The other most popular use of hypnosis in film has been to compel innocents to murder. In director Robert Wiene’s massively influential silent horror The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1919), the title character has a carnival act in which he controls a ‘somnambulist’ for audiences’ amusement. By night, he sends the somnambulist to murder sleeping men and women. Wiene’s film was so successful that decades of subsequent films featured variants of this plot, usually with the hypnotic murders treated as real. But with the exception of The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, the most popular hypnotic film of all time was The Hypnotic Eye (1960). It sees a stage hypnotist select attractive young women from the audience, bring them on stage for innocuous antics and then give them secret suggestions to return home and mutilate themselves. He, in turn, is under the hypnotic control of a once beautiful performer who has suffered disfiguring burns. The Hypnotic Eye makes overt what is implied in much of the hypnosis-for-murder genre: the hypnotist is a bitter person who would be ineffectual without this extraordinary skill. The film was subtitled or dubbed into 20 languages and the depiction of hypnosis as light entertainment masking dark destruction was disseminated around the world. Horror seized hypnotism most readily. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, it’s the heroic Doctor Van Helsing who hypnotises bite-victim Lucy to help her reveal Dracula’s daytime refuge. However, in all but one of the film versions, this scene is omitted and instead Dracula is the one practising hypnosis. But the villainous use of hypnosis to commit crimes also shows up in comedies such as Woody Allen’s The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion, in which
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Allen volunteers for a turbaned stage hypnotist and ends up compelled to commit a series of jewellery thefts. In fact, almost every genre has ventured into hypnosis and turned it to dark purposes. From porn (Stripnotized, Hypnotic Hookers) to children’s catand-mouse cartoons (Caligari-like clown Dr Bozo attempts evil in a 1982 Scooby-Doo episode).
So are there any positive or realistic depictions of hypnosis in film? Well, yes – a very few. Probably the best depiction of hypnotherapy is in Sidney Lumet’s big-screen adaptation of Equus (1977). Some atypical details are used for visual interest – there’s a rhythmically tapping pen and the patient is asked to act out memories in age-regression – but the explanation of hypnosis by psychiatrist Richard Burton and his patient’s subsequent experience of it are remarkably realistic. One film which is quite negative about hypnosis but unusually realistic in what it selects as its dangers is Todd Solondz’s dark comedy Storytelling (2001). After his favoured older brother is left brain-damaged in a football accident, the neglected youngest son of a dysfunctional middle-class family asks his father if he can hypnotise him. His dazed father mutters, “Sure, whatever” and this highly suggestible and recently traumatized man goes rapidly into a trance. Storytelling plays out the fantasies of parental favour and all the ice-cream one can eat more amusingly but also more realistically than a 1994 comedy with virtually the same plot. No Dessert, Dad, Until You Mow The Lawn. Even when the depiction of hypnosis is positive, it’s virtually always depicted from an observer’s