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Screen 2006 47(2):201-211; doi:10.1093/screen/hjl016
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved

The case of the phantom fetish: Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires

Elizabeth Ezra

This article examines the recurring image of the severed head in Louis Feuillade's serial film Les Vampires (1915-16), linking it to the anxieties and traumas engendered by the First World War. In particular, it argues for a reconsideration of the image's emblematic status as a symbol of castration, and suggests that the castration complex itself may be best understood as a fetish, acting as a decoy for other losses that cannot be acknowledged overtly (those killed and wounded at war). Like a phantom limb, the castration fetish is a substitute that at once disavows an absence and acts as a memorial to that absence.


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