Horror Show

[kensei]

I would like to slightly alter something I said earlier regarding Dracula. I commented on how Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" was the film that stuck closest to the original novel more than any other film despite its many departures. I thought it was the only Dracula movie to feature the Texan Quincy Morris, and the gunfight with Dracula's gypsy guards. But I had forgotten something. Tonight I was digging through my large VHS collection and I came across something that had slipped my mind- a copy of the 1977 BBC adaptation "Count Dracula" starring Louis Jourdan as Dracula. I remember finding it in my local public library and making a copy of it a few years ago. It's absolutely amazing. It was made for television on videotape, yet despite that the effects are quite impressive and the adaptation of the novel is close to spot on. As with Coppola's version though, there are still differences. There is no Arthur Holmwood. Instead, Arthur and Quincy are combined into the character of "Quincy Holmwood." Lucy and Mina are both intact as characters, and Lucy's descent into vampirism and then destruction is absolutely cringe-inducing. When Dracula meets his end, he implodes into dust just as he does in the novel, though it's Van Helsing who stakes him rather than Quincy and Harker sharing that honor as they do in the book. Overall, I would say this film shares equal credit with Coppola's version for staying faithful to Stoker's novel.

[Scorpio]

I like the cursed film footage; it reminds me of Ring.

[kensei]

I think that the Werewolf as a source of power would make a decent horror B movie script: Put-upon nerd dables in the Occult, learns how to transform, and goes on revenge kill rampage against his exploiters.
Its probably already been done.

It was. There was "Friday the 13th- The television series," about an antique shop that was cursed and was trying to track down and reclaim various items they'd sold that were spreading the curse to others. They had an episode about a cursed home movie camera that a nerdy kid in a film class used to turn himself into the Wolf Man. As I recall, in the end he was strangled to death with a reel of film because the film had silver in it.

[Scorpio]

I saw "The Company of Wolves" once, long ago. I know I enjoyed it but what I most remember about it was that it was a very "artsy" film. I think I would disagree somewhat about how werewolves are more obviously monsters than vampires because if a vampire movie was ever made that depicted them the way they were in folklore they would be pretty obviously monstrous, whereas a werewolf when in human form can pass for normal.

Bad werewolf movies. Hmmm... Well, all of the "Howling" sequels would certainly qualify. There was a CGI-fest called "Cursed" a decade or so ago starring Christina Ricci, who is an actress I like but the fact that I don't remember much about the movie must mean it was fairly forgettable. Then there was "Bad Moon" (I think it was called), starring Marielle Hemmingway, from the 90s. The hero of the piece is a German Shepherd, the only character who can tell there's something not right about the guy who is the werewolf, who in turn can tell he's been made and schemes to get the dog sent to the pound. Critics hated it and tore it to shreds. But I don't know, I found it quite exciting when the final battle took place and dog and werewolf were ripping the crap out of each other. Finally, the werewolf episode of tv's "The Night Stalker," which took place aboard a cruise ship, was fairly silly, though it is a chance to see Eric Braeden of the soap opera "The Young and the Restless" and John Jacob Astor in "Titanic" as a young man playing the werewolf.

The concept of the werewolf as a source of power- yes, that would be very appealing in cases where someone disenfranchised was able to harness that power and use it at will, transforming only when he wanted to, and there are stories like that. But in the ones where the change comes on when IT wants to, completely against the person's will, and he doesn't want it-- I can't imagine a more horrible existence. Any semblance of a normal life would be completely destroyed.

I think that the Werewolf as a source of power would make a decent horror B movie script: Put-upon nerd dables in the Occult, learns how to transform, and goes on revenge kill rampage against his exploiters.
Its probably already been done.

[kensei]

I like 'The company of Wolves '. It is to easy to make a bad werewolf movie because Werewolves are more obviously monsters than Vampires are. A human who loses his humanity and becomes dominated by the id is a scary concept to many people but very attractive to others. To teenage boys who are suddenly expected to have wealth,status, good looks or social skills but do not have any of theses things, the werewolf with the power to satisfy their frustrations with such simplicity must seem a desirable thing.

