bargain?

Even more significantly,  there was the little matter of me recognizing Lilly as the woman who once went by the name of "Stella," who had poisoned her husband. She had me to thank for changing her face so that she could escape and begin her life anew, a life she seemed to have been wasting on working in seedy establishments, along with too much drinking and partying......

Excerpt From Irene’s Statement To Police:

…..I know now that Ood the monster had gotten a striptease dancer drunk, brought her back to the laboratory and attached my head onto her body in a fiendish experiment. It might be hard to believe but someone had died – had been murdered so that I could be given a perfect body. My God, how horrible!

For me it began when Ood kept on convincing and persuading me into agreeing to be operated upon by him. When I awoke, he informed me that I had been in hibernation or a coma for 117 days while he operated on my spine.

I had awoken to find that I now had a perfectly beautiful body but everything felt strange – my hands and feet were so different! I even smoked a cigarette which I had never done before. 

Initially I was grateful to Ood for the miracle he had performed for me, but that soon turned to fear when he kept pursuing me around the residence in the hopes of seducing me to gratify his own obsessive selfish desires. 

Luckily, I managed to escape and make my way home but all the time I could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. Suddenly some strange inexplicable force seemed to be impelling and drawing me to the “Tam-Tam” club, a place where I had never been before! That was where I met Paul……...

Excerpt From Paul’s Statement To Police: 

…...As Irene and I slept, Ood came back and tried to set fire to the place. These events I previously outlined along with Irene’s purse having belonged to Lilly and the suspicions surrounding the news that Lilly had supposedly died on the train tracks clinched it for us as to Ood’s murderous involvement. We decided to return to the laboratory to confront Ood……...

Die Welt

(headline)

MAD GENIUS SCIENTIST PLUNGES TO HIS DEATH 

DURING LAB INFERNO!

Full Movie 

Points Of Interest 

The Head fits into a long tradition of sci-fi / horror books and movies that deal with disembodied heads and brains and human body transplants, ranging from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein through to films such as, The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962), Donovan's Brain (1953), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957), Fiend Without a Face 1958, and The Thing That Couldn't Die (1958).

The Head has a somewhat Gothic feel to it but it’s urge to titillate its audience tends to almost override any other aim it might have had. What we are left with is the usual fare of decapitated heads, body transplants and a mad scientist. 

Being a German film from a particular era, there’s a temptation to launch into learned references to Expressionist influences, Goethe's Faust, wartime Nazi altrocities, all things Teutonic and blah, blah, blah. I don’t think a film like this demands that much over-egging! It is what it is and basically it really isn't all that good! 

The film in fact really does lack a consistent style, and has an almost silent movie era feel about it together with its exaggerated acting performances.

The Head does at least have a couple of interesting things to say that are of relevance of audiences of any era:

First of all, in our striving for physical perfection, what kind of cost are we prepared to pay? Industries worth billions of dollars are geared toward conning us into swallowing pills, rubbing lotions into our skin, cosmetic nipping and tucking bits of our bodies or being zapped with lasers. All this for the promise of eternally youthful perfect looks. And as we wake up each morning and emerge from our deluded dreams of achieving age-defying eternal youth, what of our attitudes to the natural aging process and those who don’t fit into the ideal concept of bodily perfection? Then there’s the promise of genetic manipulation in which a lucky class of “beautiful” ageless people perhaps wont even have to tolerate ugliness and deformity and where only physical "perfection" is valued. The Nazi dream fulfilled perhaps?

Secondly, there are the moral and ethical questions inherent in the role and purpose of scientific advancement. Namely, not just whether we CAN do something, but whether we SHOULD do something. Just because we can perform a scientific miracle does it necessarily mean we should?

For instance, if we have the power to resurrect extinct species should we then be able to exercise that power by acting like gods and bringing those species back to life in the world? Would it be OK if we did it to species whose extinction was caused by our own activities? Would we have the right to bring back into existence species such as dinosaurs or the woolly mammoth that had died out long ago due to natural extinction events? What kind of life or role would such creatures have in a world far removed from the era in which they existed? Should we human beings take on the God-like responsibility for making such decisions?

Films like The Head raise exactly such questions that can be applied to just about every facet of scientific advancement and that should be considered thoroughly before progressing. In short, we should always ask the question, WHY should we proceed and what are the likely consequences if we do?

CAN WE?

 

wikiGrewal 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY_SczM9G7ZMbMVYKJZIuMg

SHOULD WE? 

As far back as 1954, Joseph Murray was the first to perform a successful kidney transplant on twins, with the organ functioning for 8 years after the operation. Such attempts as these were criticized by those who believed that scientists like Murray were playing God and violating the laws of Nature. Since then the first heart transplant, hand transplant and facial transplant were initially met with serious reservations.

So what of a procedure that involves something as radical-sounding as a head transplant? Sounds like something out of a horror or science fiction movie like The Head?

Recently surgeons Ren Xiaoping and Sergio Canavero have claimed that monkeys and dogs were able to walk again after their spinal cords were “fully transected” during surgery and then put back together again. This despite the long-held belief that a severed spinal cord cannot be mended in any way. The highly experimental procedures took place at Harbin Medical University in China.

The next steps to such experiments would be to treat previously considered irreversible spinal-cord injuries, including the world’s first human head transplant.

One can readily see the benefits of such research in terms of potentially helping patients with spinal cord injuries should the researchers claims hold up to scrutiny. A real dilemma, however begins to emerge when we start considering the possibility of conducting human head transplants. Such a concept raises profound moral, ethical and psychological questions for humanity.

The cost of such a procedure has been estimated at US$100 million and would involve the healthy body of a brain-dead patient being matched for build with a recipient’s disease-free head. The spinal cords of the donor and recipient would be simultaneously severed with a diamond blade. The recipient’s brain would be protected from immediate death before it is attached to the body by being cooled to a state of deep hypothermia.

It is what Sergio Canavero proposes to do to the nerves that will make the difference. In short, he proposes to bathe the ends of the severed nerves in a solution that stabilizes the membranes and put them back together where they will be fused, but won’t regrow. This will be done in the spinal cord, where there’s multiple types of nerve channels.

So, IF such a procedure could possibly be done, SHOULD it be done? This is not a question to be left up to individual scientists, or even individual countries to answer. It is one for humanity to agree on based on sound information and after careful consideration of the likely future implications. Ah, but once the door opens even just a crack………..?????




©Chris Christopoulos 2020