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pair of binoculars and a pair of stockings over my face? These are just some of the things I cannot explain … but come with us on a journey into the supernatural … up the eerie passage of the inexplicable … On 10 March 1968 we are told that Baron Frankenstein ‘is notorious round here: he’s got the biggest Schloss in
3 Memory and the child witness in ‘art-house horror’ ‘Cinema can lay claim to the child, as the child lays claim to cinema’, writes Vicky Lebeau, citing the sequence where Ana (Ana Torrent) and her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), two girls living in the post-war Spain of the 1940s, watch James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) in a makeshift cinema in Víctor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena: ‘the sequence yields one of the most compelling images of children’s look at the screen, or the look of the child caught up in the wonders, and horrors of the moving image
Frankenstein and Dracula , and also from Dracula Van Helsing’s graveyard confrontation with Lucy and his final battle with the Count, of Kharis’s attack on John Banning in The Mummy , of the openings of The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Curse of the Werewolf , of Dirk Bogarde throwing a chair through a wall in So Long at the Fair , of Alan’s death and Dracula’s resurrection in Dracula – Prince of Darkness , of the
(or freezing, or removal) of the threat, although it may return in sequels and remakes (as it so often happened from Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932) to Dracula’s many incarnations; from Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) to Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935) to Son of Frankenstein (Rowland V. Lee, 1939); from Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) to Jaws 2 (Jeannot Szwarc, 1978) to Jaws 3-D
1957 with the American horror and fantasy writer Richard Matheson, who was responsible for writing the novel in the first place, coming to Britain to prepare a screenplay adaptation for Hammer Films. Hammer had just had a notable success with its first colour gothic horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957), which starred Peter Cushing as the scientist and featured a then unknown Christopher Lee as the creature, and the company already had Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958), its next
Victorian touring actresses: Crossing boundaries and negotiating the cultural landscape provides a new perspective on the on- and offstage lives of women working in nineteenth-century theatre, and affirms the central role of touring, both within the United Kingdom and in North America and Australasia. Drawing on extensive archival research, it features a cross-section of neglected performers whose dramatic specialisms range from tragedy to burlesque. Although they were employed as stars in their own time, their contribution to the industry has largely been forgotten. The book’s innovative organisation follows a natural lifecycle, enabling a detailed examination of the practical challenges and opportunities typically encountered by the actress at each stage of her working life. Individual experiences are scrutinised to highlight the career implications of strategies adopted to cope with the demands of the profession, the physical potential of the actress’s body, and the operation of gendered power on and offstage. Analysis is situated in a wide contextual framework and reveals how reception and success depended on the performer’s response to the changing political, economic, social and cultural landscape as well as to developments in professional practice and organisation. The book concludes with discussion of the legacies of the performers, linking their experiences to the present-day situation.
upset (and occasionally delight) critics and, in the main, achieved huge box-office success. Many of these were directed by Fisher – including virtually all of the important earlier films such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Mummy (1959) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959). For a while, up until the box-office flop of The Phantom of the Opera in 1962
magazine’s ‘Fang Mail’ section printed letters by readers, creating the possibility of dialogue and developing a sense of shared identity among horror enthusiasts that had in some senses lapsed since the demise of the horror comics industry of the 1940s and 1950s, when titles had carried their own letter pages. The existence of the monster kid subculture is evident in an advert for the toy company Aurora, taken from the DC title The House of Secrets #92 (1971). The advertised toy collection brings together a mad scientist, Vampirella, and Frankenstein’s monster, but
white male readership, many of whom, like Higgenbotham, were uncomfortable with images of female empowerment.20 Given their readership – and the persistence of many artists and writers who had been working twenty years previously – it is perhaps unsurprising that horror comics of the 1970s returned to some of the imagery of the 1950s. The September 1973 cover of Monster of Frankenstein #5, for example, features an image of the monster apparently menacing an imperilled woman in a red dress (Figure 57). The title, ‘The Monster Walks Among Us!’, is in itself another 1950
The challenge of the sublime argues that the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain could be seen as a response to theories of the sublime, more specifically to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). While it is widely accepted that the Enquiry contributed to shaping the thematics of terror that became fashionable in British art from the 1770s, this book contends that its influence was of even greater consequence, paradoxically because of Burke’s conviction that the visual arts were incapable of conveying the sublime. His argument that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting, because of the mimetic nature of visual representation, directly or indirectly incited visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and even new or undeveloped pictorial and graphic media, such as the panorama, book illustrations and capricci. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and the inadequacy of their endeavours, and thus drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. By revisiting the links between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and visual practices, The challenge of the sublime establishes new interdisciplinary connections which address researchers in the fields of art history, cultural studies and aesthetics.