I saw "The Company of Wolves" once, long ago. I know I enjoyed it but what I most remember about it was that it was a very "artsy" film. I think I would disagree somewhat about how werewolves are more obviously monsters than vampires because if a vampire movie was ever made that depicted them the way they were in folklore they would be pretty obviously monstrous, whereas a werewolf when in human form can pass for normal.

Bad werewolf movies. Hmmm... Well, all of the "Howling" sequels would certainly qualify. There was a CGI-fest called "Cursed" a decade or so ago starring Christina Ricci, who is an actress I like but the fact that I don't remember much about the movie must mean it was fairly forgettable. Then there was "Bad Moon" (I think it was called), starring Marielle Hemmingway, from the 90s. The hero of the piece is a German Shepherd, the only character who can tell there's something not right about the guy who is the werewolf, who in turn can tell he's been made and schemes to get the dog sent to the pound. Critics hated it and tore it to shreds. But I don't know, I found it quite exciting when the final battle took place and dog and werewolf were ripping the crap out of each other. Finally, the werewolf episode of tv's "The Night Stalker," which took place aboard a cruise ship, was fairly silly, though it is a chance to see Eric Braeden of the soap opera "The Young and the Restless" and John Jacob Astor in "Titanic" as a young man playing the werewolf.

The concept of the werewolf as a source of power- yes, that would be very appealing in cases where someone disenfranchised was able to harness that power and use it at will, transforming only when he wanted to, and there are stories like that. But in the ones where the change comes on when IT wants to, completely against the person's will, and he doesn't want it-- I can't imagine a more horrible existence. Any semblance of a normal life would be completely destroyed.

[Scorpio]

As a companion to vampires, how about werewolves? They're one of my very favorite movie monsters. Which films does everyone think has done them the most justice?

Lon Cheney Jr.'s "The Wolf Man" was a classic, and I enjoyed it but I thought it was odd that though he had sharp teeth and claws he tended to not use them and just strangled his victims instead. The recent remake with Benicio Del Toro did not have such scruples and was soaked in blood and gore. I liked that very much too. Del Toro was very similar to Cheney, dark haired and a big burly guy who could easily embody the monster. Solid performances by Anthony Hopkins as a surprise second werewolf and Emily Blunt as an absolutely heartbreaking damsel who ends up having to fire a fateful silver bullet.

Other favorites-

"An American Werewolf in London." What a blending of elements! Drama, comedy, horror, music. The use of locations around London was fascinating. I visited the London Zoo in 2004. Had to pull up the movie when I got back to see if the scene where the central character wakes up there after his first night as a werewolf was really filmed there. It was. There is an exhibit of American bears there with the bears climbing across an artificial cliff face that is seen in the movie. The climax shot in Picadilly Circus is also a treat. The werewolf is on four legs, as they tended to be in folklore, not a bipedal "Wolf Man."

Then there was "The Howling," which produced several very bad sequels. But the first one, involving a pack of werewolves living in a secret society, was the very last time I ever allowed a movie to scare the hell out of me to the point of real primal fear. It was this film, along with American in London, that brought werewolf transformation special effects into the modern age. These wolves were something new- they were bipedal, but they looked like giant regular wolves standing up on their hind legs, seven feet tall and hideously frightening.

Then there was the tv show "Werewolf" on the FOX network when it first premiered. Veteran actor Chuck Connors played the villain werewolf, and sorry but I don't remember the clean-cut pretty boy's name who played the hero werewolf. I remember enjoying it very much and I'm sure there were some cheesy elements to it but overall I think it was very well done. These wolves were ambidextrous- they could go about on all fours or stand upright, and were quite well designed by FX master Stan Winston if I recall correctly. As the villain, Connors pulled off something never seen before- when he transformed he would open his mouth, pull back the skin of his face, and his wolf self would emerge from out of his mouth. Yikes!

