I swear there was one very large, ornate, floor-standing candlestick that appeared in every film.
Thought-provoking post by sovay on Hammer's Horror of Dracula.
Vampire round-up:
--I tried watching an episode of Dark Shadows, the one where Barnabas Collins appears for the first time. It was rather fun, and Collins is an engaging vampire, rich, overdressed, and so courteous he makes you nervous. I can't say it inspired me with a wild urge to watch the rest of the series, though. It had a soap-operatic, glacially paced feel (well, obviously it is a soap), and I could see that there wasn't going to be an emotionally satisfying climax anytime in the next umpteen hours of episodes. And I'm usually the person who wants stories to take more time and movies to be more contemplative. You can have too much of a good thing. I kinda want to like it, though. I remember Esther Friesner writing in one of her essays on Tolkien that as a young student she took time out from her crush on Legolas for a crush on Mr. Spock and then on Barnabas. If anyone has a great attachment to Dark Shadows, I'd like to hear about it.
--In "Monsters, Foreigners and Outsiders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages", which, by the way, is still an awesome course, we've been talking about a scholar named Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and his monster theses. He has seven concepts of the monstrous. I'm trying to learn them for a test, actually (it's pretty boss that I'm taking a midterm in monster theory, have I mentioned that?). They're ideas like "Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire", and "The monster polices the borders of the possible" (as in, the monster is made from taboos or commits them--things that are possible for humans, because they have been done, but are way out past the boundaries of what's acceptable in human society). I'll list them all later, it'll help me study.
I bring this up because I came up with a monster thesis of my own: "The monster changes when it is observed". This is like Cohen's further theory, "The monster is a harbinger of category crisis": for starters, monsters tend to be uncategorizable, perhaps because they're the result of two or more categories being combined. My own idea says the same, but goes in a different direction. Monsters are uncategorizable. So far, so good. Take the vampire, for instance. Human-looking, sucks blood, potentially very scary, and the Western idea of vampires has been assembled from a multitude of different legends and more recent media. Thus, vampires can potentially vary immensely depending on what legend or new concept the creator uses. They may not even resemble the few characteristics I listed above.
Vampires are immensely popular this century-plus, thanks to Bram Stoker and the film industry, and during the last thirty years, thanks to popular fiction. All the massive popularity and attention has created a stereotype vampire: Bela Lugosi in evening dress, perhaps with visible fangs and bloody drool. That's the observed vampire, which isn't really a monster in the sense of "aberrant creature" anymore because we know him so well. We've created a category for him, good old Count von Count. This means that there's a great surge of creative artists trying to make their vampires new and different, to defy the new category that has appeared to try to trap the monster. That's part of Where We Get Sparkly Vampires: the attempt to ring new changes, to remain mysterious and uncategorized. (The sparkly vamps in turn create a huge upswell of authors going, "My vampires are REAL, the way monsters Used To Be, my vamp can beat up your vamps." I don't think anyone gets to say that their own vampires are the real, original, honest, accept-no-substitutes vampires while other people's are phony. But I do like to make fun of Twilight as much as the next girl.)
Time to study! But this is so much more fun. Yes, and it even counts as studying this semester. Woot! Still, time to buckle down and study of the French language and of the Chinese history.
Oh, BTW, today's my twenty-ninth birthday. Gosh. We're celebrating tomorrow night, my parents and I, because I have school till late and then fencing practice. At the moment, though, I'm going to go sit and study near Emily Dickinson's grave. It's the perfect afternoon for it.
Vampire round-up:
--I tried watching an episode of Dark Shadows, the one where Barnabas Collins appears for the first time. It was rather fun, and Collins is an engaging vampire, rich, overdressed, and so courteous he makes you nervous. I can't say it inspired me with a wild urge to watch the rest of the series, though. It had a soap-operatic, glacially paced feel (well, obviously it is a soap), and I could see that there wasn't going to be an emotionally satisfying climax anytime in the next umpteen hours of episodes. And I'm usually the person who wants stories to take more time and movies to be more contemplative. You can have too much of a good thing. I kinda want to like it, though. I remember Esther Friesner writing in one of her essays on Tolkien that as a young student she took time out from her crush on Legolas for a crush on Mr. Spock and then on Barnabas. If anyone has a great attachment to Dark Shadows, I'd like to hear about it.
--In "Monsters, Foreigners and Outsiders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages", which, by the way, is still an awesome course, we've been talking about a scholar named Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and his monster theses. He has seven concepts of the monstrous. I'm trying to learn them for a test, actually (it's pretty boss that I'm taking a midterm in monster theory, have I mentioned that?). They're ideas like "Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire", and "The monster polices the borders of the possible" (as in, the monster is made from taboos or commits them--things that are possible for humans, because they have been done, but are way out past the boundaries of what's acceptable in human society). I'll list them all later, it'll help me study.
I bring this up because I came up with a monster thesis of my own: "The monster changes when it is observed". This is like Cohen's further theory, "The monster is a harbinger of category crisis": for starters, monsters tend to be uncategorizable, perhaps because they're the result of two or more categories being combined. My own idea says the same, but goes in a different direction. Monsters are uncategorizable. So far, so good. Take the vampire, for instance. Human-looking, sucks blood, potentially very scary, and the Western idea of vampires has been assembled from a multitude of different legends and more recent media. Thus, vampires can potentially vary immensely depending on what legend or new concept the creator uses. They may not even resemble the few characteristics I listed above.
Vampires are immensely popular this century-plus, thanks to Bram Stoker and the film industry, and during the last thirty years, thanks to popular fiction. All the massive popularity and attention has created a stereotype vampire: Bela Lugosi in evening dress, perhaps with visible fangs and bloody drool. That's the observed vampire, which isn't really a monster in the sense of "aberrant creature" anymore because we know him so well. We've created a category for him, good old Count von Count. This means that there's a great surge of creative artists trying to make their vampires new and different, to defy the new category that has appeared to try to trap the monster. That's part of Where We Get Sparkly Vampires: the attempt to ring new changes, to remain mysterious and uncategorized. (The sparkly vamps in turn create a huge upswell of authors going, "My vampires are REAL, the way monsters Used To Be, my vamp can beat up your vamps." I don't think anyone gets to say that their own vampires are the real, original, honest, accept-no-substitutes vampires while other people's are phony. But I do like to make fun of Twilight as much as the next girl.)
Time to study! But this is so much more fun. Yes, and it even counts as studying this semester. Woot! Still, time to buckle down and study of the French language and of the Chinese history.
Oh, BTW, today's my twenty-ninth birthday. Gosh. We're celebrating tomorrow night, my parents and I, because I have school till late and then fencing practice. At the moment, though, I'm going to go sit and study near Emily Dickinson's grave. It's the perfect afternoon for it.