The Storyteller: The Artist’s Reflection in Andrew Getty’s The Evil Within
Art & Trash, episode 16
The Storyteller: The Artist's Reflection in Andrew Getty's The Evil Within
Stephen Broomer, June 16, 2022
For David Spittle
Andrew Getty's The Evil Within was made between 2002 and 2017, and was completed only after the filmmaker's death. It was the work of a person at once tormented and narcissistic, and its haunting narrative broadcasts a clear identification between Getty and his outsider protagonist. In this video essay, the film is considered in relation to Getty's life, themes of compromised autonomy, and the filmmaker's preoccupation with traditional special effects involving puppetry and makeup.
SCRIPT:
Tod Browning’s Freaks was received in its day as the cinematic equivalent of a circus sideshow. MGM tried to counter the perception that they were exploiting their cast by promoting the film as a work of compassion: Browning’s ‘freaks’ are exceptional outsiders, castaway from society’s narrow definitions of normalcy, and they have formed their own shelter, a community that protects its own, by brutal, sadistic means, from a world that has taught them to be merciless.
Andrew Getty was a grandson of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, one of the richest men of the twentieth century, once the richest in the world. J. Paul Getty’s magnificent wealth taught him to be merciless as well, most famously when one of his grandsons, namesake John Paul Getty III, was held for ransom and he refused to pay, a scenario so exceptional in its heartless diplomacy to have inspired several movies.
Andrew Getty loved movies. He lived in a mansion that had formerly belonged to film composer Miklós Rózsa in the Hollywood Hills. Getty aspired to be a filmmaker himself. When he first shot The Storyteller in 2002, it was already an extravagant vanity project, self-financed, with large portions of it shot in his mansion, much of which he converted into a makeshift movie studio, a gesture at once decadent and amateur. Getty was an amateur in the sense that he was not, despite his heritage, an industrialist, but someone passionate about horror movies and haunted since his childhood by vivid dreams, dreams so real that he couldn’t conceive of them coming from his own imagination. He credited them instead to a storyteller, a cryptkeeper of sorts who kept his dreams running on time like a double-feature matinee projectionist. Even after initial production wrapped, Getty continued to make the film, reshooting, reediting, building elaborate animatronics. He died in 2015, from heart failure arising from methamphetamine abuse. In 2017, fifteen years after The Storyteller was shot, it was finished by Getty’s collaborators and released under the title The Evil Within.
The film’s narrator, Dennis Peterson, has two voices: an articulate interior voice that unpacks his life and his dreams with allusions and metaphors and with a sense of authority. And then there is the voice that comes from his body as a man with an unspecified intellectual disability. As his family begins to explore institutionalizing Dennis, his two sides mobilize, with the disabled Dennis vocally opposed to, but easily led on, a spree of horrific violence. The world of Getty’s film is a shadow world; it’s the world on the edge of vision glimpsed in a mirror; it is the world of Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting The Nightmare, and its incubus is Michael Berryman, a character actor with hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia whose appearance in The Storyteller shows him at his most impish, naked in full body greasepaint. He is the Storyteller of the title, but he never really speaks. He has Dennis to do that for him, and Dennis becomes his puppet early on, in the film’s most disturbing sequence, something akin to rape: Berryman attaches a zipper to Dennis’s skin, opens him up to reveal a vacant space, and crawls inside.
The Storyteller is a film about puppetry and illusionism; it begins in this fantasy that dreams are orchestrated for the dreamer by a puppeteer, much as movies are orchestrated for their audiences by filmmakers. When Getty died, much of what he loved about movies—traditional, plastic effects; the grain and flicker of the film projection—had long been shorn away by the technological advances of video and digital effects. His film remained dedicated to the operator behind the curtain, an unbridled nostalgia for a genre cinema that had been shaped by makeup artists, creature builders, artisans who specialized in the realization of imaginary beings. The Storyteller was to be a showcase for the unique terror of sculpted creations, executed by armatures and motors, like the movie monsters of Stan Winston, Rick Baker, Chris Walas, and Screaming Mad George. When these creatures appear, they bear an unpredictable strain of body horror, the figure transformed in grotesque ways, as if by an imaginative taxidermist; they also tap into the terrifying potential of the inanimate, that suspicion that made killers out of a ventriloquist’s dummies and dolls in Dead of Night, Devil Doll, Magic, Trilogy of Terror, and Child’s Play.
