Revelation of the Lamb in Four Parts
By Z.C.S.
Photographer:Ian Britton
~ 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 a modern monster.
But on April 25, 1990, a script leaked on the internet. In it, he planned to film ten murders with kidnapped people. Police traced his IP and 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.
The tape set 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 an unidentified person,
on the bed, screaming in terror.
From p3 we can see
Martineau's face. From p4 we can see the person, but can't tell if male or female. She or he 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.