The audience stirred expectantly at the baroness’s first appearance, which was the grown-up Alraune being incarcerated inside a convent so that the scientist could study her as she grew up. Do they like me? thought Alice glancing round the theatre. Or are they simply curious?
Here was the brief scene with the music-master, with whom Alraune had her first real taste of passion. There had been some anxious moments about the timing of this, and Conrad had threatened to walk angrily out of the theatre if his music did not synchronize perfectly with the actor’s simulated playing of a violin, but Alice knew he would not do so, because he would not spoil her night.
But it was all right. The music – beckoning and faintly sinister – came in exactly on cue, and the scene moved from the music room to the bedroom, the bed discreetly veiled in gauze drapings, again in deference to the censor. It was a sumptuous setting, and Alice was still surprised that no one had seen anything bizarre about having such a sensual scene inside a convent.
The story spun itself on to the discovery by Alraune of her own heredity, and to the first unfolding of the black and bitter hatred. Alice remembered that scene very vividly indeed; she had found it almost impossible to imagine how a girl of sixteen or so would react on learning she had been conceived in such circumstances. The pain and the self-loathing all looked convincing on the screen though; in fact they looked frighteningly real, and Alice was again aware of a sense of deep unease. Where did I get those emotions from? Supposing such feelings don’t always come out of the past or the present? Supposing they sometimes come from the future…?
The writers had added a scene in the fourth reel, in which Alraune, now eighteen, destroyed the damning evidence of that grotesque conception. Alice watched critically as the camera moved to the tall old house where the prostitute lived. In an upstairs room, stuffed into an old bureau, were the letters exchanged between the scientist and the prostitute, clearly testifying to their dark pact. A good scene, the writers had said, pleased. A shocking and dramatic scene. Herr Ewers had been consulted, partly as a courtesy, but mostly because of copyright, and he had approved the scene. Entirely in character for Alraune to do that, he had apparently said. Very good indeed.
As the cloaked and hooded outline that was Alraune crept up the stairs of the house, casting its own distorted shadow on the wall, Conrad’s music began to trickle in again. At first it was so fragile it was barely audible – no more than a wraith of sound, tapping gently against your mind. But then it began to take on strength and substance, becoming rhythmic and menacing. The beating of a hating heart…
As the fire, ignited to burn the letters, blazed up, the camera panned outwards to take in the whole house front, and there, at one of the windows, surrounded by the leaping flames, was the terrified figure of the prostitute. Alraune’s mother. Trapped in the burning building, her hair already alight and blazing, her mouth wide open in a silent cry for help…Get-me-out…Get me out before I burn alive…