~ gg martineau, american filmmaker & serial killer
Guy Ghislaim Martineau was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 6, 1946. His parents, Jacques and Yvette Martineau, had emigrated to Boston from the Magdalene Islands two years previous so that Jacques could work as a baker for a friend starting a new company in the area. Though they were never rich, the Martineaus were happy, and kept a clean, cozy, and loving home. From a young age, GG showed an interest in photography and in drama. He was regarded throughout the neighbourhood as a smart child with a bright future. Though there is some evidence which suggests that madness ran in Yvette's family (the Renauds), it never manifested in Yvette herself, and there was no indication that it might ever manifest in GG.
In 1960, at the age of 14, GG's father passed away, and to help pay the bills GG took a job at the Boston Globe as a photographer. Though limited by the nature of his work at the newspaper, GG quickly showed a great deal of potential, and the chief editor permitted GG to develop pictures of his own in the company dark room. GG quickly became something of an authority on photography and developing at the company, though his normal school studies prevented him from taking on any kind of full-time job related to editing photography for the paper. Martineau's photographs from this period include a variety of styles; though it includes a great deal of the macabre or the bizarre, there is also the beautiful and the tranquil in equal proportions.
Some time before 1966, Martineau began to dream of being a film director. Over the next few years, GG began hanging around with a lot of film and drama students, and put together a script for a ghost story. He decided that, to truly test himself, he would try to affect the audience with that most subtle and challenging emotion: horror.
Martineau's project was released in 1969, when Martineau was only 23 years old, as Memory. The film was made on a shoestring budget and starred actors from the local college troupe. It's the story of two grieving and guilt-wracked parents who are haunted by the vengeful ghost of their ten year old daughter. Although it has a traditional gothic structure – ghosts, children, incest, murder – it is a thoroughly modern psychological monster movie; the parents, whose persistent abuse led to the violent death of their daughter, try to find their humanity and repent, while the spirit tries to strip them of their sanity. Although a fantastic film in its own right, it was largely passed over by critics and consumers alike.
Memory was creepy, but not especially horrifying per se. Somewhat disappointed with what he perceived to be a failure, Martineau plunged into his next project. This one was a success even by Martineau's own stringent standards, despite its lack of critical attention; GG truly felt he had succeeded in breaking through the boundaries of cinematic horror, and didn't need any cinemast to tell him. Twilight of the Spirit, released in 1972 (a full year before The Exorcist) and starring Italian actress Victoria della Chiesa, remains to this day in a class of its own. Although movies treating the theme of demonic possession are a dime a dozen, few directors have dared to try to create an actual character study of the possessed. In Twilight of the Spirit, we bear witness as the soul of a young woman, Maria, becomes integrated with or subsumed by a malevolent alien intelligence. Departing from traditional conceptions of possession, Martineau consistently excludes all religious overtones. Disturbing and, in retrospect, shockingly prescient, Martineau invites us to understand the possession from the perspective of the conjoined being whose soul is formed from the union of woman and demon; but Martineau challenges the traditional dual notion of possession, painting the relationship as one, not of enslaver and victim, nor of malevolent pilot and inert vehicle, nor as a mutually pitiful accident, all of which had been done before. Instead, Maria's relationship with the demon begins almost like a love relationship, progressing through something very much like domestic abuse, culminating in a total unity of the human and the absolutely alien.
Despite the silence (perhaps stunned silence) with which Twilight was met, Martineau's fascination with horror was developing into an obsession. His next film, The Forgotten Star, is not only an even more unsettling film than its predecessor, but it also exemplifies Martineau's stylistic flexibility. In The Forgotten Star, Martineau successfully blends elements of gothic horror and the weird tale, classic film noir, and 1930s pulp science fiction. The film follows Jack Sartor (played by one-time actor Hugh Fredericks), the sole survivor of a colony that was overrun by a creeping gelatinous fungus from space. As the "pathoform" nears more densely inhabited solar systems nearly ten years later, Sartor begins to hear the voices of his wife, his son, and his daughter, all of whom had been consumed by the spreading vileness. The ending of this movie is often said to be the most bizarre in cinematic history; without giving it away, I can say that anyone who stopped watching five minutes too early would not have been truly affected; but at the time and even today at art house showings, a significant proportion of the people who watch it all the way through leave the theatre crying. GG Martineau began to develop a reputation as being the next big thing, not only in horror cinema, but in cinema in general.
~ portrait of the artist in decline
Then things began to go wrong. Martineau, still not satisfied with the power of his previous works, began slowly to convince himself that only a madman would be able to truly horrify in film. His next work was released too quickly, in 1976. A black-and-white art film about the lives of five psychopaths, including the Penobscott Slasher Dale Wilkins, Faces Turned Away was a major disappointment for the small following Martineau had already built up. It was clear that Martineau had lost touch of the distinction between horror and terror, and the images shown and stories related in Faces left behind the realm of the seductively chilling and occupied the realm of the repulsively excessive. Ironically, Faces was the first film for which Martineau was to receive wider critical attention, all of it negative, and the poor reviews the film received deterred many viewers and cinemasts from watching any of Martineau's other work.