Puppetry itself presents a thematic parallel: The Storyteller is about loss of agency. Getty’s characters are marionettes in the usual fashion, just as all characters in movies are puppets for writers, actors, and film directors; but these characters enact a narrative that further internalizes this aspect of cinema. Dennis suffers from common insults posed to the intellectually disabled: presumptions about his lack of emotional maturity, presumptions about his desires and his naivety, and the standing threat of having his autonomy taken from him. Dennis is not helpless: like Tod Browning’s freaks, he embraces his otherness, and consequently, the world begins to reflect that otherness. Dennis is pursued by grotesque hallucinations and begins to kill and stuff animals, children, and finally, adults, transforming them by taxidermy into horrific puppets. This underpins the film’s themes of loss of agency, the presence of hollowed-out puppets. Dennis’s zipper-suit nightmare introduces this theme, but it persists elsewhere, as spectacle—an animatronic band at a pizza palace, itself an allusion to the Rock-afire Explosion—and as action, with Dennis’s taxidermy creations, transforming beautiful, unattainable ice cream parlour worker Susan and sadistic social worker Mildy Torres into insect-like monsters.
Cinema influenced Andrew Getty’s perception of reality—for example, in his inspiration for the character of the storyteller, as a sandman-cum-film-director. If the storyteller’s presence is a sign that the film’s world is under control—that it will mete out ironic, fated punishments—Getty nevertheless allows those reins to loosen, as the film’s diegesis becomes ragged, unhinged, unpredictable. Dennis’s intellectually disabled side, characterized as gentle, attempts to rebel but finds that this nightmare world is bleeding into reality. His brother John discovers the same when, at a restaurant, he approaches a man he believes is his therapist, only to find himself chastised by a giant, played by 7’6” cult film actor Matthew McGrory. When the homogenous world of normalcy finds itself under attack, John and his fiancé Lydia become trapped in an unfamiliar mirror of Southern California.
Like this lonesome middle ground in which John and Lydia find themselves, horror films tend to serve as a mirror; the very best do so with subtlety and personal commitment, achieved by introspection, by an honest recognition of the most terrifying experiences with which life can present us. The Storyteller is not a film about spiralling addiction, even though Andrew Getty’s addiction to methamphetamines led to his death. By the accounts of his collaborators and those who finished the film for him, Getty’s death was the only means by which the film could ever be released. One imagines that, if he were still alive today, he would still be working on it. Getty laboured on perfecting, revising, reshooting, reediting the film, because it had become a mirror of his own fears—being misunderstood, being institutionalized, being subject to a conservatorship, trapped in a lonely manor or a straitjacket. The story of Andrew Getty and The Storyteller is a modern-day translation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. His story is that of Dorian Gray in reverse: as Getty deteriorated, the portrait of his pain became more perfect, more honest, even beautiful, in its pain, in its admissions of fear.
Those scenes that deal with disability and otherness also demonstrate the degree to which Getty was ruthless with himself, his own life and desires, his autobiographical investment in the film. Getty sees in those bodies that have been othered by society a reflection of himself. Getty was haunted by dreams, threatened by loss of agency, and came to see the world as merciless. In the final act of the film, a theme emerges that speaks to this, when John Peterson admits to Lydia that he was responsible for an injury that caused his brother’s intellectual disability; subsequently, as Dennis tortures John with a grotesque puppet show, there’s even a suggestion that John’s account of the accident is a lie to cover a more petty and malicious event. John is a storyteller too, and the film reminds that storytelling, with all of the faults and falsehoods that come with it, is an inescapable facet of human experience. Getty’s film finds its storyteller on the other side of the mirror. It is a reckoning with how we tell the stories of our lives, whether to reveal uncomfortable truths, or to conceal our sins.
