The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is excited to present “Destructible Man: The Dummy-death and Cinematic Storytelling Language” on April 11th at the Philosophical Research Society.

Howard S. Berger goes deep into one of cinema’s most overlooked niches: films that include a ‘dummy death,’ a cinematic illusion that transpires when a living actor is swapped out at the last second before a moment of extreme violence and replaced with a doomed doll. In that moment of shift is an important cinematic beat where the viewer gives in to the suspended belief of the transformation, and the visual storytelling takes over. Join as he unravels the complexities of the trope with clips, discussion, and dissection!

The class will be illustrated by clips from such dummy-death emboldened films like Strait-Jacket, Scanners, Dracula vs Frankenstein, The Birds, 2001, and The Fury in addition to two silent films: Alfred Clark’s Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895), known to be the first edit in cinema as well as the first dummy-death and The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first complex narrative film and also the first dummy-death within a complex narrative film.