Martineau stopped working for a few years after Faces Turned Away. He began a couple of projects but was completely discouraged, and never finished any of them. But late in 1979, he began to develop the notion that the true power of horror hinges on the audience's suspension of disbelief. To this end he began exploring the idea of doing a documentary on an actual haunting. Subsequent investigation and research made it clear, though, that what passes for a spooky ghost story for the campfire lacks the substance to be turned into a sustained horrific experience. Disappointed, Martineau began drafting up all sorts of scripts for fake documentaries, but again, his perfectionism stood in his way of turning any of them into a finished project. Finally, he realized that a truly verisimilar representation of horror would require the peripheral evidence and documentation of an actual ghost story, combined with the proper buildup and narrative structure of a fictional tale.
The fruit of this line of reasoning was Whispers: The House on Dan Street. Whispers purported to be a true account, in documentary style, of the history of an old Victorian house inhabited by a hostile ghost. Not content to just set up realistic interviews with "witnesses" (which is really standard fare for a mockumentary anyway), Martineau forged police reports, medical files, death certificates, autopsy reports, old history books and articles, everything that would be needed to convince anyone doing peripheral research on his movie that it was, in fact, true.
The result was a very scary picture show. Some critics began to talk tentatively about the return of the king of horror. Though the documentary style still maintained some degree of distance between the audience and the horror, this film was far scarier in its own right than Twilight of the Spirit or The Forgotten Star, because people thought it was real. Martineau's confidence in himself as a master of horror (and now, of hoax) began to grow again.
Of course, it was only a matter of time before the "witnesses" began to come forward to tell the world that they were actors and that Martineau's film was fiction. Critics and audiences perceived this as duplicity on Martineau's part; they felt he wasn't really all he was cracked up to be if he had to trick them into being afraid. Now with two flops in a row, it looked like Martineau's career was over.
For the next seven years, Martineau worked in a small photography lab, developing pictures and editing home videos. He began to drink. His dejection turned to depression, and his depression began to turn into psychosis. No one will ever know what happened to Martineau's mind during that time. We know he took up the study of ancient Aztec mythology, and became especially enamoured with the stories of human sacrifice. He also became fascinated with 20th century political massacres, especially the Holocaust. He started thinking of himself as an agent of horror, and eventually as a prophet and high priest of the god of horror.
Some time in 1989, a VHS movie began circulating discretely through bootlegs and private trades. The contents were the most savage and brutal images ever committed to film. The movie, called simply Study of a Human Sacrifice or simply Human Sacrifice, is basically a home video of Martineau's tour of four major cities – Boston, New York, Toronto and Montréal – as he collected victims for revolting orgies of rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism. Study of a Human Sacrifice documents the murders of ten people, some positively identified from the corpses and others associated with missing person files, over the course of two weeks. All were sacrificed to the honour of some horrible god with an unpronounceable name – Martineau's invocations as he howls them on the tape, which involve hideous throat clicks and other vocal contortions, generally end up making him vomit before he can finish them. With each murder, Martineau's figure becomes more menacing, and his voice becomes increasingly undercut with something subhuman. In the tape he explains that these are methods of bringing outside intelligences into his body and conjoining with them to create a superior being, immortal and impossible to capture.
But on April 25, 1990, capture him they did. His trial (for which he did not enter a plea) was over in short order; he was found guilty, sentenced to ten consecutive life sentences and over three hundred additional years' imprisonment, and was taken to the Marvin Institution for the Criminally Insane. But he wouldn't stay there for long.
On June 6, 1993, the occasion of his 47th birthday, GG was found to have disappeared from his totally locked, escape-proof cell. The only signs suggesting how he had escaped were even more perplexing than the disappearance itself: traces of blood were found that were later proven to be that of Herman Hero, an orderly who had been off work sick that week and who had never even worked in Martineau's wing of the Institution. Hero's body was later found slashed to ribbons in his own bed at home. No murder weapon was ever found. No sign of forced entry into Hero's home was ever found.
And no murderer has ever been found.
~ revelation of the lamb in four parts
In the nine years since his vanishing act, only one piece of evidence has ever surfaced that he is still alive and at work. In 1995 a new film began to be circulated underground on VHS.
This film is called Revelation of the Lamb in Four Parts. This is an accurate name, because not only does the film imply horrible violence committed toward an innocent youth (the lamb), it also confronts us with the horrible fact that GG Martineau is still on the lam. Furthermore, it in fact consists of four parts, or four tapes. Although each of the tapes is chilling in its own right, the four must be watched together to be really appreciated.
