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

Abstract

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.