Horror Show

[Scorpio]

The scene where she had gone down through the bottom of her casket into this underground maze? I remember seeing the film in 1979, and I had no idea it was supposed to be a coal mine. After I realized it was, I though "Who buries bodies over an area where the ground is hollowed out for a mine?" Does that really happen in Yorkshire.

I thought the Coppola version was awful, sorry. Just pulling a few specific details from the book doesn't make it "faithful." It didn't remind me of the book at all. It was tedious, and just not terribly scary, or even suspenseful. The usually great Gary Oldman is just awful.

I thought that the 1979 Nosferatu by Herzog captured the beginning very well, the part where Harker was trapped in Dracula's castle. The rest of the film was fantastic, as a film, but you cannot say it was faithful to the book.

I think that some of Yorkshires coal mines date from the early Industrial revolution and records of there exact location are not terribly accurate.

[RivkahChaya]

There is a 1979 version of Dracula with one really good scene in it.
Van and the gang encounter a vampire in an abandoned mine working.
Its supposed to be Yorkshire; It's probably a coal mine.

The scene where she had gone down through the bottom of her casket into this underground maze? I remember seeing the film in 1979, and I had no idea it was supposed to be a coal mine. After I realized it was, I though "Who buries bodies over an area where the ground is hollowed out for a mine?" Does that really happen in Yorkshire.

I thought the Coppola version was awful, sorry. Just pulling a few specific details from the book doesn't make it "faithful." It didn't remind me of the book at all. It was tedious, and just not terribly scary, or even suspenseful. The usually great Gary Oldman is just awful.

I thought that the 1979 Nosferatu by Herzog captured the beginning very well, the part where Harker was trapped in Dracula's castle. The rest of the film was fantastic, as a film, but you cannot say it was faithful to the book.

[Scorpio]

There is a 1979 version of Dracula with one really good scene in it.
Van and the gang encounter a vampire in an abandoned mine working.
Its supposed to be Yorkshire; It's probably a coal mine.

[kensei]

I believe Francis Ford Coppola's film "Bram Stoker's Dracula" from 1992 followed the book more closely than any other Dracula film, though there were still radical departures, primarily the whole romantic theme that had Dracula genuinely in love with Mina and believing her to be the reincarnation of his former wife. In the book there was no romance, if there was love it was definitely a selfish kind, and he was more like a rapist than a lover. But the similarities were many.

The way the book is entirely in the form of diary entires, newspaper articles, etc. is reproduced.

Jonathan Harker's time in the castle and his interactions with Dracula and the three vampire brides is quite faithful, as is the depiction of Renfield in the asylum. Famous lines from the book are used, such as Dracula's musing about the wolves howling- "The children of the night, what sweet music they make."

Dracula appears looking both young and old, depending on how much he has fed, as in the book.

The ravishing of Lucy over time, and her slow decline into death and vampirism, is very faithful right down to the inclusion of the white wolf escaped from the zoo. Dracula and the wolf actually seem to merge into one. One difference- in the book, Lucy's mother is with her when the wolf enters to kill her and the mother isn't featured in the movie at all. The graveyard scene where the men dispatch the vampire Lucy in her tomb is faithful and one of the best scenes in the film.

In the book, Dracula is killed not with a wooden stake but with two knives- Harker's Gurka Kukri to the throat, and Quincy Morris' Bowie knife to the heart. This is reproduced literally, right down to the type of knives. This makes Quincy quite an important character, but I don't think any other film has even featured him. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) He dies after being wounded in a fight with Dracula's gypsy guards, which is also from the book and was never featured in any other film. In the book it's a very quick skirmish though, and in the film it's an extended chase and gunfight. The film embellishes Dracula's death into a melodramatic last kiss with Mina, rather than his instant disintegration from the book.

Van Helsing. Forget any notion of Hugh Jackman's young action hero. In the book he is an old man but still very driven, and the way he protects Mina at the castle and then in the morning enters it to conduct the butchery required to slay the three brides (which takes a considerable toll on him both physically and mentally) is rendered very faithfully. The film portrays him as being a good deal more zany in his behavior than the book, but that provides some good comic relief.

All in all, by far my favorite Dracula film of all time with solid performances by Gary Oldman as Dracula, Winona Ryder as Mina, Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, Keanu Reeves as Harker, Sadie Frost as Lucy, Tom Waits as Renfield, and Cary Elwes as Arthur Holmwood.

[RivkahChaya]

There was a tv special a couple of years ago entitled "The Real Wolfman," which was a study of the Beast of Gevaudan in France.... what about the question of whether a holy blessing placed on a silver bullet that wouldn't ordinarily fly straight might miraculously make it fly straight and true? They didn't even address that.

