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Pittsburgh Triumphant
Indie filmmakers create black-and-white horror film for the 21st Century


By Greg Goodsell, Bakotopia.com Contributor

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. - Oscar Wilde

Jim Towns, co-director of “Prometheus Triumphant: a Fugue in the Key of Flesh” tells the story of his visit to the notorious Mummers Museum in Philadelphia.

Among the vast collection of medical curiosities was a human skull with an iron rod pushed clean through. “It was during the time when train engines were wont to explode at any given time,” Towns explained. Said victim was a man who managed to survive the ordeal and would go on to lead a normal life and die of natural causes - albeit with an iron rod pushed through his skull.



The anecdote dovetails nicely with Towns’ film as both address the resiliency of the human spirit to triumph over grotesque odds. Prometheus is a black-and-white silent Gothic horror film for the 21st Century, calling to mind E. Elias Merhige’s “Begotten” (1996), the films of Carl Dreyer, and most especially Guy Maddin, who Towns says he was only recently made aware of through “The Saddest Music in the World” (2006). “Prometheus” could be a direct descendant of Maddin’s earlier features, such as “Tales from the Gimli Hospital” and “Careful,” “except without any winking to the audience.”



“Prometheus has a very classical love story at its heart. Two mismatched lovers. It’s set in a nebulous time period and place, a lot like the Universal films such as ‘The Wolf Man’ and ‘The Son of Frankenstein.’ You know it's sometime between the 1880s and the 1930s, but you can't quite discern it. There's an anachronistic quality to it.



I point out that a lot of these classic horrors appear to be set in some Victorian era when a telephone will suddenly pop up. “In ‘The Wolf Man,’ there are gypsies and then there’s Lon Chaney Jr. driving a car. I kind of love that. And there’s also that part where Chaney takes a cart with Maia Ouspenskaya from Wales to Switzerland. I love that nebulous world, because it’s almost a fantasy world. You just can’t quite place it.”

Towns and company tried to recapture this non-era-specific atmosphere with the resources that their limited budget would allow.



“It takes place during one of the last great plagues that’s sweeping this Germanic town in the mountains. The doctors at the local university are confounded and have no way of helping. The hero is Janick (Josh Ebel), who is a kind of upstart young medical student or doctor, who has very radical ideas about life and death. When he promotes these techniques as a way to combat the plague, instead of being rewarded and congratulated as a hero, his theories are rejected as being too radical and he's decried as a heretic.



He has a kind of secret love in the doctor’s daughter Esmeralda, who then succumbs to the plague, and without Janick around to help her, she dies from it. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that Janick comes back in a more mysterious disguised form, exhumes her, and begins a very slow and laborious process of not only reanimating her, but also restoring her to the woman he loves.”

Does it all come back to bite him in the ass?



“No! No! There was a point where we made a conscious decision, since we had a Frankenstein story, and ‘Modern Prometheus’ was the original title for ‘Frankenstein,’ the Frankenstein story is always a morality tale about the presumption of man to assume the power of God, and it always ends tragically. We thought there’s no reason for this to end tragically…”

Prometheus succeeds in creating an undefined European landscape largely through a careful collection of settings, all for the taking in that most American of cities, Pittsburgh. Abandoned foundries, mental hospitals and decaying structures, each with their own brand of poetry and desolation, was there for the filmmakers’ taking.

“It was incredible, some of the locations we got,” Towns said.

“Prometheus” has tons of atmosphere, a lush musical score by Lucien Desar, and more than just a generous helping of sex.

There is ample nudity and a (fairly discrete) scene of necrophilia. Making the round of the film festival circus, visit: www.madmonkeyproductions.com to acquire the DVD.



Also printed in Bakotopia magazine, issue 36, 9-4-08