I like 'The company of Wolves '. It is to easy to make a bad werewolf movie because Werewolves are more obviously monsters than Vampires are. A human who loses his humanity and becomes dominated by the id is a scary concept to many people but very attractive to others. To teenage boys who are suddenly expected to have wealth,status, good looks or social skills but do not have any of theses things, the werewolf with the power to satisfy their frustrations with such simplicity must seem a desirable thing.

[RivkahChaya]

I think that he means that the vampire has been sanitized.

Then say sanitized. Don't use "Mormon" as a synonym, because it isn't. There are a lot of reasons to be alarmed about the Mormons, like the fact that they pretty much own the Boy Scouts of America, and have for the last 15 years or so, which is why you still can't be gay and a scout master, and the BSA requires scouts (scouts themselves, not just the scout masters) to state that they believe in a deity. I'm not exactly sure what they have to state, and whether they discriminate against non-Christians (I'm pretty sure they are OK with Jews, but I'm not sure about Muslims, or polytheists, like Hindus, and I'm fairly sure non-deity centered faith systems, like Buddhism would be out), but it is definitely not OK to be atheist, and they have formally expelled scouts who, or whose families, espoused atheism.

I would rather let the Mormons be alarming for the reasons they actually are alarming, then for made up reasons like "They're ruining the vampire movies." It gives them an "It's just a strawman" argument against attacks. When someone is being attacked for both real and imagined wrongs, they sometimes get sympathy as the victims of the imagined attacks, which lets them ride out the attacks that have a good reason.

[Scorpio]

I think that he means that the vampire has been sanitized. He also feels that vampires have become the victims of romantic fiction: All Vampires have been demoted to the role of Heathcliffe,the bad boy beloved of chick flicks.

[RivkahChaya]

Filmaker and author Guillermo del Toro claims that vampires have been ' Mormonized ' by modern culture.

What does "Mormonized" mean? I can't figure how a fetishized, sexualized, romanticized vampire is something that can be chalked up to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I mean, I am in no way or shape an LDS fan, and the LDS is one reason I was terrified of a Romney presidency, but I did a cursory reading of the Book of Mormon about 22 years ago, because I was interpreting at an LDS adult education meeting on a regular basis, and I don't remember vampires being mentioned.

I also can't figure out what Guillermo del Toro would know about Mormons.

Now, if this is some kind of slander against the Mormons, I guess I can see how someone could trump up their strange and true Mormon idea of a woman needing to be married in order to get into heaven (ie, be immortal in the way Christianity conceptualizes it), which was how they justified polygamy, and some other strange ideas they have about death, such as baptizing the living in the name of the dead, so that people who were not Mormons in their lifetimes, could get into heaven after death, by some kind of posthumous conversion (which if I understand it, the baptism merely creates the opportunity for, it doesn't just whisk them away), into Mormon elders being figures who grant immortality, sort of like the "head" vampire in films like The Lost Boys.

But if someone has drawn those parallels, that sounds like anti-Mormon rhetoric, and not anything the Mormons would have people believe about them.

If you ask me, you don't need to slander the Mormons. You can just point out what they actually do believe, and let it speak for itself; you don't need to work in vampire crap. In fact, please don't. You might accidentally make Mormonism sound attractive to some Goth 13-year-olds.

[Scorpio]

Agreed. Though I enjoyed Gary Oldman as Dracula and the wide range of expressions he had to pull off, there is nothing in vampire fiction that provokes quite the pure primal terror as the look of Schreck's Count Orlock in "Nosferatu." Oldman was scary in how he could completely pull you in with his charming guise but then turn on a dime into the monster, but Schreck was always the monster, a monster you knew at first look you never wanted to come withing a hundred miles of. Yet wasn't he still pretending to be human? A real vampire from folklore (if there has ever been such a thing) is never doing that. They don't pretend. They are reanimated corpses who come out at night to prey on the living, with no soul, no memory of who they were in life, no personality and certainly no charm. They are horribly frightening and completely disgusting creatures who rarely even speak. They are wearing whatever clothes they were buried in, which is the only reason a vampire might appear well dressed. That traditional folkloric vampire has NEVER been portrayed in a movie as far as I know, and I think if it was and was done well it could be the scariest vampire film ever.