I've seen that. They were trying to stay away from all supernatural explanations, including religious ones.

Also, while I'm inclined to think that most silver bullet stories are, to put it politely, theoretical, a silver, or silver-clad bullet probably wouldn't have flown straight because it wouldn't have been as soft as a lead bullet, and wouldn't have picked up rifling from the barrel. I wonder (and I'm plenty open to correction) if a silver bullet wouldn't have been frangible, and if it did happen to hit its mark, a one-shot-kill bullet.

I think the modern vampire image from Stoker onward is one big fetish; it would account for its popularity and longevity.

The book is quite a bit different from any movie. Even though the men are trying to save "their" women from the beast, there isn't really anything sexy about it. Stoker deliberately borrowed the physical description of Dracula from descriptions of the atavistic "born criminal" type.

I don't take Stoker to task for romance, or fetishism people have stuck on to his story.

At this point, if someone tried to make a true-to-novel version of the book (even Herzog's wonderful 1979 film ended up making Isabelle Adjani the POV character), people probably wouldn't like it because they wouldn't recognize it.

[kensei]

I have just watched "The Vulture," a 1967 horror film (same year I was born) starring Broderick Crawford I first saw on t.v. at about the age of ten 35 years ago, for only the second time, after searching for it for years and finally finding an affordable copy on VHS on Amazon.com. I want to stress that when I first saw this as a child it filled me with a foreboding and traumatic horror that I carried with me for weeks, so much so that I never forgot it and I've always wanted to see it again to see if it would seem much downplayed to my adult self as other movies have that I remember from my youth. I have to say though, the way I remembered it, "The Vulture" has always been the gold standard in my mind. It made me SO SCARED, with memories of a half man-half bird creature descending with thumping wingbeats to snatch its victims away with sharp talons.

The verdict: "The Vulture" is not that scary. It's a good flick, but what has me absolutely amazed right now is how the scenes that so traumatized me as a child comprise just literally mere seconds of the movie. Those talons, coming down from above and clamping down on people's shoulders to whisk them away to a horible fate. Very little blood and gore, hardly any really. And the creature turns out not to be supernatural, but a crazy old man who used weird science to transform himself. He is dispatched with a couple of bullets and then dumped in the ocean and forgotten. Seriously, I would say that the man in man-bird creature form makes up no more than two minutes of this movie. It was those "victims being snatched away scenes" that haunted me, and I can't believe how brief they were, and made me think I was seeing the scariest movie I'd ever seen or would ever see. My adult self had no memory of 90% of the movie, only the 10% that scared me. I guess that's a fascinating psychological study.

Afterthought: The movie takes place in Cornwall, with lots of lovely coastline scenery, and I've been there so I really enjoyed that. One really weird thing, though- in the mid-1970s a creature called the Owlman was reported seen in Cornwall, no fantasy but the real thing. This movie predates that. Hmmmm...

[Scorpio]

Wes Craven 's ' The serpent and the rainbow ' is a good movie about the original Zombie of Voodoo lore. Romero's movies turned the Zombie into a flesh eating Ghoul.A satire of consumer society.

[kensei]

I think the "silver bullet" thing had to do less with the silver, than that the bullet was made from some holy object, that had been blessed-- some cross, or candlestick, or cup use by a church was melted down to make the bullets, and that why they had the power of exorcism. Gold probably wasn't used, just because gold is so malleable, it would probably make really lousy bullets. Silver has been used as a symbol of purity before, too.

.

There was a tv special a couple of years ago entitled "The Real Wolfman," which was a study of the Beast of Gevaudan killings in medieval France. Since "The Beast" that was thought by some to be a werewolf at the time was said to have been killed by a peasant hunter using silver bullets blessed by a priest when so many others, including soldiers, had failed to kill it with ordinary lead shot, the show conducted a forensics test on silver bullets. They found that silver doesn't fly straight at all and would present huge problems in accuracy. I won't go into all the related implications they explored. I'll just say that it made me think- wait a minute. If we are willing to consider the supernatural at all in this case, at least enough to try and debunk it, then what about the question of whether a holy blessing placed on a silver bullet that wouldn't ordinarily fly straight might miraculously make it fly straight and true? They didn't even address that.

[Scorpio]

I think the "silver bullet" thing had to do less with the silver, than that the bullet was made from some holy object, that had been blessed-- some cross, or candlestick, or cup use by a church was melted down to make the bullets, and that why they had the power of exorcism. Gold probably wasn't used, just because gold is so malleable, it would probably make really lousy bullets. Silver has been used as a symbol of purity before, too.

