end, Edmund betrays his only son to save his own skin. Your idea of the tension in the Blackstone
home manifesting them into a reality is the key. That’s much more important than whether they are escapees or not. You’ll remember in the study sequence, Edmund mentions that the evil beings have escaped from an institution down in Joliet and Serge says, “Mo, they are manifestations of your own mind.” Both arguments are equally true. They can be either.
I f the movie is indeed Edmund’s dream, wouldn’t that make the scenes that don’t include him gratuitous—like the scene of Charlie and Mikki at the filling station, or Eunice being treated with the corrosive “youth cream”? It’s an interesting point. How can Edmund have
this perspective? You’re right, these are gratuitous cuts. But then, I may argue that Edmund knows about all his guests’ lives because he has invented them. Maybe I should’ve stuck to Edmund alone, I don’t know. This is all hindsight.
T h e movie reaches its peak of horror at sunrise, when Edmund surrenders the secret of his son’s hiding place to the Queen of Evil, in order to save his own life. In a sense, the pirn’s pastoral main credits sequence is an ironic counterpoint to its most chilling mo­ ment—which, presumably, is happening in­ side the house simultaneously. Ideally, yes, the horror of the film should reach
its peak at that moment, but I don’t think it does. I find it instead in Reel 5, during the chase—when Edmund survives being strangled in the swamp, awakens, finds his wife’s suicide message, and discovers the surrogate wife in the bedroom. That is the visual horror in the film. But you’re right, it is a much more horrible
moment when he chooses his life over that of his son, but visually I could not draw this out; it is one of my own failures on the film. As you remember, it’s just a scene where he turns to the window and divulges the whereabouts of the son to Martine Beswicke. I spiced it up with some music and some effects, but it is not the visual climax of the film. Intellectually, you’re right on. It is the climax of Edmund’s soul, the big sell-out. You could say that perhaps this sell-out itself is the motivation for the entire nightmare. Where Edmund’s fear comes from, I did not
explain, but it comes from somewhere deep, deep inside him. His cowardice, which is discovered by
Nicole, is possibly the fundamental reason why he’s trapped in this circular dream. Or it could have come years and years ear­
lier... What did he do to his son? We don’t know in the film. Possibly it was not something that happened to his son, but something that hap­ pened to him in his own youth. Perhaps his fears originated with Kali, the Mother figure, when he was a young kid. Or from a shadowy, punishing Father figure. Mother, Father, and Son. They’re all there. In REPULSION, as you remember, Polanski went back to the photo of the girl on the school steps in Brussels to suggest that she was congenitally insane. I wish I had given a reflec­ tion of Edmund’s past. I did not give this in SEIZURE and that was a mistake.
The preeminence of the Queen of Evil in Edmund’s nightmare suggests that his fear also has a sexual basis. The Queen of Evil, as portrayed by Martine
Beswicke, does have a sexual connotation. Her killing of Mark Frost (Troy Donahue) is sexual. Her threat to Edmund is consistently sexual; his fear of her is based, I think, in sexual fear. The Mother. The Destroyer. I think I could have pushed that point much further than I did. But that’s part of doing a film when you’re 26 years old; sometimes you’re not sure of the punches that you have. If you look at the newspaper ad, you’ll see
that the fucking distributor actually shortened her skirt so that you can see her thighs, slitting the skirt to make her some kind of Raquel Welch figure! In the movie, the skirt falls to her ankles. I wish I had done more with that, perhaps made her more pornographic.
Edmund’s wife, Nicole, is one of the film’s most interesting characters. I f her recogni­ tion of Edmund’s cowardice condemns him to dream on, i t ’s also the moment when she “awakens” from her own life’s dream, isn’t it? She sees that Edmund is a coward, divorces him with an act of suicide, and the strength of her resolve empowers her to protect her son in the only way she can—as a supernatural force. Yes, the turning point in Nicole’s development
is her discovery of Edmund’s cowardice. She gives herself up, realizing there is no hope as long as the father—the head of the family—is scared. She takes her own life. Edmund finds her farewell written on the bathroom mirror, but he never sees the body. (Interesting... think about that.) He never
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