That said, I do admit to a guilty pleasure in "The Lost Boys" from the 80s. Those vampires, led by a young Keifer Sutherland, posed as the juvenile delinquents they'd been in life but in their true guise were brutal violent predators who hung upside down from rafters like bats while dormant and would burn if touched by sunlight. There was a lot of comedy in that one, but it blended perfectly with the horror and that horror was pretty dark.

Filmaker and author Guillermo del Toro claims that vampires have been ' Mormonized ' by modern culture.

[kensei]

As a companion to vampires, how about werewolves? They're one of my very favorite movie monsters. Which films does everyone think has done them the most justice?

Lon Cheney Jr.'s "The Wolf Man" was a classic, and I enjoyed it but I thought it was odd that though he had sharp teeth and claws he tended to not use them and just strangled his victims instead. The recent remake with Benicio Del Toro did not have such scruples and was soaked in blood and gore. I liked that very much too. Del Toro was very similar to Cheney, dark haired and a big burly guy who could easily embody the monster. Solid performances by Anthony Hopkins as a surprise second werewolf and Emily Blunt as an absolutely heartbreaking damsel who ends up having to fire a fateful silver bullet.

Other favorites-

"An American Werewolf in London." What a blending of elements! Drama, comedy, horror, music. The use of locations around London was fascinating. I visited the London Zoo in 2004. Had to pull up the movie when I got back to see if the scene where the central character wakes up there after his first night as a werewolf was really filmed there. It was. There is an exhibit of American bears there with the bears climbing across an artificial cliff face that is seen in the movie. The climax shot in Picadilly Circus is also a treat. The werewolf is on four legs, as they tended to be in folklore, not a bipedal "Wolf Man."

Then there was "The Howling," which produced several very bad sequels. But the first one, involving a pack of werewolves living in a secret society, was the very last time I ever allowed a movie to scare the hell out of me to the point of real primal fear. It was this film, along with American in London, that brought werewolf transformation special effects into the modern age. These wolves were something new- they were bipedal, but they looked like giant regular wolves standing up on their hind legs, seven feet tall and hideously frightening.

Then there was the tv show "Werewolf" on the FOX network when it first premiered. Veteran actor Chuck Connors played the villain werewolf, and sorry but I don't remember the clean-cut pretty boy's name who played the hero werewolf. I remember enjoying it very much and I'm sure there were some cheesy elements to it but overall I think it was very well done. These wolves were ambidextrous- they could go about on all fours or stand upright, and were quite well designed by FX master Stan Winston if I recall correctly. As the villain, Connors pulled off something never seen before- when he transformed he would open his mouth, pull back the skin of his face, and his wolf self would emerge from out of his mouth. Yikes!

[kensei]

The scariest screen vampires belong to the F.W Murnau 1922 ' Nosferatu '
tradition. The ' Penus with teeth ' portrayed by Max Schreck would influence the 1979 ' Nosferatu the vampyre ' portrayed by Klaus Kinski,and the Salems Lot TV movie with Reggie Nalder.

Agreed. Though I enjoyed Gary Oldman as Dracula and the wide range of expressions he had to pull off, there is nothing in vampire fiction that provokes quite the pure primal terror as the look of Schreck's Count Orlock in "Nosferatu." Oldman was scary in how he could completely pull you in with his charming guise but then turn on a dime into the monster, but Schreck was always the monster, a monster you knew at first look you never wanted to come withing a hundred miles of. Yet wasn't he still pretending to be human? A real vampire from folklore (if there has ever been such a thing) is never doing that. They don't pretend. They are reanimated corpses who come out at night to prey on the living, with no soul, no memory of who they were in life, no personality and certainly no charm. They are horribly frightening and completely disgusting creatures who rarely even speak. They are wearing whatever clothes they were buried in, which is the only reason a vampire might appear well dressed. That traditional folkloric vampire has NEVER been portrayed in a movie as far as I know, and I think if it was and was done well it could be the scariest vampire film ever.

