How to Shrink-wrap a heretic or a TV Star
The MythBusters were working on the movie myth that full body paint could kill you – as in the case of the supposed death of the gold colored James Bond girl (and no - she’s not dead not unless the MythBusters has a very good necromancer on staff)– and they came upon a snag. Jamie’s blood pressure started to sky rocket and they were mystified as to why.
I was mystified by their confusion, especially since I knew the answer! And largely because I am a horror writer! (Although being a med student helped.)
Now don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan and I think these guys rock, their show is one of only three I watch on TV (and then only on my vacations since our family does not own a functioning TV); and I am also aware that Adam and Jamie almost always get a definitive answer…but man, this one bugged me because it just seemed so obvious to me.
Their error was in using liquid latex to create their gold body suit…and liquid latex is a full body rubber band. They were compressing him, and death by compression, or pressing is nothing new.
Most of the first incidences of compression in the West involved large stones, a tradition that is most recently noted in popularly in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible where he fictionalizes the accounts of the Salem Witch trials which included the death by pressing of one Giles Cory, but there is a more gruesome method – widely practiced during the Spanish Inquisition, but also used by various Native American Indian cultures and some Arabic and even Tibetan ones as well involved leather. Untreated leather to be precise – what is usually called rawhide, these days.
There is a reason that modern leathers are oiled, treated with various conditioners, and in extreme cases, like in Wellington boots or the Australian full thigh boots, darted – that is joined with some spacing material – with spandex, lycra or gore-tex.
There is also a reason why leathers are dry-cleaned to keep these oils and conditioners in place.
Untreated leather shrinks and it also hardens as it does. Many early cultures were aware of this and used rawhide leathers as a sort of shrink wrap.
- One example of this is the Tibetan practice of wrapping tea blocks in leather and then thoroughly soaking the resulting blocks in river water.
These blocks are then left lying in bundles near a very hot fire. As they dry the leather bundles shrink and compress the loose leaves together and press out air and water.
The leather also hardens as it dries and creates very hard, stiff square packet that is then quite easy to transport. If you have ever given your dog a rawhide chew toy then you know exactly what I am talking about.
This is great stuff for tea, rice, or other things that had to be transported in as compact and protected a way as possible. And the faster it dried the harder and tighter the packet became.
The Arabs used this as a method of protecting silks, papyrus, salt, and so forth as well.
It is believed that the first step “up” from using this method for package storage to using it for punishment evolved in hot desert climates in a milder form.
The victim was staked out spread eagle in the desert sun, which is bad enough, but the thongs used to stake him or her out were made of rawhide, soaked in water or urine – and that was worse.
As it dried the stuff shrank and grew shorter with the result that it exerted pressure on the victims’ limbs and cut into their wrists and ankles first and then slowly drew and quartered them.
The full treatment of wrapping the person in leather was a bit slower to come and seems to have developed in various stages all around the world.
Sometimes just the victims’ arm or leg was wrapped, sometimes their chest to allow a slow suffocation, and then finally the full monty.
It seems that my Castilian Spanish ancestors were the first to shrink wrap people and they started by doing the Cathars – a “rogue” branch of the Roman Catholic Church during one of many Spanish Inquisitions.
While not as entertaining as burning or as temporary as water boarding, pressing a witch was a great way to get your confession out of your heretic and a truly fantastic way of dealing with the body afterward. The leather wrap helped to protect you from the diseases, effluvia, and smell of a dead witch and thus allowed you to speed up production, as you did not have to call a time out to bury them between bodies – and sadly, as I am sure you know, the truly evil do tend to love their efficiencies. (After all, the trains are all on time.)
Now the weird bit. Modern fetishists soon figured out that latex acts in the same fashion. It shrinks and compresses as it dries, thus allowing both the sadist and the masochist their little kicks, something a topless dancer friend of mine once mentioned to me as a downside of her profession.
I actually did some research on this after seeing the show, because it gave me an idea for a story, saintaspie.deviantart.com, because you would not believe the amount of research a writer has to do – and how many nitpickers send nasty letters if you skimp!
I both talked to several fetishists and bought a can of the stuff for myself.
Believe it or not, there is a compression danger warning on my can that clearly states that you should never cover more than one third of your body with the stuff at any time.
And the fetishists I spoke too said this is religion in their world. That is why it is usually pored on or spattered rather than painted on, and why bare patches are always monitored for redness (Hence the thing about leaving a patch of skin, MythBuster guys!) so that blood pressure can be visually monitored before health is truly endangered.
And of course I heard rumors about snuff films and latex murders, but given the warning and Jamie’s experience on the show with the stuff, I’d say deaths are definitively possible.
I have also hence discovered that the Bond girl was NOT latexed. They used gold body paint.
And there you have it. Anyone know how I can contact the awesome MythBusters crew and tell them? I don’t want any credit or recognition, I just hate unsolved puzzles, and am willing to bet they do too.
Oh and as a final aside, many modern horror writers have used pressing or compression deaths in their stories. One of my favorites, for technical accuracy and sheer grotesque detail, is Stephen King’s “The Raft” found in his Skeleton Crew collection.
Check it out.
And remember, the tale – not he who tells it!