CREATOR’S STATEMENT
Andrew Getty, an heir to the Getty family fortune, made only one film in his lifetime, and it can’t truly be said that he completed it. The Storyteller, shot and edited intermittently between 2002 and his death in 2015, was a passion project with a budget far exceeding most independent films; it was the work of a person at once tormented and narcissistic, and its haunting narrative broadcasts a clear identification between Getty and his outsider protagonist. Getty’s work on the film was, by accounts, obsessive and meticulous and largely independent: he wasn’t working in a total vacuum, but he was living the film, engaged in all aspects of its production and shooting much of it in his own home. When Getty died in 2015 as a result of complications arising from his methamphetamine addiction, his friends and collaborators seized the opportunity to finish the film, releasing it under the title The Evil Within in 2017.
The tragic circumstance of Getty’s death invites speculation about the film and its themes. As I discuss in this video essay, The Evil Within is about loss of agency, the spectre of conservatorship, the strain and guilt in families. Its author loved horror culture and the influence of both the physical constitution of horror effects—be it plastic, animatronic, or puppet—and the narrative roots of horror-fantasy storytelling—from Poe and Bierce to Rod Serling and the Crypt-keeper. I argue that the film has an autobiographical aspect, and that the fears and anxieties of protagonist Dennis are a cathartic mirror of Getty’s own anxieties, that this is where The Evil Within gains its soulfulness and its empathy. Empathy might not be the first thing that one recognizes in a film in which disabled actors play ghouls, their physicality employed for shock value. But the narrative holds complex ideas about otherness, evident in its handling of Dennis, whose unspecific mental disability becomes a point of profound empathy as he struggles against the patronizing, snickering, presumptuous behaviours he encounters in the world (and which are inevitably met with violent reprisals).
Two films came to mind as I watched The Evil Within: Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and Michael Winner’s The Sentinel (1977). One could not find two films more unalike in their handling of othered bodies: Freaks is a film of profound, if machined, empathy in which the truly monstrous characters are conventionally beautiful, while The Sentinel, like all of Winner’s films, is eagerly offensive, populating its closing passages with images of people with physical irregularities who are meant to represent the social landscape of a Boschian hell. In a regressive simplification, Winner equates physical abnormality with evil. Between these two examples, I take The Evil Within to be far closer to the attitude of Freaks, with a crucial difference: that Browning’s film was a work of liberal compassion, albeit serving the dual purpose of leering; while Getty’s is a work of extreme, even patronizing, identification with the other.
In The Storyteller, I weave scenes from Getty’s film with those images and narratives to which it’s indebted - the plasticity of 1980s movie monsters, the terror of the inanimate-made-animate. I am also, however briefly, integrating altered images from All the Money in the World, Ridley Scott’s controversial account of the Getty kidnapping, as an acknowledgement of two things, the family legacy that Andrew Getty came up through, and the theme of cinematic puppetry, from Kevin Spacey’s ‘monster makeup’ to his erasure from the film, exiting just as he’d entered it in the trailer, his shaky approach through the deep black of a shifting mask. Later in the video, I argue that characters are puppets for actors, directors, writers; these images are a reminder of the malleability of cinema in a contemporary age of digital—and readily substitutable—puppetry.
The Evil Within is a posthumous film, and its maker made no other films. To pose an argument around its authorship is a challenge. It is, like Franz Kafka’s Amerika, a work that must be accepted in its suspension, as close to complete as it may be. In this case, the film’s incompleteness might be looked upon as a strength, its meanings more open than closed, its psychology and subtext richer for having not been subject to further refinement and deliberation. But its strangeness has little to do with it being ‘left in state’, and is more a sign of the author’s debts to an ‘American weird’ cinema typified by David Lynch. The film’s abundance of strange imagery, especially in its mythic prologue, suggest that Getty might have imagined something akin to ‘universe building,’ developing a surreal atmosphere to be perpetuated in further works, the first entry in a Storyteller’s anthology. Andrew Getty’s story is ultimately one of obsessive, uncompromising devotion. For my part, in exploring Getty’s authorship with this video, I have elected to follow the path of Stan Brakhage, whose Film Biographies mix fact and fantasy and presumption in the pursuit of the greater truths of art.