Biblical Scholars in Pop Culture & The Media: (2) The Abominable Dr Phibes, Again

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Abominable Dr Phibes, Dr Phibes, rabbi, symbols

“I would imagine that scholars of religion exist largely in the movies to explain the happenings in horror movies to unbelievers and skeptics.”
(Eric Repphun)

The 1971 classic, The Abominable Dr Phibes, contains not just one character who is a biblical scholar, but two biblical scholars! It is a veritable biblical scholar-fest. In addition to Dr Phibes himself, the film includes a Jewish scholar and rabbi, whose role is to explain the hidden meaning of the murders to the investigating police detective. This is perhaps the most common and hackneyed role for the religious or biblical scholar appearing in horror movies, as Dr Repphun surmises above.

The old bearded scholar creates an ambivalent mix of scholarly erudition and mystical spookification. He provides the film with a rational (albeit contrived and ridiculous) explanation for the series of murders which is taking place – i.e. that they are mimicing the ten plagues of the book of Exodus. And he also heightens the sense of the uncanny within the film, that spine-chilling decentering which is the necessary fuel of any horror movie (and which in The Abominable Dr Phibes threatens to disappear underneath the film’s campy absurdity).

When we first view the Jewish scholar in his study, he appears through the frame of an iron gate, and is sitting behind a wooden and somewhat ecclesiastical-looking desk, with a colonnade in the background – a scene overdramatically mysterious and arcane. When the camera zooms in, the scholar is as wide-eyed as a lunatic – every part the mad academic. He is on the left-hand side of the shot, which foregrounds two huge feather quills in their respective inkwells and a collection of odd artefacts. On the right is a puzzled police detective, brow furrowed as he struggles to understand the scholar’s undoubted profundity.

The Abominable Dr Phibes - The Jewish Scholar

While the scholar translates the meaning of Hebrew, he refers to the Hebrew word for blood as “the Hebrew symbol for blood.” As we know from Dr Langdon’s stated area of expertise in The Da Vinci Code, “symbols” are much more mysterious and profound than mere words. Again, there is a mix of rational explanation and mystification.

The greatest moment of spookification in this scene occurs when the police detective queries, concerning the ten plagues of Egypt, “But, ah, all of this would be myth, of course, Sir?” The scholar’s eyes open up wide, and he says, with a hushed reverence, “Oooooh, I think not… There is little doubt that the plagues did occur.” The scholar appears to know this for certain, and this can only be by some uncanny intuition which cannot be understood by the untrained. But absent is any hint of a scholarly method of arriving at such a conclusion. According to the rabbi, the stories of the plagues only “seem a myth.” When it comes to the great miracles of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the biblical scholar seems to be mystically in touch with reality in a way that transcends rational enquiry. Which is not too far from the MO of many current biblical scholars, I guess.

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Biblical Scholars in Pop Culture & The Media: (1) The Abominable Dr Phibes

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Abominable Dr Phibes, Da Vinci Code, Dr Phibes, Robert Langdon, vengeance, Vincent Price, Vulnavia

It would be interesting to systematically examine the various portrayals of biblical scholars when they appear in various media – newspaper reports, television, etc – and in film and television, so as to discover the dominant ways in which they are represented, and so to discover the lenses through which biblical scholarship is typically presented to and construed by the general public.

One of the more familiar media idealisations of biblical scholars (which has little to do with reality) is of the scientific voice in the wilderness, of one who has suddenly discovered new “facts” which will potentially undermine all of Christendom and/or religion. The paradigm for this type of scholar, of course, is fictional “symbologist”(!) Robert Langdon of The Da Vinci Code fame. This type of character, the modern scholar in opposition to secretive, conspiratorial, fearful, and insecure traditional religion, is a modernist fantasy, but one which the media regularly constructs for “biblical scholarship” as a whole.  Whenever some archaeological finding or piece of biblical scholarship hits the news (whether in fact new or old), a biblical scholar typically gets wheeled in for comments, which are then framed to fit the (often sensationalised) needs of the story. On occasion, the scholar’s point of view is portrayed more or less correctly, but more often than not she ends up serving this dominant caricature of biblical scholarship which has long been nurtured by the media.

Such a portrayal of biblical scholars is no less fictional than the portrayal of mass-murdering biblical scholar Dr Phibes in the 1971 horror film, The Abominable Dr Phibes – which plays on another widespread public misperception, the tendency to confuse the scholar with his subject matter. Played by Vincent Price, Dr Phibes has a PhD in Theology, which, as the chief inspector notes, “neatly explains his knowledge of the Old Testament.” For Dr Phibes plans to kill nine doctors and then himself, utilising methods that recollect the ten plagues of Egypt. For example, Dr. Hargraves’s head is crushed by a mechanical frog mask, Dr. Longstreet has all the blood drained out of his body by Phibes and his beautiful female assistant who is named Vulnavia, etc, etc. And – displaying the breadth of his biblical scholarship – Phibes designs amulets for each of the gruesome yet farcical murders, upon which is written the name of each plague… in Hebrew.

Dr Phibes seems to have embodied the vengeance and retribution which pervades the Old Testament; his nine murder victims are the medical doctors and nurse who failed to save his beloved wife from her mortal illness. The subject matter of the biblical scholar has become completely fused with the character of the scholar himself. 

The whole film is viewable in its full splendour, here: