If, as we are told in Genesis, God created form from formlessness, and gave spirit to blank matter, then it is the puppeteer whose powers achieve something like the divine. Manipulating fingers, strings, hidden voices, shadows, paper cut-outs, or carefully placed lights, the artist crouches beneath or behind the stage and transforms into a kind of demiurge, animating the inert and imbuing a previously inanimate figure with movement, character, and life. This process is a form of transference, a physical transmission of energy and dexterity from puppeteer to puppet. The puppet is a hollow vessel, to be filled with our life force. Hence why puppets are so creepy: they require our life to live out their own. Yet no matter how cheap, how threadbare, how see-through their mechanisms, they fascinate us. In some strange and ancient way, perhaps, we recognize ourselves in them.
The Re-Animators