Oddly, there's a tiny amount of truth in it, in that metal in general, but silver in particular, is a hostile environment for germs, so people sharing a cup, like a communion cup, with wine in it (alcohol) at a church, are very unlikely to catch something from it. I'm sure that wasn't in the minds of people who were making silver bullets for werewolves, though.

It's certainly true that the disgusting fiends of legends are not like the vampires and werewolves in movies. Although, the Bela Lugosi Dracula is fairly off-putting, he's not a really likeable guy, and as far as the way he is dressed, the film was made in 1931, and he dresses in a coat and tails for the opera, which is appropriate, and then shows up in similar dress for a dinner, which is a little over-dressed compared to the other guests; it's almost too subtle, if you are watching the film 80 years later. The cut and style of his clothing is Victorian, while everyone else's evening clothes are 30's style, another thing that is lost on modern audiences.

Anne Rice wrote fetish fiction. There's nothing wrong with that, other than the rather disturbing fact that a lot of people who bought it did not seem to realize it was fetish fiction.

Twilight is fetish fiction for 12-year-olds, and there's no escaping the pedophilic subtext. The vampire may not look old, and may even be weirdly subverting Peter Pan, but if an adult man acts immature, says he "feels" like a child, and even sort of looks like one, albeit, he's much, much older, that just makes the pedophilia even creepier, and is still illegal.

How did they even get a marriage license? I had to show an ID, to prove I'm not trying to defraud, and because at least one of the people being issued the license has to be a state resident, and I'm sure that if you happen to look like you might be just barely old enough to get married, you have to show proof of age.

I think the modern vampire image from Stoker onward is one big fetish; it would account for its popularity and longevity.

[RivkahChaya]

I think the "silver bullet" thing had to do less with the silver, than that the bullet was made from some holy object, that had been blessed-- some cross, or candlestick, or cup use by a church was melted down to make the bullets, and that why they had the power of exorcism. Gold probably wasn't used, just because gold is so malleable, it would probably make really lousy bullets. Silver has been used as a symbol of purity before, too.

Oddly, there's a tiny amount of truth in it, in that metal in general, but silver in particular, is a hostile environment for germs, so people sharing a cup, like a communion cup, with wine in it (alcohol) at a church, are very unlikely to catch something from it. I'm sure that wasn't in the minds of people who were making silver bullets for werewolves, though.

It's certainly true that the disgusting fiends of legends are not like the vampires and werewolves in movies. Although, the Bela Lugosi Dracula is fairly off-putting, he's not a really likeable guy, and as far as the way he is dressed, the film was made in 1931, and he dresses in a coat and tails for the opera, which is appropriate, and then shows up in similar dress for a dinner, which is a little over-dressed compared to the other guests; it's almost too subtle, if you are watching the film 80 years later. The cut and style of his clothing is Victorian, while everyone else's evening clothes are 30's style, another thing that is lost on modern audiences.

Anne Rice wrote fetish fiction. There's nothing wrong with that, other than the rather disturbing fact that a lot of people who bought it did not seem to realize it was fetish fiction.

Twilight is fetish fiction for 12-year-olds, and there's no escaping the pedophilic subtext. The vampire may not look old, and may even be weirdly subverting Peter Pan, but if an adult man acts immature, says he "feels" like a child, and even sort of looks like one, albeit, he's much, much older, that just makes the pedophilia even creepier, and is still illegal.

How did they even get a marriage license? I had to show an ID, to prove I'm not trying to defraud, and because at least one of the people being issued the license has to be a state resident, and I'm sure that if you happen to look like you might be just barely old enough to get married, you have to show proof of age.

[Scorpio]

The first director to really get King "right" was David Cronenberg, with "The Dead Zone".

And the last director to make a good movie based upon a King novel was Frank Darabont. Rob Reiner also made a decent effort with
Misery.

[Magpie]

I think King regards himself primarily as a storyteller, and it shows in the movies.
A lot of directors are ignorant of the story tellers art, and the result is often way to literal and heavy handed.
DePalma and Kubrick possessed enough ability to convert King's engaging but often self indulgent style into pure cinema.

The first director to really get King "right" was David Cronenberg, with "The Dead Zone".

[Magpie]

I saw Death Ship an age ago. I seem to remember Nazi's in it for some reason.

That's right--survivors of a cruise ship sinking run across what appears to be an abandoned tanker, but was actually a secret floating concentration camp from WW2.

[louisa]

.

King wanted Michael Moriarty for the role, someone who would come across so sane and sober, that it'd be a shock later when he went crazy, and you would believe there had to be a supernatural, or some outside force, at work, because a guy like that doesn't just go off the deep end, he has to be pushed (yes, I realize the character was already an alcoholic, but not all alcoholics are violent or even detectably altered, if they have been drinking for a long time, but they are generally more suggestible than sober people.)

