The gorehound

I’ve landed myself in numerous strange situations in the name of journalism, but having an interviewee about-turn and stab me in the arm with an eight inch knife is definitely near the top of my weird-o-meter.

In retrospect, alarm bells should have sounded much earlier on that day. For a start, when the cab pulled into the car park of the “hotel” (it was more of a run-down, leafy castle), we were greeted by the welcoming sight of no cars, no guests and no staff. A rusty “Re...t..on” sign dangled precariously from the wall, and the door – despite the ‘Back in 5 minutes’ note – looked like it hadn’t been opened for years.

“It’s like a scene out of The Shining,” commented our ever-optimistic photographer. Oh happy day.

I have come to Northside Dublin’s most unpopular hotel to make the acquaintance of illusionist/magician/Slasher movie extra Daemon Codell. The word is that Codell specialises in staging sick, gorey and downright grotesque stunts to entertain people who find such things amusing. Pandering to train-wreck ‘I Shouldn’t Look But I Have To’ compulsions, Codell’s routine has seen his audiences leave, pass out and be physically sick on numerous occasions (a feat of which he is particularly proud). Looking around, however, I’m beginning to wonder if maybe the man is more dangerous than his PR lets on.

The floor of the hotel ballroom is splattered with blood. A selection of torturing devices are dotted about the room – a frame, rope and stool for hanging, a coffin for sawing people in half, a blood-soaked head lying unattended on the floor amid sundry other unorthodox theatrical equipment.

“Come over here then,” a voice bellows from the other side of the room. Codell emerges from the shadows, clad head to toe in black, with a menacing gleam in his eye. He strides across the room and grabs my right arm, blade in hand, and begins to roll up my sleeve. The thought of turning and running crosses my mind. But then I’d have a bug-eyed editor to deal with – I choose the lesser of two evils.

I’m looking at the knife in Codell’s hand, and it certainly appears very solid – there are no bendy bits, no second layer for the blade to disappear into, nothing. I’m wondering what’s next when all of a sudden he sinks the knife into my arm – it’s gone in about two inches. There’s no pain, at least I don’t feel like I’ve been slashed, but my arm looks like it’s got a big piece of metal stuck in it. Igor, Codell’s trusty assistant, who’s been hanging around like a bad case of the clap, douses me in blood for added authenticity.

Eeeeeww!

Daemon Codell is the alter ego of Dublin born Joe Daly, a seemingly normal individual who embraced both the name and the character of a legendary 18th Century magician, who made his name by sawing people in half on stage. However, unlike most illusionists, Codell’s stage show wasn’t actually an illusion.

“It was later found out that he actually killed his assistants in order to do the illusions”, smiles Joe. “He would saw someone in half with no boxes around them or anything. He literally got people off the streets who nobody would miss – prostitutes, transients, all this type of thing – and he’d employ them. Before the show, they were drugged so there’d be no major screams or anything.”

Codell came to a sticky end, courtesy of a hangman’s rope – but for an entirely different crime.

“The ironic thing is that he wasn’t put to death for his illusions – they were only discovered after he died,” Joe explains. “He was actually put to death for blasphemy. The story was that he used to claim that he resurrected people. It was just an illusion and he wasn’t killing anyone doing it, but it got on the wick of the heads of the church that this guy was claiming he was more powerful than God – and that’s what he was hung for.

“He had a group of disciples, fruit cakes, really, and they believed the hype that he would resurrect himself so they performed this ritual to bring him back from the dead. But, obviously, it didn’t work, so now, at the opening of the show, we do the ritual again and Daemon is resurrected so we’re bringing the story right up to date.”

Daly’s obsession with magic was kickstarted at the tender age of six when he was invited up on stage at a Paul Daniels show. However, his descent into the darker end of the illusionist’s spectrum stems from a desire to shock his audience on a deeper level.

“Magicians now, when they saw a girl in half, say ‘Ta da!’ and put her back together and the girl steps out. But what if you leave the audience thinking? What if you don’t put them back together again?

“A lot of our illusions are more psychological. We’ll chop off someone’s head with a guillotine and the person’s head will actually fall off – and you’re left with just an upper torso. Normally, the blade goes through his head and that’s the trick, but no – his head falls off.

“If you think of magic shows, most people imagine British conjuring – the Paul Daniels or the David Copperfields. There’s nothing wrong with David Copperfield, he’s a brilliant illusionist, but every magician in the world’s copying him. They’re all there with their slicked back hair, white shirts, leather trousers and it’s all a bit naff.

“But then you get the likes of David Blaine and it suddenly becomes very cool and there’s a lot of people saying magic is the new black. So I thought why not take the tackiness out of magic and make it into this really cool show – and that’s what we’ve done.”

Daly’s upcoming stage show, entitled Vapours, combines not only a deft knowledge of magic and illusion, but a plethora of cunning special effects developed by the Irish team behind Saving Private Ryan and Braveheart (“we shoot fireballs out over the audience”, he grins), as well as an incongruous soundtrack…

“For one of the illusions, we torture this clown to death by twisting the upper half of his body off and we use the song ‘Let’s Twist Again’ by Chubby Checker. People are laughing and yer man is there spitting blood and screaming in pain and you’ve Chubby Checker singing ‘Let’s twist again like we did last summer, yeeeaaah’.”

Although no one’s actually lost their torso yet, Daly did come a little too close for comfort to the sharp end of a knife.

“It’s generally a pretty safe practice”, he says, “but the biggest cock up we made was when I got stabbed in the eye. He (pointing at Igor – H.H.) was going for my throat, but he missed and almost managed to knock my eye out. That was the sorest thing – there was blood everywhere. And it was mine.”