Summary
A tremulous society matron, Mrs. Evangeline Royce—played by Lucia Moore with the brittle luminosity of a chandelier about to shatter—discovers that the gilded cage of her marriage is infested, quite literally, by a chitinous microcosm of her own repressed appetites. While her railroad-baron husband (Forrest Robinson) thunders down steel tracks of commerce, Evangeline remains in their Manhattan mausoleum of a townhouse, where the wallpaper’s damask pattern begins to ripple with the scuttle of barely visible arachnids. Enter the governess, Hester Vale (Mabel Taliaferro), whose dove-grey eyes conceal the predatory patience of a praying mantis; she arrives clutching a petit-point satchel that never leaves her lap, inside which something alive chews incessantly. Between them flits Marguerite Leslie’s uncanny cameo as the spectral child-Bride, a pre-pubescent apparition in lace mitts who speaks only in entomological Latin and serves as the film’s lepidopterous chorus. Into this parlour of hush and rustle comes Dr. Felix Möbius (Ralph Morgan), an alienist whose beard smells faintly of ether and old love letters; he proposes that the mites are “psychogenic ectoparasites,” blisters of the soul made manifest. The plot spirals like a moth toward candle: Evangeline’s desire for her own gender, Hester’s vengeance for a sister long ago sacrificed to the Royce fortune, and the doctor’s obsession with proving that passion can be distilled into a powder and snuffed like snuff. Robert Edeson’s Reverend Dorsey tries to exorcise the townhouse with psalms and coal-oil, but the insects merely rearrange themselves into erotic topographies on the ceiling. When the husband returns, he finds his wife wrapped in a cocoon of silk stockings, her mouth a perfect O of bliss and terror, while Hester—now wearing Evangeline’s wedding gown—waltzes with the child-Bride beneath a rain of chitin that glitters like mica. The final shot is a single three-minute close-up: Moore’s iris dilating until the reflected silhouette of the audience itself appears, as though the film has been devouring us all along.
Synopsis
