By DORA WILKENFELD
Lynne Cohen cues up the iMac and waits patiently for the film to start. "It takes a minute to get going," she says. After a moment's pause, the screen bursts into ghoulish life. A haggard figure writhes in agony, strapped down on an examining table in the Victorian gloom, as equally emaciated orderlies pour some sickening liquid down his resistant throat. And over these disturbing images flickering across the computer screen in shades of dingy gray and sickly green, a voice like Vincent Price intones in a half-crazed groan, "True! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?"
"So that's just a little bit of it," Cohen says, pausing the video.
The opening scene of "The Tell-Tale Heart," her adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's classic story of a maniac and his murderous exploits, encapsulates Cohen's approach to the art of making horror movies. "The horror genre opens us up to that dark part of ourselves--it's cathartic," she says. "I wasn't a horror fan until recently... horror wasn't necessarily my genre. But through people I know who are into horror, I started getting into it."
The directors she lists as inspirational--Robert Rodriguez, Tim Burton, Robert Wiene, who created the German Expressionist masterpiece "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari--have clearly influenced the dramatic lighting and charged, off-putting sets and scenery in "The Tell-Tale Heart." But there's something about Cohen's film that sets it apart from most other horror movies: the actors are all puppets.
Cohen, who trained as an actress at the Boston Conservatory before coming to UConn for graduate school, has a long-standing fascination for the phantasmagorical worlds theater and film can create. In choosing to enter the puppetry program here in Connecticut, Cohen says she was seeking to expand her repertoire, and get her name out there in the drama world as something more than just a run-of-the-mill actress. "There's something very primal about puppets," she says, and "The Tell-Tale Heart," which she plans to premier at Hartford's esoteric performance and art space, Real Art Ways, on April 16, reaches into the furthest crevices of human strangeness.
Cohen's film takes viewers into what she calls the "Insanity Zone," where reality and deranged fantasy intermingle and nothing is as it seems. The presence of puppets enhances that sense of unsettling madness, and Cohen's look particularly estranged from good mental health, even when seen outside the context of the film and its intricate sets. As they dangle from their control strings among the many puppet prototypes and half-built designs in the UConn Puppet Lab, Cohen's main characters--the unnamed narrator and his nemesis, the eerie and ultimately doomed old man--lend an air of miniature menace to the otherwise cheerful workshop. The two characters bear an eerie resemblance to each other, with their disheveled hair, gapingly wide eyes, and emaciated physiques, casting even more doubt on the narrator's crumbling mental state within the movie. Are they really two separate characters, or two aspects of one one cracking psyche?
"I wanted the whole world of the film to be sort of old and falling apart and rotting," Cohen says, back in the screening room, "but also with a kind of elegant beauty." This diminutive actress/puppeteer doesn't look, at first glance, like the kind of Goth horror fiend who would count shock-rock pioneer Alice Cooper among her favorite artists. But on closer inspection, it's clear his top-hatted and corpse-painted funereal glamour rubbed off on Cohen's creations.
The puppets themselves are only one aspect of the entire project. When she describes the technical details of shooting and creating a movie--from designing the scenery and lighting to filming and editing the raw footage--Cohen's eyes light up and a wide smile spreads across her narrow face. "I'm finding that I really love directing... as a director you have control over that world."
"Making movies is an extremely techy thing, and a puppet movie even more so. For every character you have to make every little thing--some need eight people, all crammed into the little set area," Cohen says. Fortunately for her, she had a team of dedicated technicians, from set builders and lighting designers to puppet tech directors, ready to help out. The actual shooting of the film took about four and a half weeks to finish, all scheduled around classes--"Very challenging," Cohen acknowledges. The movie concept, drawing viewers into the Insanity Zone, making them uncomfortable, making them question their own reality, was the first step. Making the concept into a real film required some practical expertise.
"Engineering is not necessarily my forte," Cohen says. "I'm more the creative part--it really has to be a collaborative effort."
On viewing the film-in-progress, the influence of German Expressionism in the twisted scenery and strange camera angles becomes obvious. Cohen called in set and lighting designers to help her achieve this unsettling look.
"I want the windows skewed, I want angles," she says. "I want the room and sets to look like my design, only good."
Taking Cohen's designs and refining them was a group project, completed by a class at UConn taught by Michael Ananea. In the film, the nightmarish surroundings become as much a character as the puppet murderer and his victim. "They're such a part of the story," Cohen says.
Shooting over, the film is in the post-production stages of editing and adding sound and effects. "It's where you start to see the story come together," Cohen says of the editing process.
Before coming to UConn, "I'd never done art or made things with my hands--it was empowering" to start, Cohen says. "It was a big leap to come and do this." The process of making the film may be in its final stages, but getting it out to a wide audience will be the beginning of a whole new phase. Cohen hopes that, by entering the movie into some film festivals, she can start to carve out a niche for herself, as an artist, director, puppeteer, creator. Although Poe's masterful story ends on a note of paranoia and madness, this "Tell-Tale Heart" could prove the opening bell of a new and vibrant career.
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