Ok, i recently read the Hannibal Lecter trilogy and have two questions related to it:
In Red Dragon, Francis Dollarhyde lights Freddy Lounds and sends him on his merrry way, later on after Lounds is put out and is in hospital and there is mention of him “inahling flames” so my question is if i am set alight by a picture obsessed mass murderer should i take one deep breath and then hold it for as long as i can or take lots of very short breaths?
And question 2
In The Silence of the Lambs, it is said that Buffalo Bill (Jame Gumb) flays his victims, how does one go about flaying someone and have there been many criminals who have flayed their victims regularly and if they were caught was it surmised why they did so.
Flay:
To strip off the skin or outer covering of.
To whip or lash.
As far as serial killers flaying people, some did. Ed Gein and Gilles de Rais come to mind. A good source on serial killers is www.crimlibrary.com.
As far as the first question goes I would think it would be better to hold your breath in the hopes that someone would put you out really quickly. Otherwise you would be inhaling fire which isn’t very good on the lungs. But IANAD.
If you are ablaze at a constant rate, I would think that you would be better off with a long, slow breath so that the air hopefully has enough time to cool a little before making it to your lungs. If you are burning hotter by the moment, take a quick large breath, and hope you either escape or die before you need to do it again.
thanks but literally how do you flay someone? what sort of methods are used? has the none whipping meaning ever been used as a punishment? (iirc the romans flayed the back skin of their crucifiction victims but any others?)
Flaying (with a whip) was apparently a punishment for sailors in the British fleet for a long time. I can’t think of any other examples, but it was not particularly rare.
I don’t think that there are many people studying how to flay a human (with a knife), but the principle should be the same for any type of animal. Flaying is to remove the skin, so you pretty much take a knife and cut it away from the muscle under it.
Wish I could remember where I read about one flaying technique in which air is forced between the skin and the tendons (or whatever) that hold the skin on, breaking them and loosening the skin. You then simply have to cut it loose at the stronger attachment points and voila.
Was it from Hannibal Lecter that I learned that “each animal has enough brains to preserve [that is, tan] its own hide”? I think so, in Jame Gumb’s internal monologue on classic brain tanning.
Scarlett, copyediting a book on serial killers at this very moment
You skin a human the same way you’d skin any other mammal. You cut all the way around the wrists and ankles, then one long cut from genitals to belly. From there you make a “Y” cut across the chest and down the limbs, do the same with the legs. Now that you’ve made your starting cuts simply pull the edges of the skin and cut it away from the membrane that covers the muscles. If you are REALLY good at this you could concieveable keep your victim alive during this procedure, though the loss of blood ought to do them in quite quickly.
Generally speaking you would be aware that someone was going to set you alight because they cover you with a highly flammable substance (e.g. petrol) first, so you can take your big breath just before they throw the match. Then: DROP AND ROLL so that you put the fire out by starving the flames of oxygen. A fire blanket or extinguisher is also useful at these times.
DeaganTheWolf gives a good explanation. If someone is hirsute and you want to remove the hair, remember to shave the body first. Use a lubricant (e.g. shaving cream) and plenty of fresh razors or you’ll damage the skin. Otherwise you might want to use a body scrub (exfoliant) to remove the dead skin cells and improve the skin’s condition.
Interestingly, one of Australia’s favourite children’s songs - Tie me kangaroo down, sport - ends with the stockman requesting to be flayed so that his skin could be displayed on the wall of the shed. And they do it. Jeez, you gotta love this country.
Not these days perhaps, but there was once significant academic interest in flaying. Done “properly”, removing the skin allows the underlying musculature to be seen and studied. By the 18th century a knowledge of what this looked like and how this worked had become a part of the standard, institutionalised training for artists. The importance of such understanding as a foundation for portraying (male) nudes was being actively encouraged by the likes of Reynold’s Royal Academy.
As a result, a whole minor genre of study pieces - mainly small sculptures - of flayed men grew up. How many of these were simply being copied from other examples is difficult to say, but at least some derived from cases where executed criminals were being flayed for this purpose.
The excellent Spectacular Bodies exhibition, curated at the Hayward in London in 2000 by Martin Kemp, helped foreground this genre. There’s a drawing of a flayed man from the period on the cover of the US edition of the exhibition catalogue.
Sorta. IIRC, he mentioned that the Native Americans beleived that was true, but he didn’t agree with it, even for the larger primates. Thus, he kept a full stock of beef brain on hand.
There’s a rather famous painting (flemish, I believe) depicting the public flying of a corrupted judge. But since I can’t remember the painter’s or painting’s names, I can’t find a link.
I’ve read that technique through a link in an old cooking thread in Cafe Society. The goal was to leave the skin as intact as possible so it could be stuffed with ham or other things. It was part of a whole book on illusion foods (a fried fruit desert that looked like intestines, eggshells filled with almond milk pudding, etc)
