Paul A J Lewis and Peter True
“You’re not having a moment, are you?” Dr Feinstone’s (Corbin Bernsen) wife Brooke (Linda Hoffman) asks her husband over the telephone after, in the grip of a psychotic episode, he has pierced a young boy’s gum during a routine dental examination. Filmed in gruesome extreme closeup, this is the first—and remarkably, least graphic—of many mouth-related injuries that take place in Brian Yuzna’s films The Dentist (1996) and The Dentist 2 (1998). These two films take the body horror motifs with which Yuzna’s whole career has been associated, and meld them onto narrative techniques associated with film noir in order to deliver a satirical examination of a society that privileges control (and particularly, control over one’s appearance) which, intentionally, is difficult to swallow. (Pun intended.)
Brian Yuzna came to The Dentist with strong credentials in body horror, thanks to his role as the producer of Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986), which Yuzna also co-wrote. Moving from film production to directing with Society in 1989, Yuzna consolidated his association with body horror through his handling of a story that focused on a privileged Beverly Hills community secretly controlled by shape-shifting aliens, and which climaxes with a party in which said entities perform “shunting” in a veritable orgy of grue, sex, and satire.
As a director, Yuzna followed Society with three sequels to existing franchises, all of which employed vividly-realised makeup effects to emphasise the destruction, transformation, and mutilation of the human body. Bride of Re-Animator and Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 (both 1990), and Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993) extended Yuzna’s fascination with body horror motifs, all three films offering a depiction of the human body as near-plastic and utterly malleable. In these films, dead body parts are crafted onto other dead body parts to create unrecognisable creatures, a woman births a huge cockroach before experiencing a horrific Kafka-esque metamorphosis, and military experiments with the undead are carried out in a secret scientific complex, resulting in an outbreak of hideous once-human monsters.
Each of Yuzna’s films are loaded with satire: of the privileged Beverly Hills quarter (Society), of gender conflicts (SNDN4), or of the military-industrial complex that squanders seemingly limitless amounts of public money on the edge of a city crammed with poverty and homelessness (ROTLD3). Despite the fact that some of these projects were sequels to existing properties or written by others, there is nevertheless a strong sense throughout Yuzna’s work of a distinctive authorial voice that is fascinated with the relationship between body horror motifs and social issues—particularly relating to privilege, power, and control.
Yuzna came to The Dentist after the project had been pitched to producer Pierre David by previous Yuzna collaborators Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli. The pitch was developed in response to Trimark head Mark Amin’s request for David to produce a picture that would be distributed by Trimark. Gordon and Paoli wrote a complete script for the film which was then tailored by another writer, Charles Finch.
In The Dentist, the carefully managed world of respected Beverly Hills dentist Dr Alan Feinstone begins to fall apart when, on their wedding anniversary, Feinstone suspects his wife Brooke of having an affair with their pool cleaner, Matt (Michael Stadvec). Feinstone’s paranoia is amplified when IRS agent Marvin Goldblum (Earl Boen) contacts him, suggesting that he will overlook some gaps in Feinstone’s tax returns in exchange for some free dental work. As the day progresses, Feinstone finds himself in the grip of a major psychotic episode, resulting in moments of horrendous violence enacted against the mouths of his patients, employees, and his wife.
In The Dentist 2, Feinstone breaks out of the mental hospital in which he has been incarcerated and begins a new life in the town of Paradise, Missouri. After murdering the town’s dentist, Dr. Burns, Feinstone takes his place and begins to fall in love with local woman Jamie (Jillian McWhirter). However, Brooke has hired a private detective to track down her husband, and Feinstone is also faced with being identified by a visiting out-of-towner (Clint Howard) and nosey bank teller Bev (Susanne Wright).
Gordon and Paoli’s original script for The Dentist took place entirely within the dental surgery over a period that Yuzna has described as being “almost in real time” (Yuzna 2023a). During rewrites, Finch extended the plot so that it took place over a couple of days, and added the concept that the story was being narrated by Feinstone after his incarceration in a mental hospital. The film’s distinctive pre-credit sequence, depicting Feinstone miming a dental checkup against a pure white backdrop, was developed to anchor this and ensure from the get-go that the audience recognised Feinstone as “a very unreliable narrator” (Yuzna/Forrante 2023a).
The second film was scripted by another writer, Richard Dana Smith, but continues the narrative of The Dentist in an organic way and feels very much authored by both Yuzna’s presence behind the camera and Corbin Bernsen’s performance as the deeply unsympathetic Feinstone.
Central to The Dentist is Feinstone’s fastidiousness, established early in the film through the mise-en-scène of the Feinstone home: all modernist hard angles and minimalist design. His home is arguably more clinical and less “homely” than the themed operatories at Feinstone’s surgery. “But underneath that clean white surface, there was the stench of decay,” Feinstone observes in his narration. In both films, the disruption of this “clean white surface” precipitates Feinstone’s violence. In The Dentist 2, Feinstone tries to regain control by building a clinical and minimalist operatory on the top floor of Dr Burns’ house; it’s in this room that the film’s climax takes place, with both Jamie and Brooke fending off the dastardly dentist.
Feinstone’s fastidiousness is also captured through the film’s photography. Dennis Maloney was the cinematographer on the first film, but left the production owing to a family emergency; he was replaced by Levie Isaacks. Before his departure, Maloney established a distinctive, slightly overexposed aesthetic for The Dentist which Yuzna has described as “this sort of over bright, very crisp look” (Yuzna/Forrante 2023a). The intention was to “burn out parts of the scene. Just burn it out and give it a texture, so there’s a lot of contrast [….] Normally in a horror movie you’d be going dark, and smoky, and colours” (Yuzna/Forrante 2023a). Describing the look as “clean,” Yuzna has said that the photographic style of the film was intended to articulate Feinstone’s obsession with cleanliness and his hatred of “filth.”
This also made it difficult to “hide” some of the effects work. What Yuzna has called an “oversized mouth” was built by the special effects team, including Kevin Yagher and Anthony C Ferrante. This large mouth was used in sequences that depict Feinstone using his dental drill to grind teeth into stumps, and tear apart tongues and gums. The effects involving the oversized mouth were filmed with a wide angle lens, SFX technician Josh Logan saying that one of the things Yuzna taught him was that “when you’re shooting gore, use a super wide lens, and push it up as close to the subject because it makes effects look much punchier” (“Mouths of Madness”).
Mouths are the pivot point of the horror within The Dentist. The narratives of both films are interrupted by sequences in which the aforementioned “oversized mouth” effect is employed to show nightmarish visions of healthy mouths transformed into pits of putrescence. In extreme close-up, tongues and gums are torn apart by dental drills; teeth are ground to nothing; mouths are clamped open using implements that resemble medieval torture devices. In fact, Anthony C. Ferrante has said that the production team scoured dental surgeries to acquire real dentistry implements that were “the most medieval stuff we could find” (Yuzna and Ferrante, 2023a). If body horror is marked by its fascination with the abject, in The Dentist and The Dentist 2 the abject is located specifically within the mouth.
In a particularly memorable effect, Marvin Goldblum’s mouth is clamped open unnaturally. (The effect was achieved via the creation of a prosthetic mouth, tongue, and jaw that hid the actor’s real chin within its fake oral cavity.) The sequel features less frequent moments of “body horror” punctuation than The Dentist, but when these moments come, they are splendidly unpleasant—including possibly the most abject scene in both pictures: working on the teeth of his beloved Jamie, Alan experiences a vision of Jamie’s mouth filled with cockroaches that emerge from behind her gums and crawl across her tongue. In The Dentist 2, Golblum’s mutilation finds its echo in Feinstone’s disfiguration of Bev. Telling Bev to smile before clamping her mouth open, Feinstone uses his dental drill to grind one of her molars into a stump before gouging at the exposed nerve in an effort to extract information from her. (All of this is filmed in loving closeup.) Later we see Bev’s dead body discovered, her face locked into a permanent Joker-esque smile by the fact that the dentist has, perimortem, removed the epidermis from around her mouth, exposing her the bloody muscles and subcutaneous tissue. (The effect is not dissimilar to the appearance of the Chatterer Cenobite in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.)
The Dentist and The Dentist 2 are difficult to contain within a singular genre. Yuzna has invited comparisons between the first film and the tropes of the slasher movie, saying that The Dentist is “sort of a bodycount movie [even though] actually there aren’t that many killings” (Yuzna/Forrante 2023a). Both pictures draw on the horror elements (specifically body horror motifs, here tied to anxieties surrounding the mouth and dental interventions) associated with Yuzna’s career, but they frame this within tropes, specifically, of film noir. The hardboiled narration from Feinstone’s perspective, the focus on the dissolution of the mind alongside the fragmentation or outright destruction of the self, the overwhelming anxiety surrounding sex and intimacy; all of these suggest elements of commonality between The Dentist films and noir—but tied up in, and expressed through, body horror’s fixation on the symbolic mutilation, manipulation, and destruction of the body.
Specifically, if body horror is about a fear of the abject or, more precisely, the bodily abject—including the decaying and broken body, divided into its component parts—The Dentist and its sequel focus on a character who is repulsed by the abject and by sexuality. Feinstone’s avowed dislike of “filth” manifests itself in moments in which he is challenged sexually, and is connected to his fixation on dental decay. “Filth was everywhere,” Feinstone narrates whilst driving to work, “The disease was spreading. How deep did it go? To the nerve?”
Reinforcing the film’s association of sex and the abject, the major inciting incident of the first film occurs when Feinstone sees, or thinks he sees, Brooke performing fellatio on pool cleaner Matt. Feinstone witnesses Matt’s filthy hands—contaminated by having cleaned the filter on the Feinstones’ outdoor swimming pool—leaving a dirty, muddy residue on Brooke’s clean skin. The camera emphasises this in closeup. In this precise moment, Feinstone’s rage visibly intensifies. Later, whilst deliriously under the influence of nitrous oxide in Feinstone’s surgery, beauty queen April grabs Feinstone’s crotch, and Feinstone imagines a similar muddy stain on his trousers. (Again, Yuzna emphasises this in a close-up.)
From its opening moments, the film doesn’t hesitate to establish Feinstone as abusive and controlling, cruelly berating Brooke in response to a simple mix-up over his shirt. As a dentist, the mouth is the sole domain in which Feinstone has control. After spying on Brooke performing fellatio on Matt, Feinstone holds a pistol on the couple. “I’m a dentist and this is my wife,” he tells Matt, “You know what that means? It means she’s got a perfect bite! C’mon, hun, show him how good your teeth are.” Yuzna cuts away from this scene. Only later do we learn that Matt is still alive, so the moment of revenge was a fantasy. However, it remains unclear whether or not the entire poolside scene was a product of Feinstone’s imagination. Feinstone’s ultimate act of “revenge” against Brooke, enacted at the film’s climax, involves luring her into his new opera house-themed operatory and removing her tongue and teeth.
Aside from the violence meted out by Feinstone against his victims’ mouths, both films feature scenes in which mouths are penetrated by fingers in a manner that suggests sexual domination. In The Dentist, the sedated April unintentionally sucks Feinstone’s finger suggestively, leading Feinstone to confuse April with his wife Brooke. This incident precipitates Feinstone’s sexual assault and attempted murder of April, interrupted by April’s agent/boyfriend Steve. In the sequel, Feinstone experiences a role-reversal nightmare in which he is in a dental chair and Brooke penetrates his mouth with her finger; she teases his tongue out of his mouth before amputating it as revenge for Feinstone’s mutilation of her own mouth in the first film.
The noir associations are amplified in The Dentist 2. With its story of a murderous sociopath hiding in plain sight in smalltown America, the sequel has striking similarities with the work of the hardboiled crime writer Jim Thompson. (Thompson’s novels—such as The Killer Inside Me—often focused on outwardly respectable members of small towns who secretly harbour murderous instincts.) Here, it’s perhaps worth noting that Feinstone’s psychotic episodes appear to precede the narrative of the first film, which features a number of sequences in which Brooke asks her husband if he has taken his (presumably antipsychotic) medication.
Yuzna, Bernsen, and Pierre were keen to pursue a third Dentist film, possibly with Feinstone relocating to a dental surgery based in a shopping mall (Yuzna/Ferrante 2023b). When this project faltered, Yuzna and Bernsen developed a concept for a similar horror film focusing on a plastic surgeon instead, but struggled to find funding. With The Dentist and its sequel, Yuzna crafted a fascinating diptych of pictures in which body horror motifs are employed within a satirical examination of, in the first film, the privileged Beverly Hills set and their focus on the “perfect” smile and, in the sequel, the “folksy” smalltown milieu and its proud opposition to the city. The Dentist himself—and Bernsen’s superb performance in both pictures must be mentioned here—uses his adaptive charm and professional expertise in order to gain access to, and navigate through, both of these environments and their communities. Once in place and triggered by his need to exert control, Feinstone slowly releases his unconscionable hatred and violence like an unexploded wartime bomb. Time for a check-up?
Works Cited
“Mouths of Madness.” The Dentist. Vestron Video Collector’s Series, 2023. Blu-ray
Yuzna, Brian & Ferrante, Anthony C, audio commentary. The Dentist. Vestron Video Collector’s Series, 2023a
Yuzna, Brian & Ferrante, Anthony C, audio commentary. The Dentist 2. Vestron Video Collector’s Series, 2023b
