I swear there was one very large, ornate, floor-standing candlestick that appeared in every film.

[teenybuffalo]

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

Comments

[teenybuffalo]

Thanks! It sure is.

[sovay]

Happy birthday!

[teenybuffalo]

Thank you! I ate a brownie sitting near Emily Dickinson's grave and then went to a fencing practice at school.

[nineweaving]

Happy birthday". May this year be musical and monstrous.

Nine

[negothick]

yes, yes, we likes this, we likes this. Monstrously musical.

[teenybuffalo]

We'll work on it!

[teenybuffalo]

Thank you, I will do my very best to make it both!

[stevie_stever]

Happy Birthday!

[teenybuffalo]

Thank you! It surely has been.

[teenybuffalo]

I was very much annoyed by the realization that "monster" can refer to a pair of conjoined twins, Frankenstein's Monster, or an incestuous child molester (as in "complete monster"). It's astonishingly reactionary. All three creatures (four creatures, counting both twins) create feelings of shock or fear or horror, but the innocence of the first-named creatures versus the active evil of the last-named creature apparently doesn't matter to the speaker. You would think that all that mattered was the onlooker's feelings, not the actions of the subjects. It's a failure of language to accurately report what it sees.

There was a two-headed duckling, stuffed and mounted, in that curiosity show at Arisia. I was very impressed. Apparently, even though conjoined twins may only happen in one case out of a million ducks, when you're working at a hatchery where 1,000 ducks a day hatch out, "a million" isn't such a big number anymore. I'd have liked it better if the ducks were still running around alive and well, though.

[negothick]

You two have probably (and, privilege of LJ, to opine on that which one hasn't read)said as much and more than your original author.
I'd like to add another monster: the kind of literary critic who thinks in lists and categories (which would be most of the published kind).
We (the folks on this LJ) tend to consider the interstices.

In Cotton Mather's collections of Signs and Wonders (that meaning of Monster as demonstration), a two-headed lamb would have indicated bestiality by the farmer.
And thanks to the wonders of Googlebooks, I checked Mather's Magnalia Christi, and it's worth doing. Every meaning of "monster" is there--abnormal beast (the very paragraph that Lovecraft quoted in "The Unnameable"), witch, serial killer, heretic, racial Other. . .it's a paper in itself!