Yes, I can Michael Moriarty in the role. I also think Christopher Walken might have been good.

[kensei]

I'd like to comment on monsters from folklore- i.e. ones that have been believed in and told of in supposedly true stories from the past- as they have been depicted in horror movies. I honestly and with great consternation do not understand why film studios don't seem capable of adapting anything from history without embelishing the hell out of it. They've certainly never turned out an accurate Jack the Ripper movie and there's nothing supernatural about that. Throw in that extra element and dramatic license just goes all over the place.

Vampires in folklore were reanimated corpses who fed on the blood of the living. They were partially decayed, hideously ugly, foul smelling, and lacking any personality whatsoever for the identity they'd possessed in life was completely gone. Rarely if ever did they even speak. They were empty shells, mindless parasites. Isn't that pretty darn scary? But name one vampire movie that has ever presented them that way. There aren't any. I guess the one that came closest was the first one, "Nosferatu." Then along came Dracula, and for a long time writers seemed to think that all vampires needed to look and dress like him. They added charm to the vampire, and the idea that he could try to masquerade as a normal person. Anne Rice put her personal spin on that and virtually invented the Goth culture, and then "Twilight" actually turned vampires into romantic, heroic good guys. WTF? If the people of the 16th century who believed in real vampires could have seen forward in time they would have thought we were absolutely insane. Folklore tends to state that the way to destroy a vampire has to involve destroying its heart, and often also cutting off its head. It didn't specify a wooden stake as many movies have. Notice how in the most faithful interpretations of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the vampire is killed with knives, not wooden stakes.

Then there is the werewolf, also once widely believed in. Vampires, being the undead, could only be dealt with in that form, but many living people were tried and executed as being werewolves. Most of the case histories describe people who turned into wolves that looked just like regular wolves, and then ran around making fatal nuisances of themselves and eating people. Sometimes a little larger than usual, sometimes lacking a tail, but otherwise indistinguishable from a regular wolf. This actually translated into other animals in various parts of the world, whatever was the most ferocious predator in each region. Africa had wereleopards. South America had werejaguars. Scandinavia had werebears. Etc. etc. Polynesia even had "shark men." But when Hollywood got hold of the shapeshifting legend, the limits of early technology produced the "Wolf Man," a two-legged beast rather than a four-legged one, and to this day that has never let go. Even with modern special effects, werewolves tend to be depicted as walking upright. That feature isn't completely absent from folklore, but it wasn't the norm. Ways to kill a werewolf in folklore tended to focus on how any wound the wolf suffered would then be seen on the corpse of the human after death, but the reliance on weapons of silver seen in movies was not entirely a creation of Hollywood. Some old stories do mention it, as well as fire, as being ways to kill a werewolf. But silver was also sometimes mentioned as a way to kill a vampire.

Finally, there is the zombie. In folklore, it is a product of Voodoo which is a religion comprised of a mixture of African tribal practices mixed with Roman Catholicism and practiced mainly in the nation of Haiti and various other places. A traditional zombie is a corpse reanimated through deliberate magical practices by a criminal voodoo magician, to be used as a slave for the purposes of-- whatever. Manual labor, murder, take your pick. In recent years there's been a lot written about how voodoo priests have faked all of this using poison from blowfish, sending someone into a coma so close to death that they are declared dead and buried. Then they are dug up, revived, and put into a trance and implied to be a zombie. I would call that a "fake zombie." A "real zombie" would be a genuine dead person risen by actual magic, if such actually exists. The proof would come over years, as a real zombie wouldn't age and a fake one would. But when HOLLYWOOD came along, they took the zombie in a completely fabricated direction. There were a paltry few early renditions of actual folklore such as "White Zombie," but apparently that wasn't exciting enough, because somehow zombies got turned into mindless reanimated corpses that had nothing to do with magic but who would rise en masse and go off on a mad crusade for "BRAINS!" The flesh-eating cannibal zombies of so very many movies now have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any supposedly real story that has ever been told about them. They never ate people in folklore, period. As for how to "kill" a zombie, i.e. return it to natural death, the movies instruct us to blow their heads off, whereas the old tales tell us to simply force them or trick them into swallowing some salt. That does the trick. The one time I have seen this used in fiction was in my very favorite episode of that 1970s classic t.v. show "Kolchak: The Night Stalker," a "monster of the week" show that ran for one season in 1974-75. Their zombie episode was actually pretty faithful to folklore, and pretty darn creepy.