The tapes have been named "Lamb p1," "Lamb p2," "Lamb p3," and "Lamb p4" – the "p" standing for "perspective." The four parts of Lamb are not sequential, but concurrent; each is exactly 4'19" long. Lambs p1, p2, and p3 all show the same room, from different angles. Although each perspective is different, this much is common between them. There is a room, with one door. There is a simple bed with a metal frame and grimy white sheets. There is a teenage girl, nude, on the bed, screaming in terror.
Lamb p1, the first of the tapes to surface (around February of 1995, in Buffalo) shows the bed and the girl in profile. The room's walls and ceilings are plain and white washed, and it is lit by an unknown, diffuse source of white light. The head of the bed is on the right-hand side of the screen, and we can see a bit of a door on the left-hand side. In p1, we can see that the girl has brown hair. She's clearly not restrained or attached to the bed in any way, but at no point does she ever get up. She's batting in the air with her hands and feet, flailing her limbs and screaming. Straight ahead of us, we can see a window. The window reveals a green hill against a dark grey, overcast sky. There's a single dead tree on the crown of the hill. About halfway through p1 (starting at about 2'03"), we can see it begin to snow outside. No other cameras or people appear in this shot.
Lamb p2 (April '95, Boston) appears to be shot from the ceiling. It looks down on the bed. The girl on the bed is clearly the same girl as in p1; her face and proportions are completely identical – but in p2 her hair is blonde. For whatever reason this might be, it's absolutely clear that p1 and p2 were filmed at exactly the same time, of the same model, from different angles; the (brunette) girl's flailings and shrieks in p1 are represented with perfect precision in p2 (by the blonde). Everything in p2 has a slightly pinkish hue which seems to be emanating from the left (where the window was in p1), as if the sun is setting outside the window. As I mentioned above, no camera that could be recording p2 can be seen from p1. Neither p1 nor p2 capture any camera that could be recording p3, as described below.
Lamb p3 (April '95, New York) is seen from the eyes of the girl. We can see no camera above her (where p2 should be). The lighting is of an unknown source, but it's white and diffuse, identical to that of p1. Though we know it's the same girl from her motions and her sounds (though we can't see her hair very well, we can tell by her pubic hair that she is brunette), there are some substantial differences between Lamb p3 and Lambs p1 and p2. First, in p3 we see a crow flying around the room, periodically landing on the girl and nipping tightly at her skin. This is clearly what she's screaming and flailing about. The crow lands on the girl's body often and ought to be visible from both p1 and p2. Also, in the corner of the room between the door and the window, we can see a young girl, less than ten years of age, standing and watching. This girl should appear in p1, but doesn't. This girl takes no action through the whole film, and seems to be there only to witness.
Lamb p4 (at least August '95, possibly in Hartford) is the only one that does not take place in this room, but can provide nothing but frustration to anyone who tries to use it to determine where it is filmed. Instead, it seems to be a walkthrough of some sort of ancient house. The course begins in earth tunnels, but soon we come to a door. The door opens and we find ourselves in long hallways with mirrors mounted on the walls. As the camera pans past the mirrors, no reflection of any camera is visible. Instead, only the staring visage of Martineau appears reflected, fat and wide-eyed. The first actual sight of Martineau in a mirror occurs at 1'53". The house has windows, and if one were to look out the windows one feels that one could get a sense of the geometry of the house – but hallways appear where windows indicate only yard; wing upon renovated wing twist around with overlapping spaces, defying all sense of Euclidean mise en scène. At around 2'01" we begin to hear the screams of the girl coming from somewhere in the house; as the film progresses these become louder.
The bird finally leaves p3 at 4'12", possibly out the window. As soon as this occurs, we hear heavy footsteps approaching at a normal walking pace. In p4, we arrive at a door, behind which we can hear the girl crying. When the footsteps stop outside the door, we can see the little girl in p3 cover her eyes with her hands. At 4'14", the door swings open – neither quickly nor slowly. In p1, the door opens with its hinge toward the camera, and so the opener is obscured. In p2, the opener never enters into the field surveyed from above.
From p3 we can see Martineau's face. From p4 we can see the girl. She screams even louder, but Martineau doesn't move. At 4'19", all four tapes end.
Guy Ghislaim Martineau remains at large.
Walko, Jamie. Revelations of the Lamb: The Legend of G. G. Martineau. Hoober Ltd., New York: 2001.
< http://www.scare.net/revlamb/ >
< http://godsofhorror.com/ >
My own copies of Revelation of the Lamb. You can get a copy of any one Lamb tape for about $400, if you know who to talk to about it. I've been picking them up for the past three years; I got the last one in January 2002.
