The 1979 black comedy Wise Blood stars Brad Dourif—best known for providing the voice of Chucky in Child’s Play—as Hazel Motes, a war veteran and founder of the irreligious Church of Truth Without Christ. After returning from the army, Hazel decides to become a sidewalk preacher and encounters a number of strange characters along the way. One of those people is Enoch Emory (played by Dan Shor), a newcomer to the city looking for something to believe in. At one point, Enoch takes Hazel to a museum, where he shows him a man’s shrunken corpse.
Enoch later steals the corpse from the museum, believing it to be the new Jesus. He delivers it to Hazel’s girlfriend, who dresses up like the Virgin Mary and poses with it in front of Hazel. This angers Hazel, and he grabs the shrunken man from her, smashing it against the wall and detaching its head from its shoulders. Hazel then picks up the head and throws it out of the window for good measure.
The Shrunken Head in Wise Blood Wasn’t a Prop. It Was Real.
Here’s the wild part: That shrunken corpse prop? Not exactly a prop after all. As it turns out, the little noggin used for the miniature dead man was an actual shrunken head—known as a “tsantsa”—that had been obtained by a man named James Ostelle Harrison in 1942. Harrison was a former faculty member at Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia, who came across the head while traveling in Ecuador. He eventually donated it to the university, where it was displayed for decades in campus museums.
It was loaned out as a prop for Wise Blood and remained in storage for many years after its return. Upon rediscovering the tsantsa in 2018, Mercer biology professor Craig Byron conducted research to determine whether it was authentic. Byron’s team determined that not only was it a genuine human head used for ceremonial purposes more than 80 years prior, but also belonged to the slain enemy of the person responsible for it. Once the research was completed, the tsantsa was repatriated to the General Consulate of Ecuador in Atlanta.
You can catch a glimpse of the shrunken head as seen in Wise Blood at around the one-minute and six-second mark below.
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