That said, I do admit to a guilty pleasure in "The Lost Boys" from the 80s. Those vampires, led by a young Keifer Sutherland, posed as the juvenile delinquents they'd been in life but in their true guise were brutal violent predators who hung upside down from rafters like bats while dormant and would burn if touched by sunlight. There was a lot of comedy in that one, but it blended perfectly with the horror and that horror was pretty dark.

[Scorpio]

The scariest screen vampires belong to the F.W Murnau 1922 ' Nosferatu '
tradition. The ' Penus with teeth ' portrayed by Max Schreck would influence the 1979 ' Nosferatu the vampyre ' portrayed by Klaus Kinski,and the Salems Lot TV movie with Reggie Nalder.

[RivkahChaya]

With the 1979 version are we talking about the one starring Frank Langella? I read a commentary on it once by Langella in which he said it amused him how people would tell him how frightened they were when they saw him bare his fangs, as he did not actually wear fangs. However, didn't that movie interchange the characters of Mina and Lucy and end with Dracula dying in the sunlight while hanging from a hook from the mast of a ship? I'd have to see it again. Parts may have been faithful to the book but others definitely weren't.

Yes. The Lucy/Mina name switch goes back to the stage play. I'm not sure why, but Hamilton Deane, who wrote the play in 1924, for the London stage, kept Mina Harker, and eliminated Lucy as a character altogether, but changed Quinc[e]y Morris to a woman; the New York version dropped the Quincey character, and renamed Mina Harker Lucy Harker. The 1931 Universal film, which was based on the play restored both Mina and Lucy, with Mina as the first victim of the two. However, in subsequent treatments, screenwriters have maintained the swap, including the 1979 film, which was also Universal. Maybe because more people have seen at least one version of the film, or the play, than have actually read the book, or maybe because the name "Mina" somehow sounds more vulnerable, and Lucy is a stronger name, [SPOILER]: it somehow "feels" better for the woman who actively battles Dracula. I don't know. Even the 1979 Nosferatu has a Lucy.

Langella does have fangs in one scene, but most of the time, he manages to speak so that none of his teeth are visible. It's very good. It looks like he's trying to hide his fangs.

[kensei]

With the 1979 version are we talking about the one starring Frank Langella? I read a commentary on it once by Langella in which he said it amused him how people would tell him how frightened they were when they saw him bare his fangs, as he did not actually wear fangs. However, didn't that movie interchange the characters of Mina and Lucy and end with Dracula dying in the sunlight while hanging from a hook from the mast of a ship? I'd have to see it again. Parts may have been faithful to the book but others definitely weren't.

The Coppola version- I know it has its detractors. It has a lot of garish color in it, American actors faking British accents, Dracula's hair when he is in old man form looks completely bizarre, and other things that turned many people off. But I saw it at a time in my life that was very formative to me and I've always returned to it. Its detractions from Stoker's novel were many, but the number of things that stuck to the book implicitly were, I still think, more than any other movie has ever done. And there are lines of clever and darkly amusing dialogue I've always been able to quote from memory, such as when Van Helsing and Dr. Seward are debating how Lucy is losing so much blood without it ever being found on the bedclothes.

VAN HELSING: Where did the blood go?!
SEWARD (exasperated): Something just went up there, sucked it out of her and flew away I suppose?
VAN HELSING (after an ominous pause): Ya, why not?

Or those same two men, after Lucy dies and everyone is in mourning.

VAN HELSING: I know how much you loved her. That is why you must trust me and believe.
SEWARD: Believe? How can I believe?
VAN HELSING: I want you to bring me before nightfall a set of post mortem knives.
SEWARD: An autopsy? On Lucy?
VAN HELSING: No, no, no, I just want to cut off her head and take out her heart.

And I definitely didn't think Oldman's performance was terrible. He went through a LOT of elaborate changes visually throughout the film and wore extremely heavy makeup for parts of it, but I found nothing wrong with his acting. And the bit where he caught Mina's tears in his hand and turned them into diamonds was pretty cool. The way he could be that charming and romantic, but then so quickly turn vicious and pure evil to the point of physically transforming the moment things didn't go his way, I found frightening.